Dear Mr. King: Decline

Book columnist J. Peder Zane writes an open letter to Stephen King about his pending National Book Award. “I am writing to ask you to do something that only one in a million in your position would even contemplate. I am beseeching you to perform a truly heroic act that could influence the direction of American culture. Respectfully, I am urging you to decline this award.”

Anger In Kabul (And Now In Europe)

Asne Seierstad’s book “The Bookseller of Kabul” is a runaway hit. It has “sold more than half a million copies in Scandinavia alone. It has been sold to publishers in 17 countries and came out to rave reviews in Britain last month. It is due out in the US in October, and is the bestselling Norwegian non-fiction book of all time.” But the Afghan family on which the book is based is angry at its portrayal and the head of the family is “not only demanding ‘compensation’ and ‘damages’, but says that many people, himself included, ‘would be happy to see it burned’.”

Ned Rorem At 80

Composer Ned Rorem is turning 80 – and his “bleak pessimism about the future of music and the world at large has deepened even more. Yet the number and scale of events this season show that his fears of being forgotten are ill-founded. Indeed, Rorem’s milestone year is being marked in grand style.”

Time For Movies To Pay For R&D

The powerful lucrative movie business gets a lot of its talent from the theatre. “Is there something inherently wrong about one of the world’s most powerful industries’ being so disconnected from the source of some of its greatest talent? A good part of the entertainment industry’s research and development have been in the nonprofit sector, but the bills have not been paid by entertainment conglomerates but through the box office, foundations, local businesses and the taxpayer.”

Scots Ballet’s Movement Problem

The Scottish Ballet wants to move. But it “has attracted widespread condemnation from the visual arts world after revealing it is applying for lottery cash to convert Tramway 2 – an internationally respected exhibition space which launched the careers of artists such as Roderick Buchanan and Christine Borland – into rehearsal space.”

What’s Wrong With The Booker

The Booker prize has, for much of its history, been anthrax for the average reader. One thing you could be guaranteed of: you might come out of the experience feeling cleverer, or more high-toned, but you’re unlikely to have had much of an enjoyable time. Furthermore, you are unlikely to have read anything contemporary, or that has anything to say about Britain today. Rather as British art abandoned painting, for decades British writing abandoned story. Plot, good characters and, God forbid, humour, have not only been largely absent from the list of Booker triumphs – they are positively reasons for exclusion, it seems sometimes.”

Why Punishing Downloaders Won’t Work

“The urge to cast downloading as a kind of black-and-white moral issue that simply needs to be made plain to the kids so that they will knock it off is understandable, but it’s also wishful thinking. An estimated 60 million people have downloaded songs illicitly, which makes the phenomenon bigger than a youth fad. It’s more like speeding or marijuana use – activities that many people in a wide range of ages know are ‘wrong’ in a technical sense but not in a behavioral sense. By now, even if the music industry is right on the legal argument, it can’t win the moral one.”

New World, New Ideas

Miami’s New World Symphony is a training orchestra that thinks different. “New World places great emphasis on being different, as it performs some of the most edgy repertoire in music. This season, New World will be performing works by John Cage, Steve Reich and Luciano Berio – in a preview of New World’s scheduled performance in Rome – and Sibelius’ Fifth, works typically never even penciled into a regional orchestra’s schedule. ‘We have never been in competition with anyone for audiences because we do very few programs. We’re not scared of putting on an evening where we only have 300 people there if the repertoire is as extreme as it sometimes can be.”