“People who play chamber music, in the classical world, are serious. People who put self-memorializing granite slabs in their back yards are not. And that’s fine with Tzimon Barto.”
Tag: 01.16.11
Crass Middle-Class Values Are What Made the Modern World
“There were big, economically vibrant cities filled with smart people all around the globe – so why did the Industrial Revolution hit Europe and America first? According to [Deirdre] McCloskey, it was only there that what she calls the ‘bourgeois revaluation’ persuaded ordinary people not only that they could be entrepreneurs, but also that their neighbors would respect them for it.”
Actress Susannah York, 72
“Her international reputation as an actor depended heavily on the hit films she made in the 1960s, including Tom Jones (1963) and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969, for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress). But, even when her movie career waned, she worked ceaselessly in theatre, often appearing in pioneering fringe productions.”
Flo Gibson, 86, Grande Dame of Audiobooks
“[For] decades [she] read soothingly to Americans as they toiled at the gym, behind the wheel or over housework … Mrs. Gibson was the founder of, and chief reader for, Audio Book Contractors, which she ran for nearly three decades from a specially built recording studio in the basement of her home.”
What WikiLeaks Needs – A Strong Graphic
“From its founding in 2006, WikiLeaks has been engaged not simply in the distribution of information but also in competition within a marketplace of ideas, reputation, perception. Part of what matters in this competition is WikiLeaks’s image: reckless, arrogant outlaws? Or bold, righteous revolutionaries?”
Wikipedia – The Writer’s Best Friend?
“Wikipedia now has on the way to 4m articles in English. This we can liken to a 1,600-volume printed encyclopedia, which turns to any page immediately, and effortlessly opens for you related pages and external sources on the thinnest belief that they may hold the nugget that will fulfil your informational needs as a writer.”
‘The Most Spectacular Crime in American Literary History’
“Thankfully, few fictional representations are so offensive to their (reputed) models that actual violence ensues. The notable exception … took place 100 years ago this month when Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough expressed his supreme displeasure with what he believed was the depiction of his family in the novel The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig by pumping six bullets into its author.”
Modern Dance and Orthodox Judaism Infiltrate Each Other
“In Israel, a nation marked by divides everywhere, a slender peace is being brokered between the religious and secular in an unexpected arena, contemporary dance” – with a movement vocabulary drawn from the swaying of devout Jews at prayer.
‘Gallery Rage’ at the Tate Modern
Many visitors to the Tate Modern’s Gauguin exhibition “left the building in a state of what one prominent art critic called ‘gallery rage’. The crowding in front of the paintings on display was so bad … that they have vowed never to go to such a big show again.” (New Yorkers, on the other hand, are used to this.)
Houellebecq and BHL (Pretend to) Duke It Out in Print
“The running gag that permeates the entire discussion” in the new dual-author book Public Enemies “is the conceit that [Bernard-Henri Lévy’, the most celebrated, most m&eeacute;diatique intellectual in France, and the prize-winning, best-selling novelist [Michel] Houellebecq, are hated, persecuted and despised by almost everyone.”