It’s a well-peddled myth that the publishing industry is a cartel. “Curiously unsatisfied with the idea that being a successful novelist requires the ability to write books that a consistently large number of people are prepared to buy, jaded scribblers search instead for an explanation that will permit them to retreat with their pride and delusions intact.”
Blog
Shakespeare Wrote In Political Code?
Clare Asquith claims in a new book that Shakespeare embedded “dangerous political messages” in his work. “She argues that the plays and poems are a network of crossword puzzle-like clues to his strong Catholic beliefs and his fears for England’s future. Aside from being the first to spot this daring Shakespearean code, Asquith also claims to be the first to have cracked it.”
Blair To Bush – A Winston Churchill
In 2001 Tony Blair loaned George W Bush a bronze bust of Winston Churchill to put in the Oval Office. “The British government’s huge hidden collection is held inside an anonymous underground storehouse in Soho and contains around 12,000 works of art (five times more than the National Gallery owns). The curators are given £200,000 a year to buy new pieces and the art is available for government ministers to request for display in their private offices. It is also sent out all over the globe to foreign embassies and consulates. Intended as a showcase for British cultural life, the work has always stayed inside property owned by Britain. Until, that is, March 2001, when Blair’s officials requested the President of the US should be loaned a bust of the British war-time premier.”
Oxford Does Piano
The Oxford International Piano Festival is a different breed of dog. “It has nothing to do with winning anything or brokering careers. It’s about the exchange of views and opening of ears. We try to explore the world of the piano from every aspect: the virtuoso, the chamber musician, the accompanist, the pianist in academia. And being in Oxford, we’re interested in the relationship between playing and learning, performing and informing. I think that’s clear from who we invite and what they do while they’re with us.”
What Becomes (A Complete) Classic?
There are 1082 books in Peguin’s Classics collection. “The Penguin Collection raises a number of issues, not least being what exactly is a classic? A book few have read, but which remains in print centuries after it was issued? Does a classic have to have had a social impact, say, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? Must it sell a zillion copies – Judith Krantz’s Scruples and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code would qualify, though neither are in this package – or is a classic defined by the amount of joy it brings to any reader, like the Hi-Lights constituency? Or should a classic be a book that changes the way we read?”
Copy This Building
“Copying in architecture is at least as old as tracing paper. Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia was an effort to import Palladio’s neo-Roman vision to the New World. And the first United States copyright act, passed in 1790, made no provision for architecture. It wasn’t until 200 years later, in 1990, that the United States added buildings to the list of things – including movies, books and recordings – that qualify for copyright protection. But even among architects with instantly recognizable styles, it’s rarely possible to state with certainty which similarities result from direct imitation and which are coincidental.”
Selling Symphonies – More Than Just Marketing
New York Times readers respond to Daniel Wakin’s story about classical music marketing: “Why are symphony audiences shrinking? It’s obvious. The majority of the public has zero connection to the standard repertory, and therefore little reason to hear it or care about it. Whereas video-game-music concerts take advantage of an emotional investment players make in characters and scenes which they not only observe, but actually control.”
MTV For All Your Devices
Can MTV be an arbiter of mass-market music tastes in a world where entertainment flows from everywhere? The network is branching out from pure TV to other platforms. In addition to the traditional celebrity-studded ceremony of Sunday’s MTV Awards, “viewers will also be offered backstage shots and bonus content simultaneously on the MTV Overdrive broadband channel: while watching an acceptance speech from, say, Coldplay on live television, a viewer can also be logged onto Overdrive and see Kanye West in his dressing room or the Killers performing outside American Airlines Arena. It’s all about circulating people back and forth between the different screens,”
End Of An Era – The Last Opera Recording
A new recording of Tristan und Isolde with Pacido Domingo marks the end of an era. “No more spending hundreds of thousands of dollars coddling famous singers’ egos. No more waiting decades to, with luck, recoup an investment. No more recording works with singers who have never performed their roles onstage and are long past their primes. No more sessions spread out over weeks, months, years. No more relying on technology that permits a soprano and tenor to record a duet without ever setting foot in the studio at the same time. No more shifty studio magic. But then again, no more of that legerdemain to bring the music alive in ways it may never be in the opera house. This new “Tristan,” which EMI Classics will release in the U.S. in September, turns out — against all odds — to be glorious.”
King Tut – Icon Of International Politics
The differences between the first visit of King Tut to America and the second are instructive. Both visits served political goals. But “the Cold War is long since over, and the technique of cultural diplomacy that characterized the era has withered as a Washington pastime. Instead, corporatism is the new driving force. The change from public sponsorship to corporate packaging mirrors the political sea change in the U.S. between 1979, when Tut 1 finished its blockbuster national tour, and 2005. It brackets the Reagan-Bush era and the decline of liberal democratic ideals and the rise of corporatist political philosophy.”