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Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.31.17

From Mileposts to Through Line
Mileposts are those small signs we see (or, usually, ignore) as we speed along the interstate that indicate how far we’ve travelled. It’s only in the rarest instances that anyone pays them any attention. … read more
>AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-10-31

Deaccession Obsession: AG Enters the Fray; Compendium of My Berkshire Museum Commentary
As I reported Monday on my Twitter feed (while I was traveling and off-blog), the Massachusetts Attorney General has officially entered the fray in the legal battle over the Berkshire Museum’s planned art sales. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-10-31

Artists as Researchers: Equity in Changing Places
In Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills district, …  Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation is leading the way on physical and economic changes to the area. The developer’s leadership, including Aprina Johnson, a local artist on the staff, recognized the importance of learning from residents about social impacts too. They developed a plan for an innovative initiative: paying artists to be researchers. … read more
AJBlog: The Bright Ride Published 2017-10-31

 

Michael Tilson Thomas To Step Down From San Francisco Symphony

“The move … is scheduled to coincide with both the end of Thomas’ 25th season at the organization’s helm [in the summer of 2020] and his 75th birthday in December 2019. He will remain with the Symphony in the newly created post of music director laureate, conducting at least four weeks each year and undertaking a variety of special programming projects.”

Why MTT Is Retiring From The SF Symphony (A Q&A)

“Almost my entire adult life I’ve been the music director of some organization or another. I have volumes and volumes of almost-completed compositions and stories and poems and collections and all sorts of things. For years I’ve been thinking that if I’m going to be able to devote time to making sure that these things are in good shape before I’m outta here, this would be a kind of good moment to think about doing that.”

The Remarkable Magnetic North Theatre Festival Gets A Second Chance

“For one thing, it goes to small places other than Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the country, where people are underserved in terms of having access to the work of Canadian artists. It is also a gathering place where everyone from students to audiences to artists can come together to meet and talk; and it is also a showcase for Canadian artists who don’t have a lot of platforms for their work. There are more now – but an opportunity for presenters to see a lot of Canadian work in one place in a short period of time is very important.”

What Data Scientists Are Learning From Crunching Literature

The oddest finding may be the sharp increase in an innocuous little word: “and.” In 1946, “and” accounted for around 2.6 percent of the words in the reports, a frequency similar to that of average academic prose. But by 2015, as this chart shows, its share had almost doubled, reflecting what the researchers describe as the growing tendency toward long lists of nouns that create the illusion of activity, sometimes despite a “total absence of logic.”

Data: A Revolution In Understanding Literature? (Controversial, To Say The Least)

Literary criticism typically tends to emphasize the singularity of exceptional works that have stood the test of time. But the canon, Franco Moretti argues, is a distorted sample. Instead, he says, scholars need to consider the tens of thousands of books that have been forgotten, a task that computer algorithms and enormous digitized databases have now made possible. “We know how to read texts,” he wrote in a much-quoted essay included in his book “Distant Reading,” which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. “Now let’s learn how to not read them.”

Being Hemingway (No Piece Of Cake)

“Perhaps a man possessed of an ego the size of a hot-air balloon could only subsist within a myth. To keep himself airborne required so much huffing and puffing that inevitably he ran out of breath. He was jealous, insecure, treacherous to his friends, and merciless toward his promoters—no good turn, no matter how good it was, went unpunished—and although he overestimated his talent, he also largely wasted it, which was precisely the charge he had laid against his old pal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, with The Great Gatsby, surely did write if not the then at least agreat American novel.”