“Across the Internet the use of dear is going the way of sealing wax. Email has come to be viewed as informal even when used as formal communication, leaving some etiquette experts appalled at the ways professional strangers address one another” – even as others endorse the change.
Tag: 01.06.10
The Holy Fools And Madmen Of India
How some impoverished, traumatized present-day Indians find salvation in extreme (but often very old) spiritual practices, among them music, dance-drama and tantra – “living in a mystical anarchy in a great open air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad.”
Runnicles Extends (Barely) As Atlanta SO Principal Guest Conductor
“Donald Runnicles has extended his contract as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor for one year, through the 2011-12 season. For the past nine years he has conducted about four weeks each season, and many of these concerts have been highlights of the entire musical year.”
Pamuk, Bolaño Among Semifinalists For Novel In Translation Prize
“Nobel prize winners Orhan Pamuk and JMG Le Clézio are going head to head with last year’s hottest translated author Roberto Bolaño for the title of 2010 best translated book. The prize, set up in 2007 to combat the lack of translated titles on ‘best of the year’ lists, is run by the international literature website Three Percent, part of New York’s University of Rochester.”
Ban Cigarettes On Stage!
Matt Trueman: “I’m serious. I would outlaw cigarettes on the stage. Not, I should add, for the sake of our health … Something else is the problem: theatre shouldn’t smoke because, well, it doesn’t do it very well.”
Kenneth MacMillan And Acting In Ballet
Judith Mackrell: “[What] interests me is the impact he’s made on the acting style of the Royal Ballet, his home company. Famously, MacMillan’s ballets occupy a dramatic terrain that’s darker, more elusive and more contradictory than that of the classical repertory – which means that any dancer performing his work has to learn to act outside the standard lexicon.”
The Dance Of The Acoustic Panels At Davies Symphony Hall
“[They] swim into view before each performance by the San Francisco Symphony, and the … sort of mechanized aerial ballet as each one finds its precise location has become a familiar ritual of local musical life. But for all its grace and apparent ease, this is a dance whose steps are rigidly predetermined.”
Why Does Russia Seem Indifferent To Tolstoy?
The global Tolstoy mania sparked by the centennial of his death doesn’t seem to have affected the author’s homeland. Is it the post-Soviet fall of the intelligentsia? His warmth and emphasis on love, so contrary to Dostoevsky’s darkness? His challenges to government authority and the Orthodox Church?
Is Tolstoy The Greatest Novelist Of All Time? Seven Writers Weigh In
Reflections from Philip Hensher, Thomas Keneally, A.S. Byatt, James Meek, Ian Rankin, Marina Lewycka and Howard Jacobson.
‘The Bleakest Snow Scene In All Art’
Jonathan Jones: “My candidate is The Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Royal Collection. … It could be a scene from a 21st-century war. But it portrays a realistic moment in Bruegel’s own 16th-century Flanders.”