Despite the contentious political rhetoric of our now, Smith is looking forward to taking up the post in September. “Poetry gives us a vocabulary for the feelings that don’t easily fit into language. And it’s not a static vocabulary because we as beings are constantly changing and contradicting ourselves and growing and coming up against problems that feel completely new or happinesses that feel completely new.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
Art Doesn’t Have To Come From Tortured Genius, Despite Our Myths
Actually, art is better when the artists are organized, or so say these two artists who have written a book about creativity.
Looks Like Car Hitler And Car Stalin Existed In Pixar’s ‘Cars’ Universe
The theory runs: “The Cars-verse includes a World War II–era Jeep named Sarge, who explicitly references events like the Battle of the Bulge. In the direct-to-DVD film Planes (made by Disney but not Pixar), there is an actual WWII flashback in which the plane Skipper recalls losing his entire squadron in the Pacific Theater. Assuming that Car WWII occurred, and that it contains the same contours as the actual WWII, we can assume that there were Car Axis powers, and thus a Car Hitler.”
What Is Going On With The Met’s ‘Tosca’?
Soprano Kristine Opolais, who was supposed to play the title role, has now withdrawn, a few months after star tenor Jonas Kaufmann withdrew. The show “is being closely watched in the opera world. Early in his tenure Mr. Gelb replaced an opulent, beloved old production by Franco Zeffirelli with a starker, more sexually charged one by Luc Bondy, alienating large swaths of the audience. So there is a lot riding on the new staging.”
When A Novel Of Heroism – Now A Movie – Is Actually Based On Propaganda
The new Brendan Gleeson/Emma Thompson movie is based on a book that was anti-Nazi propaganda for Communist East Germany. (But is that a problem?)
Finishing The Story Of The Barber Of Seville – On A Dark Note
In ‘La Mère Coupable,’ a lot more secrets come to light. “It takes these people everybody knows and transplants them to a Raymond Carver story.”
So, Do We Have Free Will Or Not?
We’re physical beings, so maybe we think our minds are more powerful than they are. “Is it possible that our experience of decision-making — the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones — is entirely illusory? Is it possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process may be?”
Translating Jokes When There Are Simply No Words
Translator Jessica Cohen, who along with author David Grossman just won the Man Booker International Prize for A Horse Walks Into a Bar: “Obviously if you have to explain something, it’s not funny. There were some cases like that where I managed to come up with a kind of equivalent. Some things we just had to drop.”
Now Many Theatres Bearing The Name ‘Shakespeare’ Are Getting Death Threats
Well, people are still mad they didn’t get to play Mercutio in their high school production of Romeo and Juliet … but seriously, what? “For the summer festivals — often leafy affairs for families, picnics, and a bit of Shakespeare under the stars — the venting has been a jarring reminder of the country’s political divisions. And while company directors say that Shakespeare, whose works are wildly adaptable to a variety of social contexts, is no stranger to controversy, the current maelstrom has taken their breath away.”
Social Media Is Killing, Or Is Going To Kill, The Novel
Why? Because novels are about interiority. “One of the great fights of the 21st century will be the fight for privacy and self-ownership, which is also, to my mind, the struggle for literature as distinct from the dark babble of social media. Writers thrive on privacy, not on Twitter, and so do readers when the lights are low.”