A Call For Self-Review

The case of the New York Times Book Review running a review of a book by a reviewer who doesn’t appear to have read the book prompts Alex Good to propose a solution. Since the regular reader of book review sections can be reasonably sure that some of the reviews are written without reading the books, “have authors write their own reviews. Sir Walter Scott did it. Poe and Whitman did it. And Anthony Burgess did it, prompting Gore Vidal to remark approvingly ‘shouldn’t there be at least one book review in all of England written by someone who had actually read the book’?”

Drawing Little Comfort – Animators Brooding

“These are anxious times for film animators, whose business is being roiled by layoffs, new technology and tension between the industry’s longtime leader, the Walt Disney Company, and its upstart partner, Pixar Animation Studios. Computer technology is the essence of both the creative and production process of every movie. Those are not soothing words to traditional animators, who have watched jobs dwindle in the wake of computer techniques.”

Channel Crossing – Sport Of 19th Century Artists

British and French artists of the 19th Century competed with one another, collaborated and spurred one another on – indeed, there was much to-ing and fro-ing. “The artistic and literary relationship between France and Britain – which also included a French fascination and infatuation with Walter Scott, and with Shakespearian themes – was much more a matter of give and take than, say, the British artistic love affair with New York between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, in which British art played a largely subservient role.”

Martha Graham Reborn (After A Very Very Long Time)

The Martha Graham Company is back. But it’s been away long before the legal dispute that shut the doors. “In fact, this famous troupe, the oldest dance company in America, had been in trouble long before [heir Ron] Protas took over. Graham, who was born in 1894, choreographed for sixty-five years, but she was in top form for only the first half of that run. In the nineteen-fifties she slipped into despair and alcoholism. Eventually, she stopped going to the studio. The dancers ran the company. Later she dried out, and came back, but on the arm of Protas, whom many of the dancers and staff found impossible to work with. Some quit; others were fired. Year by year, the company consisted of increasingly young people facing, without the old-timers’ guidance, increasingly serious problems: debt, dissension, cold reviews, defecting funders.”

Of Power Laws And The 80/20 Rules

Weblogs have been touted as the loosing of democratic speech – anyone can publish, anyone can read. But as there are more weblogs, natural powerlaws are kicking in and predictably some blogs are rising above the rest. “For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a ‘predictable imbalance’, with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern, with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous).” Thus too, it appears with the success of weblogs…

The New Women Literary Publishers

A new generation of women running British literary publishing imprints is making a big success of them. “So what differentiates these women from the men who came before them? Perhaps the fact that they represent ‘joined-up’ publishing. The new hierarchies comprise editors who understand business, or business people who appreciate books. Unlike their predecessors, they can safely be introduced to an author without saying anything embarrassing.”

Picasso And Matisse Come To Queens…

This week’s opening of the Museum of Modern Arts’ blockbuster Picasso/Matisse show has people wondering how MoMA’s temporary home in Queens will show itself. The blocks around the museum have been cleaned up, and the museum is anticipating large crowds. “Seeing fine art changes the way you look at the world. I hope that seeing the show here changes the way hundreds of thousands of people look at Queens.”

Havel: From Playwright To President And Back

Vaclav Havel’s presidency of the Czech Republic has ended. “Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco—the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbable yet dramatically coherent. Havel’s is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives ‘the impression of a perfect compositional unity’.”

Amazon Dumps Ads – It’s Prices, Not Ads That Inspire Customers

Amazon has decided to dump its TV and print advertising. “Last year, the company spent just under than $50 million on its TV campaign, mainly in big cities right before Christmas. But it ran ads most of last year in Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., to see whether advertising increased sales in those areas.” The results? The ads helped push business, but only a bit. Reducing prices was much more effective in driving sales…