Stanley Fish: “[The] new movie about Allen Ginsberg starring James Franco … is not only about literary criticism but is the [actual] performance of literary criticism, an extended ‘explication de texte’.“
Tag: 10.04.10
What’s Wrong With Classical Music
“The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music.”
How Neo-Atheists Miss The Point of Religion
“They view religion’s essence as a sacred text with pretensions to be historical fact. Having dismissed these claims, they feel there is nothing left to say, and that religion and all its works deserve only derision. But given that religion emerged some 50,000 years before people learned to write, it evidently concerns something rather more than the written word.”
Winston Churchill Hits No. 4 on UK Pop Charts
“[The album] Reach for the Skies, released last week, features samples of two of Churchill’s most famous speeches, set to music by the Central Band of the Royal Air Force. … And this pomp-and-oratory mash-up, we are fascinated to report, is selling like hotcakes.”
It’s True: Strong Body Language Does Make You Feel Stronger
“New research indicates that holding a pose that opens up a person’s body and takes up space will alter hormone levels and make the person feel more powerful and more willing to take risks. … The opposite also proved true: Constrictive postures lowered a person’s sense of power and willingness to take risks.”
An 18-Year-Old Tony Kushner Play Has Its World Premiere
Back in 1992, while he was a playwright-in-residence at Juilliard (and working on Angels in America), Kushner wrote a script titled Henry Box Brown: Political-Historical-Doggerel-Vaudeville for the students there. They never performed it, but the students at NYU’s Tisch School just did.
NY State Ban On Selling Museum Artwork Expires Amid Criticism
When the New York State Board of Regents met last month to consider making permanent a set of temporary regulations that bar the sale of artwork by museums to cover expenses, approval was widely considered a fait accompli. Instead…
Nicholas Serota: UK Government’s Proposed Arts Funding Cuts Will Kill Culture
The proposed cuts in public funding “will threaten the whole ecosystem, cutting off the green shoots with the dead wood, reducing the number of plays and exhibitions, discouraging innovation, risk and experiment and threatening the ability of organisations to earn or raise money for themselves. You don’t prune a tree by cutting at its roots.”
Semantics – Teaching Computers How To Think Like Humans
“Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human.”
Sundance Institute Turns to Cultural Diplomacy
A new joint initiative of the Institute and the US government “selects a curated group of ten contemporary independent films, five American and five international, and invites the filmmakers to screen their work in selected locations in the U.S. and at American embassies and other locations around the world.”