A suburban Atlanta library system has a new policy that is angering Georgia’s large immigrant community: the library will not buy any new books in Spanish, starting now. The county library board had previously set aside $3000 per year for the purchase of Spanish-language material, but the subsidy was eliminated “after some residents objected to using taxpayer dollars to entertain readers who might be illegal immigrants.”
Blog
We’re Banning Reference Books Now?
A North Carolina school district has banned the much-lauded Cassell Dictionary of Slang, claiming that the book, which includes some 87,000 entries, is somehow inappropriate for children. Not surprisingly, the impetus for the ban came from a Christian fundamentalist group, which is also seeking to ban many other books, including Maurice Sendak’s “Mickey In The Night Kitchen” and Robert Cormier’s “The Chocolate War.”
Mass Distraction
The Information Age was supposed to provide humanity with access to endless streams of information, carefully organized and readily available to anyone with a computer and a bit of know-how. But how are you supposed to take advantage of such bountiful excess when you’re forced to deal with a constant stream of pop-up ads you can’t get rid of, “informational” e-mails you didn’t ask for, and other newfangled distractions? It’s a serious matter, according to researchers who have been studying worker productivity, and the unceasing interruptions are having a profound impact on our ability to concentrate on the tasks at hand.
The Morals Clause
What do we do when the greatness of an artist’s work clashes with a serious flaw in his/her character? For years, the debate has raged around the music of Richard Wagner, a notorious anti-Semite whose music became, for a time, synonymous with the Third Reich. But what about the British composer Benjamin Britten, who has been known for decades to have been something close to a pedophile? Should this fact affect the way we listen to his music? Should we listen to it at all? The answers aren’t easy…
Is The Russian-Fuelled Art Boom Due For A Fall?
There’s no longer any doubt that Russian collectors have been fuelling a major art boom on both sides of the Atlantic. But how long can this particular bubble last? “The last time the market hit such heights was at the end of the 1980s, followed by a crash that saw New York’s SoHo, then the city’s main gallery district, end up a ghost town… According to current wisdom, this boom is safer because the new globalised market means more stability. The last boom was all about one economy, Japan’s, so it was snuffed out when that economy collapsed. But the new markets could be as yet too new and shallow to rely on.”
Art You Can See, Taste, Hear, And Smell
Wassily Kandinsky may have had more than just paint in mind when he crafted his masterpieces. “Music – and the idea of music – appears everywhere in Kandinsky’s work… To support his colour theories, Kandinsky appealed in his manifesto to the evidence of synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another (as when someone hears the ring of a doorbell as tasting of chicken or whatever).”
All’s Well At AGO (Or Is It?)
“This week, even as an information picket went up around the Art Gallery of Ontario (its 266 staff represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees could strike after June 29) management told the annual meeting that all was well. Although the AGO is undergoing a major reconstruction, its annual attendance topped 475,000 visitors, and it is on budget and acquiring new works. The upbeat report communicated management’s positive attitude to the picketers, but it bears scrutiny.”
Summertime… And The (Orchestra) Concerts Mean Something
It’s easy to pooh-pooh conservative summer orchestra concerts. But “what is it about these neighborhood concerts that makes them work so well? They come at a time when even the orchestra management is saying that supply outstrips demand for subscription concerts – you know, the ones whose ticket prices have escalated at three times the rate of inflation. Maybe the fact that the neighborhood concerts are free has something to do with it. But for these audiences, the act of the orchestra coming to them gratis eases more than just logistical and financial hurdles. The trek becomes a social gesture in which an important civic institution takes a little of its glamour and prestige to declare that a section of the city or suburbs matters.”
Report: Montreal Symphony To Get New Home
Montreal newspaper Le Devoir reports that the Montreal Symphony will finally get a new concert hall. “The MSO has been performing at the downtown Place des Arts complex, and efforts to move it into its own home have been underway since 1980. The new hall will be built on the Place des Arts site and is expected to have better acoustics and opportunities for the orchestra to expand its audience, with a seating capacity of between 1,800 to 2,200, the report says.”
Wait ‘Til The Harry Potter Kids Get Involved
“A London hospital that holds the copyright to Peter Pan has questioned the appropriateness of a series of books that portrays the character Wendy exploring her sexuality. The Lost Girls books, by graphic novelist Alan Moore, are about three world-famous characters: Wendy, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The characters meet one another and have sexual adventures. Wendy not only engages in erotic trysts but also encounters pedophiles.”