“Audience members at Fela! aren’t allowed to be passive. They sing along with songs by following lyrics projected on the set — and, at one point, they get up on their feet and shake their booty … or, as Kuti would call it, their nyansh.”
Tag: 12.28.09
Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Life Was No Children’s Book’
“Louisa made herself a brand,” says Alcott scholar Harriet Reisen. “She suppressed the fact that she had written pulp fiction that included stories about spies and transvestites and drug takers.”
On Christmas Day, Amazon Sold More E-Books Than Books
“As people rushed to fill their freshly unwrapped e-readers – one of the top-selling gadgets this festive season – the online retailer said sales at its electronic book store quickly overtook orders for physical books.” It was a first.
The UK’s Most-Played Classical Music Of The Past 75 Years
Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” came in at number one, while “Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia On A Theme was in second place. Third place went to a 1990 recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade by the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sir Charles Mackerras.”
The Survey Says: Liberal Arts Education Is More Desirable
“The benchmark freshmen surveys conducted each year by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute show an increasing appetite for the kind of educational experience typically associated with the liberal arts.”
Can Computers Replace Teachers?
“The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what concepts could bear reinforcement.”
Are Books About To E-Volve?
Is a hybrid book our future? Maybe. “As discourse moves from printed pages to network screens, the dominant mode will be things that are multi-modal and multilayered,” says Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. “The age of pure linear content is going to pass with the rise of digital network content.”
What It Means To Be An Artist Now
“Ubiquitous communication and cheap digital technologies are empowering the striving artist who steadily cultivates his or her craft, challenging the cliché of the starving bohemian, or the superstar. At the same time, say many artists, an avalanche of output and constant accessibility might push them to rediscover the merits of handcrafted work, the necessity of disconnected contemplation and the joys of face-to-face human contact.”
Ten Years That Changed Books
“It is has been a strange, fragmented decade in literature, suitable for these multitasking years.”
The Science Behind Art’s “Golden Triangle”
“Whether intentional or not, the ratio represents the best proportions to transfer to the brain. ‘This is the best flowing configuration for images from plane to brain and it manifests itself frequently in human-made shapes that give the impression they were ‘designed’ according to the golden ratio’.”