“Run mostly by thirty-something writers and editors, this latest generation of New York literary journals are stylishly packaged, serving up a mix of prominent names, undiscovered aspirants, and lost treasures from the vaults. Each has staked out a different aesthetic territory, but between them they cover a wide swath of contemporary literature.” – Village Voice
Tag: 09.00
THE AGITATION OF COGITATION
Muddy, brilliantly insightful, and often wildly impenetrable, 18th-century German philosopher Hegel has been called the “the hardest to understand of the great philosophers.” But after spending hundreds of hours of reading The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Philosophy of Nature, what do you really have to show for it? A new biography examines the difficulties of reading in a Hegelian world. – The New Criterion
OLD SCORES
Jane Campion won an Oscar in 1993 for her original screenplay “The Piano.” But should she have? “The fine print in the recently published Oxford Companion to Australian Film suggests otherwise. In its entry for The Piano, the volume notes that the film was in fact ‘based on the novel, The Story of a New Zealand River, by Jane Mander,’ though the book was ‘uncredited.’ It’s a bold and controversial charge, and one that has stirred up a considerable storm Down Under.” – Lingua Franca
IS THE REBUILT GLOBE AUTHENTIC?
London’s rebuilt Globe Theatre has become one of the city’s leading tourist attractions. But an Elizabethan scholar contends that the building is not an authentic replica of the old Globe, as the theatre claims. “Joy Hancox, who looks a bit like a British Angela Lansbury, has for the last several years waged a kind of crusade, contending that she holds the key to unlock a complex architectural mystery that has the Globe at its center. Indeed, she is beginning to convince others that the new theater is not the precise replica its designers have claimed, and that it is only a matter of time before it will have to be torn down and rebuilt.” – Architecture Magazine
“ENHANCING” OPERA
Last year the New York City Opera installed a “sound enhancement” system. After a season to get used to it, how did it work? “The results, to these ears at least, were troubling. On some nights, the opera sounded more or less normal (more when seated in the First Ring, less when seated mid-orchestra). On other nights, one heard odd echoes, bizarre imbalances between stage and pit, voices losing what one thought was natural focus, strange thumps and gurgles. After a while a curious psychological affliction set in: the tendency to listen to the sound rather than the music. A little knowledge can be a distracting thing.” – Opera News
FOLLOWING THE BREADCRUMBS OF THE PAST
We seem to be perpetually fascinated with the past; trying to figure out how Stonehenge was built, whether or not the Romans and Greeks read out loud or silently to themselves, how King Tut died. The only way historians and archaeologists have back into the past is the order on which things were built and the clues left behind. What kind of trail are we leaving for our successors? – The Atlantic 09/00