It’s easy to dive into a classic book and after awhile get the feeling you’re reading something dull. Something… well, dumb. That may, of course be more about you and where you’re coming from than it is about the classic… – The Paris Review
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Just How Enlightened Was The Age Of Enlightenment?
“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” New York Review of Books
Katy Waldman Was Reviewing A Novel. Then She Found Herself In It. And On It Goes From There.
Well, she’s pretty sure she found herself — more specifically, an essay she wrote about herself and her twin sister — but the novel’s author differs. And the author of another book claims she found more of it in Waldman’s essay than Waldman credited her for. (Waldman differs, as does her editor, who was her twin sister.) Waldman digs into all this here, in a very meta essay. – The New Yorker
Presenter Engagement
I have spoken with staff members of presenting organizations interested in community engagement who lament the fact that they are not in a position to select specific works themselves; they have to book what producing organizations are offering. Yet there are some ways in which the presenter is better positioned to support community engagement. – Doug Borwick
Getting It Backwards: The Shed’s Architects Came 1st, Its Artistic Director a Distant 2nd
When an ambitious new cultural institution chooses its architect six years before appointing an artistic director/CEO, you know its priorities are upside-down and backwards. – Lee Rosenbaum
Charity Tillemann-Dick, R.I.P.
Charity Tillemann-Dick, a coloratura soprano who suffered from pulmonary hypertension and who resumed her singing career after undergoing a double lung transplant, died this morning. – Terry Teachout
Essential Reading: Forty Years Ago George Trow Wrote That TV Had Killed Intellectual Life. Now To Social Media…
Trow argued that the rise of television decimated the elite American intellectual community to which he had belonged as the far descendant of printing magnates, a Harvard graduate, and a magazine writer. It cut out what he posed as society’s heart: the reading, debating, literary demographic that consumed his work. – The Nation
‘Fancy Free’ Doesn’t Seem So Delightful After #MeToo — Should It Be Retired?
In 2019, the Bernstein-Robbins ballet about three sailors on shore leave looks rather like “a case study in rape culture,” writes Lea Marshall, who took a group of undergraduate dance student to see it. Most of the audience loved it; the students were aghast. Marshall explains why. – Dance Magazine
Everybody’s Talking About Influencers. They’ve Been Around A Long Time
Influence was worrisome long before it was digital. The word “influence” appears in a quarter of William Shakespeare’s plays, in which the condition of being influenced is rarely happy or dignified. Almost without exception, Shakespeare gives influence a darkly astrological cast. – The New Yorker
A Very Bad Idea: Broadcasting ‘Saturday Night Live’ Direct From New Orleans Mardi Gras
Yes, they tried it once, back in 1977. And not on Saturday night at 11:30, but on Sunday evening at 8:30. “Vulture recently spoke to many of those involved, including Lorne Michaels, Randy Newman, Anne Beatts, and Paul Shaffer,” about this utterly doomed endeavor. – Vulture