After the Second World War, alienation came to betoken a near-universal spiritual and psychological malaise. Existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre used it to describe a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Novelists such as Albert Camus, the author of The Stranger (1942), demonstrated its effects in the indifferent numbness of casual violence. By the time J D Salinger released his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a chronicle of adolescent estrangement featuring the anti-hero Holden Caulfield, alienation was invoked to explain everything from juvenile delinquency and galloping divorce rates to voter apathy and substance abuse. The term was taken to define the fundamental pathology of modern life.
Tag: 03.16.18
2018’s Great British University Strike: The Lecturers Rebel
The goad for this stunningly resolute strike was deep cuts to retirement pensions, but as in all such vast, spontaneous outpourings from below, the issue is not the issue. The issue, rather, is the deteriorating quality of work life and morale in the higher-education sector. The Great University Strike of 2018 is a powerful statement on behalf of intellectual and humane values, new university priorities, and organizational structures and norms that better embody the principles of dignity, transparency, respect, and democracy.
Behind The Firing Of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art Chief Curator
Behind the scenes, according to several sources close to the museum who were interviewed by artnet News, Molesworth’s personal priorities, progressive politics, and constitutional aversion to flattering donors put her on a collision course with the museum’s director and board. Ultimately, they said, the competing agendas and approaches proved irreconcilable, and the situation became untenable.
Female Directors Are Finally Starting To Get Traction In Sci-Fi
Katherine Bigelow made Strange Days ($42 million budget) more than 20 years ago. Excepting the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending (they got their Hollywood cred from the Matrix series, which they made when they were male), it took until Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time for Hollywood to let a woman helm a big-budget science-fiction feature. (Another one, Claire Denis’s High Life, is on the way.) Anne Billson looks at the trouble female filmmakers have had making headway in high-end science fiction – and at the numerous interesting efforts they’ve made on low budgets.
Community Theatre Putting On Play ‘With Holocaust Themes’ Gets Hate Calls
Since the new play opened last weekend, the Footlights Theatre in Falmouth, Maine, has been getting hate calls. “I had one woman tell me, ‘I don’t want to see a play about those (expletive) Jews,” the executive artistic director says. He sent an email out to supporters: “I need people to know this is happening. … It’s not an open invitation to hate again.”
Emily Nasrallah, ‘Icon Of Literature And Lebanese Creativity,’ Has Died At 86
Nasrallah was a journalist, teacher, lecturer and novelist who advocated for women’s rights and wrote about refugees and war in Lebanon. Her books “recount the emptiness left by immigration, the women left behind by men seeking a better life beyond war-torn Lebanon, the parents abandoned by children desperate to fulfill the dreams they had been denied.”
People Don’t Agree On What Morality Is Or Whether It Exists, But We Still Teach It
Why? And how? “We might deny that morality needs to be taught, putting our faith in the natural goodness of children or their propensity to discover and sign up to moral standards of their own accord. Or we might bite the indoctrination bullet and resolve to inculcate a selected moral code and associated justification. … Or we might decline to educate in morality and simply educate about it. … But the objections to these responses are obvious, and serious.”
Are We In A Time Of Anomaly – Or A Breakthrough Time For Women Directing Big-Budget Science Fiction Films?
One problem is simply the numbers in the U.S. – single digits for women directors, compared to women being 1/4 of directors in France, for instance. And then, of course, “sci-fi is still fiercely defended masculine territory. The word “science” doesn’t help, judging by men’s rights movement support for James Damore, the Google engineer fired for claiming the gender imbalance in the science and technology sectors was due to biological differences. Or for the Sad Puppies movement agitating for a return to pre-diversity science fiction. Or never-ending Gamergate nonsense, or whingeing about Star Wars being sullied by women or people of colour. Sci-fi is a cultural Custer’s Last Stand for bigotry.”
After 33 Years, Chicago’s American Theatre Company Abruptly Shuts Its Doors
The theatre took down its website and all of its social media at the same time the announcement went out on a Friday morning. “The unsigned statement from ATC’s board (which declined interview requests) praised [AD Will] Davis while implying a downturn in ticket sales under his tenure: ‘Despite the innovative, engaging and inclusive approach to ATC that current artistic director Will Davis brought to our theater, which continued to garner a positive reception for our productions and educational programs, the theater has suffered from a reduction in earned revenue.'”
Where Is Pop Music’s MeToo Movement?
They tried to have a panel about it during SXSW. But even the panel showed the problem: “Issues surrounding sexual harassment and misconduct are one of the greatest challenges facing not only the entertainment business but the culture at large. Yet the single most topical panel at SXSW, an event that attracts more than 70,000 registered attendees over its 10-day run, was relegated to one of the Austin Convention Center’s smaller meeting rooms.” And most attendees of SXSW were at booze-fueled parties at the same time. What’s next?