Maybe — but, says Dance/NYC’s executive director, “In order for decentralization to be sustained, it must come with intentional investment and organization. … You need cities that invest in the arts as dignified work that should be paid.” – Dance Magazine
Author: Matthew Westphal
The Holy Grail of the Beat Generation
When Neal Cassady died in 1968, Carl Solomon recalled a conversation he had about him with Allen Ginsberg: “He told me about this fabulous hipster he knew. And I, defending something or other in my head, said deprecatingly, ‘Kinetic.’ Meaning that he was a man always in motion, jumping from one exciting thing to another.” – Jan Herman
‘The Inheritance’ Playwright To Pen Major Biopic Of Tennessee Williams
Matthew López has been engaged by Searchlight Pictures to write a screen adaptation of Leading Men, the Christopher Castellani novel about Williams and his longtime lover Frank Merlo. López’s The Inheritance won four Olivier Awards in London in 2019 and garnered eleven Tony nominations this year. – Variety
My Grandpa Was Part Of The Nazi Language Police
Martin Puchner, Harvard comp lit professor and editor of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, writes about Rotwelsch — an amalgam of colloquial German, Yiddish, and Romani spoken for centuries by itinerant people in Central Europe and incomprehensible to outsiders — and about how he discovered that his grandfather, a historian named Karl Puchner, had worked with the Nazi regime to suppress Rotwelsch and keep the German language pure. – Literary Hub
Is This The Dream Sheet Music App We’ve Been Waiting For?
“Artificial intelligence experts working with musicologists at a Berlin startup have spent years gathering hundreds of thousands of published scores and creating digital editions of each of them. The Enote app will give musicians the chance to interact with sheet music by instantly transposing it, switching between movements or measures, turning pages, changing the size of scores, and printing them on the go.” – The Guardian
Remember Those ‘Very Special’ TV Series Episodes? Some Of Them Really Did Change People’s Lives
“Very Special Episodes — i.e., the ones in which a TV series would take a break from its regularly scheduled programming to deal with a difficult or controversial subject (like The Next Generation‘s two-part school shooting arc) — are as old as television itself. Case in point: Leave It to Beaver grappled with divorce, and The Andy Griffith Show tackled alcoholism. But they really took off in the 1970s when TV legend Norman Lear wove the social issues of the era into his numerous prime-time hits.” And, as schlocky as some of them could be, people actually learned from them — a lot. – Mel
Fred Hills, Legendary Editor At McGraw Hill And Simon & Schuster, Dead At 85
“During his four decades in publishing, Mr. Hills brought to market both commercial hits and literary prizewinners and edited more than 50 New York Times best sellers. His stable of authors encompassed an eclectic assortment from multiple genres — Heinrich Böll and Jane Fonda, Justin Kaplan and William Saroyan, Raymond Carver and James MacGregor Burns, Sumner Redstone and Joan Kennedy, Phil Donahue and David Halberstam.” – The New York Times
As Book Reviews Disappear From Mainstream Outlets, A Tennessee Nonprofit Fills The Gap
“Humanities Tennessee [has] created something called Chapter 16: a part-digital, part-print publication that covers literature and literary life in the state by doing what almost any other outlet would — running reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays — but also by doing what almost no other outlet could afford to do: giving away its content for free, not only to readers but to any publication of any kind that wants to reproduce it.” – The New Yorker
Christmas Panto In The Pandemic
It seems you can’t keep England’s antic, anarchic holiday tradition down, even as disease stalks the land. Chris Wiegand talks to producers who are putting their pantos on film and in car parks. – The Guardian
As Philadelphia’s Arts Sector Closes Up For Second Time, Fears About What Might Not Survive
“After initial COVID-19 shutdowns in March, many organizations made significant investments in reopening this summer or moving activities online, … ‘and now it appears they won’t be able to reap any impact from that investment, at least for quite a while.’ … For groups that showed resourcefulness in moving operations online and making attendance safe for visitors, the new restrictions feel like a step backward. More critically, the new constraints threaten an already fragile sector.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer