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Chum In The Water – Harsh Critic About To Become The Criticized

James Wood is described as “the most brutal, the most loathed, the most respected literary critic of his time.” He has been “merciless in debunking many esteemed writers of the age — Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie. Now the New Republic book critic is about to publish his own first novel, and James Wood the novelist is fair game. “A critic writing a novel is like William Bennett in a casino. All eyes are upon him.”

New $100 Million Canadian Museum Opposed By Museum Community

The Canadian government intends to announce a new $100 million museum of Canadian history and politics. But critics including opposition MPs and the museum community say that “the money would be better spent helping cash-strapped institutions across the country. ‘Museums in Canada are desperately underfunded. Some even are verging on bankruptcy.”

The Poet Stadium

The model for Herzog and de Meuron’s recently announced stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a crossover from structure to poetry, writes Giles Worsley. “When built, it will rise 67 metres in the heart of the city and hold 100,000 spectators. The model captures the sense of ambiguity that increasingly surrounds the architects’ buildings, particularly where façade and structure meet. The Basel-based firm that designed Tate Modern has used the idea of a nest of twigs to give external form to the building, a lattice of massive concrete beams, through which spectators penetrate to the heart of the building – the stands.”

Ode To St. Petersburg (At 300)

St. Petersburg is, “without doubt, one of the world’s most exquisite cities. Yes, it is flanked by meretricious modern design, encircled by brutal Soviet-era, high-rise apartment blocks and smells of grinding poverty. Its water is often unsafe to drink, its crowded trolley-buses are rusting away and its pavements are forced to tackle the shifts of fetid marshland below them. But, when you walk along Nevsky Prospect or catch sight of any of the city’s brightly coloured, set-piece buildings, when you spy the golden spires of fairy-tale fortresses and heavenly churches or the seemingly infinite march of classical arcades, their vaults lit by the sun sparkling from the Dutch and Venetian-style canals, you feel that this is paradise, not urban purgatory.”

Can Opera Survive On The Radio?

Now that ChevronTexaco has bailed out of a 63-year sponsorship of Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, and “with classical-music institutions facing financial difficulties and dwindling audiences across the continent, is opera on the radio an idea whose time has passed? Does the Met still have the influence to attract the interest of large corporations? Does opera still have the cachet and prestige it once did? These questions will be answered in the coming year.”