Is academia getting out of the public broadcasting business? “In the past two years, educational licensees in Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle/Tacoma, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Portland, Ore., and a number of smaller markets have sold or transferred control of pubcasting stations.” Why? Money. “Educators are selling stations because of their budget woes—to get station subsidies off their backs and/or gain an influx of capital.”
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Shorting The Short Story
You can’t make a living as a writer of short stories. “Oddly, though, you can still make a pretty good living by teaching other people how to write short stories. The form survives – and even thrives, in a forced, hothouse sort of way – because it has become the instructional medium of choice in most of our writing programs. The majority of people who enroll in these programs want to be novelists, but novels don’t lend themselves very readily to the workshop format, and so would-be novelists these days spend at least part of their apprenticeship working on stories.”
Customers Accuse Book Stores With Bias
Customers of Barnes & Noble and Borders are complaining that the anti-John Kerry book “Unfit for Command,” has been hard to find in the stores. And they’re charging the stores with political bias against the book. The stores say they just haven’t been able to keep up with demands. The book, which went on sale Aug. 11 with a first printing of 85,000, will have 550,000 copies in print by next week, according to Regnery Publishing.
How European Art Theft Works…
“Investigators specializing in stolen art – many of them based in London, the center of Europe’s art markets – say that art thieves in Europe, where most of the high-profile thefts take place, tend to fall into two categories. Some are low-level criminals who are more likely to bungle the operation and dispose quickly of the works, often for a fraction of their value; others are members of organized gangs who use the paintings as collateral or bartering chips in underworld deals involving drugs, forged documents and weapons. In such cases, recovering the paintings, if they are recovered at all, can take years, even decades.”
Canadian National Looks For Bridge Funding
The National Ballet of Canada is looking for money to ease its transition into a new theate three years from now. “The opera and the ballet companies had been equal partners in the previous attempt to build an opera/ballet house — the $311 million Moishe Safdie folly that was cancelled in 1990. This time around, the ballet company decided the stakes were too high, and it preferred to invest its money in improving the company and creating new work rather than putting up its limited available dollars into bricks and mortar.That’s how the ballet company wound up being the chief tenant rather than co-owner of the new performing arts centre.”
Disputing Hockney’s Optic Theory
A couple of researchers test out David Hockney’s theory that Old Masters used optical devices to assist in their work. They registered a van Euck painting using a computer. “If the two arms had been painted in perfect perspective they would align well; they did not. Therefore the Arnolfini chandelier is not painted in perfect perspective. If van Eyck had used a concave mirror to project an image of a chandelier onto his canvas and had then traced the image with a pencil, later covering over the evidence with paint, his chandelier should be really accurate. Why cheat if you can’t get good results?”
UK Breaks Author’s Last Wish For Manuscripts
The British government has gone against author Anthony Powell’s last wish that his manuscripts should go to his school. Instead, the government will give them to the British Library. “These manuscripts are a national treasure and should be viewed by as many scholars, researchers and members of the public as possible. That is why I decided that the British Library would be the right home for these manuscripts. It is part of government policy to make works of art and important documents available to as many people as possible.”
What The Powell Archive Means To UK
“Almost alone among the output of his eminent contemporaries – including Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh – Powell’s documents are to stay in Britain thanks to the loyalty to their country of the author, his wife and their two sons. But they will be available to the public in the British Library, the national book depository, rather than at Eton, Powell’s old school, thanks to the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell.”
Leon Fleisher’s Unlikely Cure
Pianist Leon Fliesher is back playing with two hands. The cure for the ailment that robbed him of the use of his right hand for so many years? Rolfing and botox. “Fleisher’s more specific medical crusade concerns what lies beneath his carpal tunnel syndrome, which is focal dystonia: His brain sends unwanted signals that leave his fingers involuntarily contracting. A specific form of rolfing, administered twice a month, gives his muscles the elasticity to perform better and to take in the effects of the botox, which erects a barrier to the unwanted contraction messages from the brain.”
Colleges Find Download Alternatives
Telling college students no to download music isn’t a winning strategy. So universities have been looking for alternatives to illegal downloads. “Over the past year, schools have started using legal music download services, tried various technologies to block peer-to-peer traffic and beefed up education efforts and this work has helped address the problem.”