“Proust composed by an immensely complex process of writing and rewriting, weaving together passages sometimes composed years apart, filling his margins with additions and, when the margins ran out, continuing on strips of paper glued to the pages.” Carol Clark writes about the challenges of editing and translating The Prisoner, one of three volumes the author didn’t live to see through publication himself. — Literary Hub
Tag: 01.08.19
The New Spider-Man Movie Is An Indictment Of Live-Action Superheroes
Dear deities of entertainment, why in the world do we have awkward, clunky live-action movies strewn with CGI when animation exists? (Guess why. P r o f i t.) – BuzzFeed
The Day Mainstream Culture Died
Jared Marcel Pollen: No taste is triumphant anymore. This is to say that the mainstream is itself in peril as much as the domination of any narrative art within it. Indeed, the very notion of a mainstream seems to be perishing in overproduction and disaffection with the cultural gatekeepers. – 3AM Magazine
American Cultural Mythology: Authenticity Above All Else (Hollywood-Style Of Course)
Bohemian Rhapsody, picked apart by cultural commentators for its divergences from the real story of Queen’s rise, is great for its realness? A band that campily reimagined rock and roll as opera, that played with baby talk and disco beats, whose lead singer paraded about in royal finery, is the ensurer of authenticity? – The Atlantic
A New Phase In Art And Dance Made By Artists With Disabilities
This new wave “is a consideration of the aesthetic possibilities of disability. It’s not about adaptation or accommodation. It’s about how unique bodies, minds, senses and phenomenological experiences of disability and impairment—along with the political aspects and intersectional identities—can create new work.” – Vice
How Sound Can Tip Us To Things Like Climate Change
Scientist Garth Paine: “I have spent decades making field recordings in which I create a setup before dawn or dusk, then lie on the ground listening for several uninterrupted hours. These projects have taught me how the density of the air changes as the sun rises or sets, how animal behavior shifts as a result, and how all of these things are intricately linked.”
The Truth Behind The Genesis Of Monty Python’s ‘Spamalot’ (An Oral History)
It all started years before, when Eric Idle told Mel Brooks he wanted to do a musical version of The Producers. Brooks rejected the idea — then. When he changed his mind later and made gobs of money, Idle decided he could do the same thing. (Well, that’s how Idle tells it …) — Vulture
Mary Kay Stearns, One Of TV’s Very First Sitcom Stars, Dead At 93
Mary Kay and Johnny, starring Stearns and her husband (who wrote the scripts) as a couple not unlike themselves (prefiguring such series as I Love Lucy), told comic tales of a banker and his wife — and, once Mary Kay became pregnant, their child. — The New York Times
Cities Of War (An Urban Plan)
“Urbicide is the targeted destruction of cities as a tactic of war. The violence chronicled here is not aerial annihilation—hospitals and homes reduced to rubble—but the “gradual construction of buildings and infrastructure” in ways that collapse boundaries between war and peace, militarizing everyday life. – Public Books
The Essay As Art Form
The essay is a marginal, even trivial form, yet is also deeply and seriously engaged with the weightiest questions of how a philosophical and political subject can be constituted out of a particular body and mind. Essayistic writing—as opposed to strict autobiography, which may simplify and explain a life through narrative—shows what is at stake when we say “you”: another “I.” – Public Books