The National Gallery of Australia now admits it should have told a health inspector investigating the Gallery that it knew of multiple cancer cases on the staff of the museum.
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Living With The Writer
What’s it like to be the partner of a writer? A new book explores the handholding and psychological propping-up required. “What makes the arrangement work, or not work, and why? How does life at home contribute to the creative process? What is the cost of a masterpiece on a caring relationship? All this mollycoddling of someone who, after all, could just as easily be playing solitaire behind that closed door as writing, might sound excessive, but it’s by no means an exception.”
Trying To Save Peking Opera With Computers
Chinese researchers are setting up databases of traditional Peking opera, hoping to save it before it goes extinct. “The rapid globalization and the influence of foreign cultures in China have caused unprecedented challenges to the survival of Chinese traditional opera, which has been evidenced by more and more traditional operas vanishing. Statistics show there were 367 types of traditional operas in China at the end of 1950s, but the number has dropped dramatically to 267, and some of them are now extinct.”
How Snow Changes An Orchestra Audience’s Demographics
What happens to an audeince when snow shuts down a major American city? Well, in Philadelphia, “the orchestra put $10 snow tickets on sale starting Friday, and so at least an audience of about 750 showed up. Not surprisingly, they seemed to come mostly from Center City, and perhaps through weather-induced natural selection, they were overwhelmingly younger. On this single night, the median age of the orchestra audience shed at least 35 years.”
Springer: Opera Springer Is Offensive
And what does Jerry Springer the man think of Jerry Springer, The Opera? Evidently not much. He finds it offensive. “I wouldn’t have written it. I don’t believe in making fun of other religions or in saying things that could be insensitive to other people’s religions. You would have to talk to the people that wrote it. I don’t make religious jokes so I wouldn’t have done it. But it’s not up to me.”
Rome’s Fabulous Maaxi Crippled By Money Issues
Maxxi is Rome’s new museum of 21st century art, and meant to be revolutionary in a city of art that hasn’t invested much in its architecture in the past century. “Maxxi is intended to put Rome on the map as a city that takes modern art seriously. Choosing Zaha Hadid, who last year won the Pritzker Prize, underlined the importance of the project.” Maxxi is “as revolutionary as anything that has emerged from her pen. It is not so much a building as some glass-and-steel worms slithering over each other.” But now the construction is being handicapped by money issues…
Amazon Reviews V. Book Sales
Is there any kind of correlation between the kinds of reader reviews a book gets on Amazon and how well it sells? Turns out yes. A researcher analyzed Amazon’s star system and found that “books high on what he called the “controversiality index” are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales.”
Powell’s Failed FCC Reign
How will Michael Powell’s term heading the FCC be remembered? “As chairman of the F.C.C., one of the government’s most important regulatory bodies, Mr. Powell should have been an advocate for reasonable regulations that protect consumers and promote competition. Instead, he brought to his position an extreme commitment to deregulation that seemed to serve big business’s interests most of all.”
Ode To A Library
A London Library lover waxes eloquent about the power and personality of the library. “There are moments when a library becomes itself. The rest of the time is potential. The book collection, arranged by subject and author, latent with pleasures and instruction, is a library in Clark Kent mode. The crux where the book, the reader and the need collide like particles in an accelerator is its apotheosis, the library as Superword.”
Dame Helen Of Poetry
Helen Vendler has been one of the most prominent poetry critics over the past 40 years. “Whole sectors of the poetry world have complained about the limits of her sensibility. She doesn’t like experimentation, one complaint goes. Her attitude toward poetry is too academic, says another. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, literary scholars often consider Ms. Vendler far out of touch with their profession. Her approach is, so to speak, rigorously untheoretical: A poem speaks to her, or it doesn’t, and the critical essay is Ms. Vendler’s preferred medium of reply.”