“Chick Lit is a literary genre that has been demanding attention for about four years. Since then, an explosion of books with candy-colored covers and sassy girlfriend titles have appeared on bookstore shelves across the nation. And now, Pocket Books, a division of publishing giant Simon & Schuster, is launching a new imprint called Downtown Press, symbolized by a shopping-bag logo and devoted exclusively to the genre.”
Blog
Accusations At Baghdad Museum
Americans checking out Baghdad’s Museum of Antiquities have suggested that museum staff might have participated in stealing from the museum. And that the museum leadership’s membership in the Baathist Party might disqualify them from helping to rebuild the museum. But “for the foreign archaeologists who now throng the museum, the idea that their colleagues could have colluded in its desecration is too appalling to contemplate. They tend to take a relaxed view of the Baathist credentials of [museum director Donny] George and the head of the antiquities board, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim; no one in a senior position, they say, was unqualified.”
Bilbao-On-Hudson?
What will define success for Dia’s new Beacon home north of Manhattan? “Is this the kind of work that will bring in 100,000 visitors a year? That’s the number Dia hopes for. So does the State of New York and Beacon and its surrounding towns, which have chipped in $2.7 million toward the project so far and have visions of Guggenheim Bilbao dancing in their heads. Dia: Beacon offers some of the most potent art experiences to be found anywhere, in some of the most well-considered settings. But it was conceived largely to present difficult work for long durations in one space. And for much of what it offers, difficult is the word.”
Summing Up Cannes
As Cannes winds down for another year, Desson Howe writes that one thing is clear about this year’s lineup: “Someone was saving the really great movies for another year.”
Washington Ballet – Successful, But What Does That Mean?
Septime Webre has been running Washington Ballet for four years. “Sales of yearly subscriptions have tripled. The budget is up more than 50 percent. Last year the pool of individual donations hit the $2 million mark, a first for the institution. The annual number of performances has increased, and the company has moved from the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater to the larger Eisenhower for many engagements.” But “the populist drive that marks his programming and helps account for the increased ticket sales has at least one closely connected observer worried about its effects on the sterling tradition of the company’s training arm, the Washington School of Ballet.”
In Search Of The Great American Novel
“What really is the Great American Novel? It seemed elusive to me, considering the wealth of good novels in the last century and a half. There’s no such thing as The Great American Novel, only several good-great American novels, I’d declared, quibbling with the article ‘the.’ All we can do is trace the threads that run through these novels, isolate them as a scientist isolates germs in a petri dish, and see if that amounts to an American tradition, or an American canon, in the novel. Find what’s quintessentially American – if it’s there.”
Rehabilitating Sonia Orwell
George Orwell’s wife Sonia, whome th author married three months before his death, “was completely demonized,” says a new biography. Previous biographers have created “a hardhearted, mercenary gold digger who looked like a painting by Renoir and married a skeleton on his deathbed.” By contrast, the new book portrays Sonia as “the most generous person – for her to be reimagined as a monster of cold-heartedness and greed is staggering and extremely distressing.”
War & Policy As A Marketing Message
For years critics have been observing the growing sophistication and power of the entertainment/marketing complex and marveling at its effectiveness in selling its messages to the public. But “the media giants that wield such clout don’t always put it to such frivolous use. We are not just plugged into their matrix to be sold movies and other entertainment products. These companies can also plug the nation into news narratives as ubiquitous and lightweight as ‘The Matrix Reloaded,’ but with more damaging side effects.”
Hands-On Philanthropists (With Strings)
Florida billionaires Daniel and Peter Lewis are hands-on arts patrons. Daniel pledged $16 million towards the Florida Philharmonic’s $64 million endowment campaign. But when the orchestra failed to raise supporting capital, he insisted the orchestra be shut down. “The Lewis brothers share a conviction that the arts and other nonprofits must be financially sound – an elusive ideal to nearly every arts group – or be dramatically reconfigured, or even shut down. It is an ideal on which neither of the Lewis brothers seems willing to budge.”
Wal-Mart Censors
Wal-Mart accounts for about 15% of Amnerica’s single-copy magazine sales overall. ‘They’re the biggest newsstand vehicle in the country for magazines. Thus, Wal-Mart can be not only the country’s biggest retailer but its biggest censor as well.”