“Since 1991, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has compiled an annual list of books that librarians, teachers or others report have been challenged; there were 547 challenges in 2004, up 25 percent from 2003. This wave started with the religious right around 1980. And it’s contagious. It has spread, so that anybody, including the liberal left, can say, ‘I don’t want my kid to read that book, therefore I don’t want that book around for any kid to read.’ “
Blog
Oprah Gets In On Color Purple, The Musical
“The move is likely to immediately expand the box-office potential of a show that has been extensively revised since receiving mixed reviews in its initial performances in Atlanta last year. Now titled “Oprah Winfrey Presents: ‘The Color Purple,’ ” the musical will begin previews at the Broadway Theater on Nov. 1 and open on Dec. 1. In what is her first Broadway venture, Ms. Winfrey will contribute more than $1 million of the musical’s $10 million production cost.”
NY Design Schools Go For New Building Design
“Amid growing student interest in their programs, New York architecture and design schools are moving to add new buildings conceived by hot architects of the moment.”
San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre Gets A $10 Million Boost
“The Old Globe Theatre has received a $10 million gift – the largest in the company’s 70-year history – from Conrad Prebys, a former pizzeria owner who came to San Diego almost penniless 40 years ago.”
Tension – What Gets In?
There’s certainly something to be said for diversity of ideas and abilities; it produces a richer culture. But there’s also something to be said for declaring hierarchies of quality. “A whole society that adopted a policy of letting everything into the show, so to speak, would lose its ability to spot specialness and mediocrity and bankrupt the classical notion of art as a pursuit to be studied and developed by an artist over time.”
Cursing Before We Walk
“Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech. Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, “higher” regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more ‘bestial’ neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions.”
Tilting At Windmills – Quixote’s Enduring Popularity
“Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality.” And yet, “Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since.”
Cleveland Museum – Betting On City’s Future
The Cleveland Museum’s $258 million expansion is one of the biggest cultural construction projects in the city’s history. “Critics say the museum is overreaching. They claim the museum was good enough as it was and should be left alone. And they say it’s questionable whether the museum can raise all the money it needs in a city with a flagging economy, a shrinking population and a school system in financial distress.” But architecture critic Steve Litt writes that “rather than envision a future based on the worst fears imaginable, trustees of the Cleveland Museum of Art are making a huge bet on the future of Cleveland. That, it seems to me, is what they ought to be doing.”
Hard Times For Russian Literature
“Publishing experts admit Russian literature is in a state of crisis and up-and-coming authors have been reduced to asking would-be readers to pay for books in advance in order to make sure they get published. The crisis in Russian publishing has seen the country’s own authors squeezed while publishing companies rely on cheap-and-cheerful detective and war novels and translations of foreign books.”
TV In The After-Life
“It used to be when short-lived TV series were canceled, they went away forever — no syndication reruns, no cable, nothing except an episode or two in the archives of the Museum of Television & Radio. Not anymore. With the proliferation of cable channels hungry to fill time and the new revenue stream provided by TV shows on DVD, lost TV series are a thing of the past.”