“The problem with North Korea journalism is that you can write almost anything and almost nobody knows if it’s bunk. Then you have North Korea fiction, where you can paint a very vivid reality and readers, I imagine, will want to believe that it’s 100 percent true.” Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master’s Son, talks about how he dealt with the challenge.
Tag: 03.07.14
“Smart Thinking” Books – Self-Help For Smart People?
“It has been called intelligent self-help, but since most potential readers would not appreciate the implied association with the dumber varieties, “smart thinking” has a certain advantage.”
The Onion Breaks The Story: National Endowment For The Arts To Award $80 Million For Talentless Hacks
“The independent federal agency said it intends to provide the nation’s exceptionally unskilled and deluded artists with cash grants ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 in order to sway them from continuing with their derivative and atrocious work, thereby significantly bolstering the overall quality of art in the United States.”
Another Free Streaming Music Service, This One From Samsung
It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Hey Classical Musicians, You Need To Learn Folk Music
“Even teachers who know very little about traditional music could assign interesting fiddle tunes to their students as a break between scales and etudes. It would be a moment in the middle of a practice session to reflect on just how much musical tradition exists in America. It would be a moment to recognize that most, if not all music comes, in some way, from folk traditions.”
Ned O’Gorman Wanted To Give Kids ‘Literature, Latin, And Love’
“‘I was merely a fool poet,’ he said, ‘with nothing but poetry in his bag, hoping the energy and joy that brought poems from chaos would carry me to the children.’ The school, the Children’s Storefront, has flourished in three adjoining townhouses on East 129th Street, becoming a fully accredited, tuition-free school with a $4 million budget and a student body of about 170 children, from prekindergarten through eighth grade.”
Loving Good Books Doesn’t Make You A Good Person
“Ted Kaczynski was not improved by his obsession with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, nor Timothy McVeigh by his fascination with The Turner Diaries. Mark David Chapman was not healed by his love of The Catcher in the Rye. The disturbed reader—or, in my case, the merely immature reader—won’t always be ennobled simply by cracking open a great book.”
You Might Want To Sit Down: The Arts Aren’t Expanding Access To Jobs In The Arts
Um … “Barriers to the industry include the requirement for high-level qualifications and the preference of employers to use unpaid workers, the report says. Another obstacle is the need for industry newcomers to have an informal network of ‘insiders’ within the sector before they can secure a job.”
How An Orchestra Looks Affects How You Think It Sounds
“Participants across the board were better at identifying the more accomplished groups by watching them, not by listening to them. In fact, even when music and video were combined in clips, it was actually harder for participants to identify the top groups than by video alone.”
Yes, White People Should Belly Dance (If They Do It Respectfully)
“Appropriation can be insensitive or disrespectful in all sorts of particular instances. But often, it is wonderful.”