It’s exactly 100 years since Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was born. “Today Dr. Seuss’s 44 books have been translated into 21 languages, selling more than 500 million copies. ‘We’re even in Braille,’ Ms. Geisel said from her home here, an old observation tower overlooking the Pacific, where her husband did his illustrations. A private man, during his lifetime Geisel never sold his art; he was a pack rat who hoarded everything.”
Tag: 03.02.04
Bashing The Women’s Magazines
Myrna Blyth used to edit the Ladies Home Journal magazine. Now she’s written a book that criticizes the whole genre of women’s magazines. “It is the most sustained attack on women’s magazines since Gloria Steinem started Ms. in 1972 and suggested that the typical women’s magazine was just a “survival kit” for the unliberated and edited for advertisers, not readers. But Ms. Blyth’s book is all the more powerful because it comes from someone who until recently reigned as one of the queens of women’s magazines, selling millions of copies with the same practices she now finds so distasteful.”
Berlin’s New Operatic Reality
Berlin can no longer afford three opera houses, funded in the manner they traditionally have been. But it couldn’t close any of them either. “The solution that has now been imposed by the Berlin Senate, amid squeals of dismay and sighs of resignation, was predictable. The three opera houses — the Deutsche Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Deutsche Oper and the Komische Oper — will remain open, but they must cut costs, including 220 jobs, and learn to live on smaller subsidies. They are also to share workshops, and will shortly merge their three ballet companies into a single Staatsballett Berlin.”
Doubts Increase About Missing “Cezanne”
Cezanne experts are voicing more skepticism that a painting stolen last weekend in New South Wales was an authentic Cezanne. “Claiming the work appeared to have been painted in England in the 1920s,” one expert says owner John Opit was “suffering from a case of ‘mythomania’. ‘I think it’s just a case of the myth getting bigger than the man’.”