The End Of Seattle BookFest

Why did Seattle’s BookFest festival bite the dust? “The argument over what Bookfest could have done better is now hypothetical, but what no one seems exactly ready to admit is that if recent festivals had been better and more accessible (and more interesting), they would have drawn more paying vendors and more paying attendees, and the finances would likely have fallen into place. Financial instability, dwindling attendance, the remoteness of the Sand Point venue, and increasing criticism about the quality of the festival are among the problems that have plagued Bookfest in recent years.”

Kushner Blasts Theatre Critic’s Attack

Theatre critic Hedy Weiss didn’t much like Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change.” In her review in the Chicago Sun-Times, Weiss wrote: “Unfortunately, Kushner, in the classic style of a self-loathing Jew, has little but revulsion for his own roots.” Kushner demanded an apology: “It is appalling that a playwright can be flatly accused of hating his own people without a single word cited from the play in question.”

Dare To Be Wrong

The author of a new book says scientists have forgotten how to be wrong. “In any branch of science there are only two possibilities. There is either nothing left to discover, in which case, why work on it, or there are big discoveries yet to be made, in which case, what the scientists say now is likely to be false. The problem is, the top scientists seem to have forgotten that. The result is a generation of scientists who have become a little too confident that their understanding of the world is more scientifically accurate than it will be proved to be.”

New Haven’s Long Wharf Gets New Home

Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre is getting a new home. It will be in a long-neglected area of New Haven, and the $230 million project will include a home for “Gateway Community College, and a new hotel and conference center and parking.” This will be “the largest development project in New Haven in 30 years, will be built through state and city funds and from private donors.”

Irish MPs Legislate Joyce Exhibition

“Stephen Joyce, the highly litigious grandson of Ireland’s greatest writer, James Joyce, has devoted his life to fiercely protecting his grandfather’s copyright, setting his lawyers on those foolhardy enough to take the Joyce name in vain or to reproduce Joyce’s words without consent. But now, fearful for this month’s mammoth celebrations of Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, Irish MPs yesterday rushed through emergency legislation which will prevent Mr Joyce from suing the government and the National Library over an exhibition which displays 500 pages of Joyce manuscripts.”

Tolkien In The Academy

“The decades-old dispute over whether Tolkien’s work counts as serious literature is still alive. So are the debates over how to interpret the cultural politics of his imaginary world. But even before the author’s death, in 1973, some readers were beginning to wonder about a different set of questions: how to understand the relationship between Tolkien’s storytelling and his scholarship.”

Hughes: Art Market Is “Obscene”

Critic Robert Hughes blasts the state of the art market in a speech in London: “I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying for an immature Rose Period Picasso $104m (£57m), close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states, something is very rotten: such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.”

Hughes: Royal Academy Is The Cure

Robert Hughes says that London’s Royal Academy could help save art from commercialism: “An institution like the Royal Academy, precisely because it is not commercial, can be a powerful counterweight to the degrading market hysteria we have seen too much of in recent years. I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between, and what else is news?”

Recreating Old Recordings

How to preserve old vinyl and wax cylinder recordings? “Researchers using optical-scanning equipment have made exquisitely detailed maps of the grooves of such recordings. By simulating how a stylus moves along those contours, the team has reproduced the encoded sounds with high fidelity.”