The Orange Prize is holding a vote on the best books of all time by women writers. “But 50 Best Books by women? The old arguments that greeted the establishment of the Orange Prize itself are immediately unrolled for another airing: chiefly, that women are not a minority group and good writing transcends boundaries of gender, therefore to treat women writers as belonging to a separate category serves to perpetuate divisions rather than address and erase them. The notion of a literary prize exclusively for white writers or, indeed, for men, is untenable, so the defence for a women-only prize must be that we consider ourselves sidelined. Is it still true that women writers are undervalued?”
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“Shockingly Sexual” London Play Is A Sham
The show “XXX,” currently playing in London, is said to be shocking and sexually explicit to a degree not seen in the London theatre. “At a time when there’s no shortage of dildos and bare butts (even bare butts that you might know) on TV, it seems that flesh on the stage is still peculiarly ‘real’. Which is, you might think, an argument for the power of the theatre. But not for this show. Of course, it shouldn’t be banned: all you have to do to avoid it is not to go. But it is a con: it’s commerce mas querading as taboo-breaking creativity.”
In Praise Of The B-Movie
“As a cultural phenomenon the B-movie lasted for less than 40 years. Its life was extended for a while by the post-war popularity of the drive-in cinema, but it finally succumbed to television and the inexorable disappearance of locally owned independent movie houses.
Fairly rapidly ‘B-picture’ became a pejorative term. ‘B-movie dialogue’ meant a string of clichés. ‘B-movie plots’ were predictable dramas retreading familiar stories. There is some justice to this. Most B-movies are bad and forgotten. But at their worst they have an unpretentious, sometimes camp, charm. At their best they are as different from smooth A-movies as the great pulp writers like David Goodis and Horace McCoy were from the respectable best-selling novelists of the day.”
Orange Prize Shortlist Plays It Safe
Big names dominate the shortlist of six for this year’s Orange Prize. “The triumvirate of Donna Tartt, who shot to worldwide fame with her debut novel The Secret History, Zadie Smith, another novelist who struck gold first time with White Teeth, and the grand dame of Canadian letters, Carol Shields, are the favourites for the £30,000 award, which is for women writers only. The Scottish novelist Shena Mackay, nominated for the Booker for her bestseller The Orchard On Fire, is the fourth heavyweight on the list with her book Heligoland.”
London Book Review Opens Small Bookstore – But Will It Succeed?
The London Review of Books is opening a small bookstore in London. The venture “poses a large question about the way we buy books in this country. Are we ready to break the chains of corporate bookselling, which have strangled so many independents? The shop, on Bury Place, will stock the kinds of books that the LRB reviews – political polemics, biographies, philosophical tracts, slim volumes of poetry and literary novels. Whereas most big stores now carry 60-70,000 titles, the LRB shop has only 20,000. And while chains like Borders and Waterstone’s stock multiple copies of most books, the LRB shop has only one of each.”
Dance On Degas’ Model Ballerina
A ballet based on the life of the model who posed for Degas’ bronze ballerina has opened at the Paris Opera. “La Petite Danseuse, with a cast of 60, pays tribute to the model who posed for La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime. The bronze in a white tutu is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.” Recent research about the model indicates that she was a dancer “brought up in a poverty-stricken family of prostitutes and was jailed soon after posing for Degas, at the age of 14, in 1881.”
Rem Koolhaas – Beating A Retreat To Europe?
Star architect Rem Koolhaas is closing his New York office after several of his American projects were cancelled. “It’s been a tough year for the high-flying Mr. Koolhaas, who won the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000. Two weeks ago the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York scrapped his $200 million expansion, saying the project was too big for the cash-strapped institution to take on. A few months earlier, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had iced his $400 million building, citing budget and fund-raising problems. The Prada superstore in San Francisco that Mr. Koolhaas designed has been axed, and his glitzy, casino-cushioned Guggenheim Las Vegas closed after 18 months. In a recent lecture at Columbia University, Mr. Koolhaas suggested that he was fed up with New York and America and was shifting his focus elsewhere – to Beijing, for example, where he is designing a $650 million broadcast center for the 2008 Olympics.”
Voting On A Book For A Country To Read
A CBC radio panel has chosen Hubert Aquin’s controversial “Prochain Episode” as the book it would most like Canadians to read in this year’s Canada Reads program. Over several programs the panel voted off other books under consideration. The final two books for the winning slot were the Aquin and Wayne Johnston’s The ‘Colony of Unrequited Dreams’. In previous days, they had debated the merits of, and had voted off, Paul Hiebert’s ‘Sarah Binks’, Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ and Helen Humphreys’s ‘The Lost Garden’.
Course Correction – Are We Making Music Too Perfect?
According to industry insiders, many successful mainstream artists in most genres of music – perhaps a majority of artists – are using pitch correction. Now some in the music industry think the focus on perfection has gone too far. “Vocal tuning is contributing to the Milli Vanilli-fication of modern music. What a singer sounds like has always been manipulated and massaged by producers: The difference nowadays is that it is so easy to do – maybe too easy. ‘Pro Tools is the industry Frankenstein that’s taken over. Everything has to be exact, and I blame engineers and producers. It’s been overdone’.”
Mesopotamian Studies – A Changed Landscape
Clearly, after the looting of the Iraq National Museum, Mesopotamian studies will never be the same again. In Chicago “at one of the leading global centers for the study of ancient Mesopotamia, the personalities vary but the mood is a mix of anger and mourning, seasoned by the bitterness of personal betrayal. And it’s clear that the recent events in Baghdad already have provoked both internal and external soul-searching about the role of this composite museum-research institute in a harsh new world for near-Eastern scholarship.”