Is our reliance on new technologies weakening our grip on the English language? With e-mail, text messaging, and countless other ways to do whatever it is you do faster, “dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo. Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, ‘Well, at least people are writing again.’ Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.”
Tag: 02.16.06
A Matter of Choice
“When it comes to consumer choice, it’s hard to beat recordings of the popular classics. There are now around 100 different recordings of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and nearly 200 of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.” Conversely, you’re lucky if you can find even a single recording of that contemporary work your local orchestra played last weekend, and finding more than one recording of a work written after 1970? Forget it. “But now things are changing. As new music loosens up, and finds a genuine public, so the record companies are taking an interest in it.”
Vegas Avenue Q Closing
After eschewing a national tour and opening in a special theatre in Las Vegas, Avenue Q was expected to usher in a new generation of theatre in the desert. But after only five months, and selling only 65 percent of its tickets, the show is closing. “The short-lived run of “Avenue Q” in Las Vegas will probably give pause to many Broadway producers who have seen long-running blockbusters and newly minted hits alike head to the desert chasing seemingly no-lose propositions.”
Rare Blake Watercolor Sale Irks Experts
A major find of 19 watercolors is about to be broken up and sold at auction. “The watercolors — illustrations created in 1805 by the poet and artist William Blake for a 1743 poem — are being heralded by scholars as the most important Blake discovery in a century,” and experts are upset at the prospect of the sale.