Who buys 80 percent – that’s a super, super, super majority – of novels? You knew it: Women. But our love for novels, as the narrator in Anna Burns’ The Milkman experiences, seems to be a challenge for some other humans. “William Thackeray called fiction ‘sweets’ – to ensure a balanced diet, he also recommended ‘roast,’ by which he meant nonfiction. It’s surprising how enduring these puritanical associations have proved; fiction is still seen as ‘a slippery slope to idle self-indulgence,’ as Taylor has it. One of her correspondents wrote: ‘having an affair is dangerous, masturbation requires solitude and privacy. Reading a book offers both without anyone noticing.'” – The Observer (UK)
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African And Arab Filmmakers Put Their Focus On Genre
Films and filmmakers from Africa and the Middle East have had a good year at A-list film festivals, including Mati Diop and her Atlantics, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes. “The ‘new wave’ of Arab and African cinema includes a small group of films that explore links with genre cinema – including fantasy, sci-fi and horror – which is related to a broader trend in literature and the contemporary arts in the Arab world that is exploring dystopias and fantasy settings.” – Variety
Houdini’s Undercover Ghostbuster
In the early 20th century, Spiritualism was at its peak, and so were fake psychics who fleeced people who just wanted to communicate with a dead loved one. Into the breech between weird and real stepped Rose Mackenberg, who “investigated more than 300 psychics and seers in the two years she worked for Houdini and many more after that. In a career that lasted decades and led her to testify before Congress, she proved to be quick-witted, adept with disguises and unblinkingly skeptical.” – The New York Times
The Los Angeles Museum Of Contemporary Art Voluntarily Recognizes A New Employee Union
LA’s MOCA employees now won’t need to go through additional certifying steps – or employer “education” either. MOCA Director Klaus Biesenbach said recognizing the union was “in full alignment with this vision we have set forth for our institution. Ultimately, we’re taking this step to come together as one team, one MOCA.” – Los Angeles Times
Longstanding Member Of Swedish Academy Boycotts Nobel Ceremony For Peter Handke
Peter Englund, the former permanent secretary for the Swedish Academy and a current member, said, ““To celebrate Peter Handke’s Nobel prize would be gross hypocrisy on my part” He is the only current member of the Academy with firsthand experience in Bosnia, according to a journalist, and Handke’s win has been met with horror by “politicians and writers lining up to condemn his denial of Serb atrocities during the war in the former Yugoslavia, as well as his presence at the funeral of war criminal Slobodan Miloševic.” – The Guardian (UK)
Turns Out It’s Tough To Make Scorsese’s Guys Look Different From Each Other
The styling is in the ties. And there are … let’s say a lot of different ties in this movie. Says one of the costume designers, “The language of how the tie greets the shirt greets the belt; the cut of the suit and how that translates across the years for each of these men, that was a real joy for me.” – The New York Times
For The Stand-Up Act On ‘Mrs. Maisel,’ Almost Nothing Is Spontaneous
Rachel Brosnahan, who plays Midge Maisel, says that season three changed things for her – and made the actor a better comedian too. “While the first and second season, most of the major stand-up was born out of something she was experiencing in her real life in real time, this new season takes me on the road. She’s a working comic now. And she’s having to learn to be a technically better comic, to write tighter jokes, to write jokes for different audiences who won’t necessarily understand or relate to what’s going on in her life.””- Los Angeles Times
A Performance Artist Ripped The $120,000 Banana Off The Wall At Art Basel Miami – And Ate It
The New York-based performance artist David Datuna recorded for Instagram (of course) the removal and eating of the banana, a much-discussed artwork by Maurizio Cattelan. But, plot twist: “Gallery officials replaced the banana with another one, saying that the artwork was not destroyed and that the banana was simply an ‘idea.'” – The New York Times
This Nobel Prizewinner Says The World Demands A New Narrative Style
Olga Tokarczuk, in a lecture in Sweden, said it’s time for a sort of fourth-person narration: “We can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective, from which everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.” – Washington Post (AP)
The Creativity Artificial Intelligence Might Bring
“In the future, we can expect computers to produce literature different from anything we could possibly conceive of. Our instinct is to try to make sense of it if we can. But when a new form of writing appears, generated by sophisticated machines, we may not be able to. As we learn to appreciate it, perhaps we will even come to prefer machine-generated literature.” – Nautilus