Under Antoni Cimolino’s tenure as artistic director, the Ontario institution has seen six consecutive surpluses and attendance surpass the 500,000 mark. – Toronto Star
Blog
Can Computational Science Really Improve Our Insight Into The Humanities?
Questions that historians and literary critics used to debate are increasingly scooped up by quantitative disciplines. In 2011, for instance, a team led by evolutionary biologists cooperated with Google to analyze millions of digitized books, published a study in Science, and announced that they had founded a new field called “culturomics.” – Chronicle of Higher Education
Paying attention
The New York Times apparently wants us all to be more productive, since it’s hammering away at the subject from many fronts. – Andrew Taylor
No worries
Yes, my recent car crash scared me terribly, and yes, I know how very lucky I was to escape without a scratch. Even so, that seems to have been the end of it. I haven’t had any flashbacks, or any bad dreams about car crashes. Unnerving though the immediate experience was, it appears to have passed through me without leaving a trace. – Terry Teachout
David Friesen, Bassist And Pianist
David Friesen, My Faith, My Life (Origin)
Friesen’s virtuosity brought him to prominence as a bassist nearly fifty years ago. This two-CD album presents him on the first disc playing his compositions on the Homage bass, an instrument he developed. – Doug Ramsey
Ingmar Bergman Grew Weary Of Making Movies. Then He Started Writing Books
The books are startlingly intimate, exploring things he felt he couldn’t convey in film. “In order to go back to the beginning, to explore with such startling intimacy the archetype of all those other women, this great artist has to find a new mode of expression—one that was, so to speak, neither wife nor mistress. A virgin medium.” – New York Review of Books
Is Donald Trump Really A Great Novelist?
Richard North Patterson: “The aim of the novelist is to enlist others in his fantasies, immersing them in an alternative reality so emotionally compelling that they willingly suspend disbelief. Trump has dangerously conflated this sort of storytelling with real-life presidential leadership, casting himself in the role of the archetypal savior-hero, battling the forces of evil. He’s our first novelist in chief.” – The Atlantic
Charges Of Mismanagement Of Control Of Balanchine’s Ballets
Unlike a painting or the written score of a symphony, a dance is uniquely fragile because there is no foolproof way to preserve it and steps are easily forgotten. Even a complete work can be changed in subtle ways so that its vivacity is flattened. The petition raises a thorny question: Who is truly in charge of this peerless treasury of artworks for the next decades? – Washington Post
A New Bio Of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “The Female Byron” Haven’t Heard Of Her? (It Was Complicated)
Landon has been labeled “the female Byron” and “the Sappho of a polished age.” But the public figure she probably most closely resembles is Britney Spears. The two had the same gimmick: Entice your audience by straddling the line between virgin and whore. – Pacific Standard
On Rereading Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” 50 Years Later
James Parker has been reading it since it first came out, and finds that it still resonates. Find your own personal canon, he writes, and you discover and rediscover new things over the years. What’s your go-to book or piece of art? – The Atlantic