Tonja Carter – who found Lee’s earliest draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and turned it into a bestselling but controversial “sequel,” sued the local museum for selling things like a Mockingbird cookbook and got its director fired, and muscled the local community out of the annual Mockingbird play – is creating a “Harper Lee Trail” to attract tourists to Monroeville, Alabama. (No word if she’s planning to charge admission.)
Tag: 12.01.16
He Couldn’t Believe He Ate The Whooooole Thing: Comedian Milt Moss Dead At 93
The man in that immortal Alka-Seltzer commercial was, in fact, a stand-up comic and MC who specialized in one-liners and Candid Camera-style fool-the-audience gags.
How Parchment Supplanted Papyrus (It Was An Ugly Business)
“[It] papyrus was rough, brittle, and prone to fraying. Its rise at papyrus’s expense, however, had little to do with the ergonomics of its use or the economics of its manufacture and everything to do with ambitious pharaohs who ignored the cardinal rule of military leadership: never get involved in a land war in Asia.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.01.16
Other Matters: Journalism, Jefferson And Rivera
Charges about biased reporting are as old as journalism itself. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-12-01
Eduardo Mendoza Wins The 2016 Cervantes Prize (Spanish Literature’s Highest Award)
Education and Culture Minister Inigo Mendez de Vigo announced the prize Wednesday, saying that beginning with Mendoza’s 1975 novel, “La verdad sobre el caso Savolta” (The Truth about the Savolta Case), the author had reinvented Spanish fiction. He said Mendoza’s books are “full of subtlety and irony.”
French Musician Jailed In Russia Over Plagiarism Dispute With Russian Pop Star
“Didier Marouani, a disco star who first toured the Soviet Union in 1983, and his lawyer, Igor Trunov, were detained Tuesday evening in a bank where they said they planned to sign an out-of-court settlement with Filipp Kirkorov, Russia’s biggest pop star. Marouani, 63, claims one of Kirkorov’s songs, “Cruel Love,” contains music he wrote years before.”
The Ten Best Books Of 2016?
Editors of the New York Times Book Review choose their favorites of the year.
Have “Identity Politics” Hurt Art?
Jay Nordlinger believes that insisting that black characters in opera be black or Asian characters in theatre be Asian is a perversion of art. Such “authenticity” he believes, goes against the very nature of dramatic portrayal…
Sometimes Black And White Open Possibilities We Hadn’t Thought About. Rauschenberg Took The Opening
“As Cage demonstrated in 4’33”, a piece for piano inspired in part by the White Paintings in which nothing is played for that exact duration, there is no silence in music that is not also an opening to sound of other sorts, and so it is with these monochromes: the visual realm is opened up even as it appears to be evacuated. The Black Paintings also point to a space outside painting, which Rauschenberg called the ‘gap between art and life’, and it was capacious enough to contain the Elemental Sculptures as well as the Combines – combinations of painting, collage and sculpture – to come.”