“By putting digital copies of works online, Darnton has argued, we could open the collections of the country’s great libraries to anyone with access to the network. We could create a ‘Digital Republic of Letters’ that would be truly free and open and democratic. The DPLA would allow us to ‘realize the Enlightenment ideals on which our country was founded’.”
Tag: 04.12
How The Cuban Music Industry Is Different
“In Cuba, many of the groups are on salary, which really creates a new dynamic. First, in a capitalist society, groups rise and fall based on their popularity and their money making capacity, where in Cuba, this is very different. Some of the groups are sustained because they’re on salary, they survive maybe even when they’re not so popular but they’re still going… because these are traditions that are preserved.”
Those Critics That Panned Leaves Of Grass And The Waste Land? They Had A Valuable Point
“The critics (like the poets themselves) were creatures of their day, and subject to the prejudices of the day. … Such contemporary insight is important not just for its punctuality. The reviews expose how the poets failed the time – or how their time failed the poets. Only by knowing how critics resisted the work can we see what the poetry put in danger.”
Are Museums Trying To Overwhelm Visitors?
Julián Zugazagoitia describes visiting museums “where you walk into a room and there’s one little painting surround by all these cards in different languages. And the video. And X-rays of the painting. And the only thing you can’t see is the work of art itself.”
Is Public Sentiment Making Our Culture More Shallow?
“Changes in culture tend to change our ‘modal type’ of character like this. In other words, a culture finds (in fact creates) its ideal person. What, then, is ours going to be? What modal type matches our culture as it has shifted in the early years of this century?”
Will E-Books Kill The Book Cover?
“A digital book has no cover. There’s no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon’s postage stamp-sized pictures, which don’t actually cover anything, and instead operate as visual portals into an entire webpage of data.”
Why Literature Needs To Be Disruptive
“Texts have become detached from robust criticism. The role of the serious, independent literary critic with their own orientation in the world, part of a critical culture which holds writers up to clear standards, has fallen away – often seen as an outmoded, elitist bourgeois affliction best blotted out. The results are far from desirable.”
But Who Was Casanova, Really?
“He was a true Enlightenment polymath, whose many achievements would put the likes of Hugh Hefner to shame. He hobnobbed with Voltaire, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin and probably Mozart; survived as a gambler, an astrologer and spy; translated The Iliad into his Venetian dialect; and wrote a science fiction novel, a proto-feminist pamphlet and a range of mathematical treatises.”
The “New Aesthetic”
“This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen.”
American Education Is In Great Shape. So Why Don’t We Know That?
“By many important measures – high school completion rates, college graduation, overall performance on standardized tests – America’s educational attainment has never been higher.”