The “trained sensibility,” he says, is unavailable “unless you take certain masterpieces into yourself as if they were communion wafers…. If you don’t give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven’t got anything but a show of culture. It has no reality whatever. It’s an acceptable challenge to internalize all of these great things, all of this marvelous poetry. When you’ve done that, you’ve been shaped from within by these books and these writers.”
Tag: 04.07.05
Report: Thousands Of Small Publishers Add Up
A new report says that there are thousands of small publishers in America “earning between $1 million and $50 million on their own, but adding up to an estimated $11 billion market. Traditional studies released by the study group, the Association of American Publishers and others assume that the solid majority of book sales comes from the larger organizations, with the top 50 making at least $20 billion out of a $28 billion market. Wednesday’s report, titled “Under the Radar,” asserts that the industry is both larger and less concentrated than previously believed.”
Bellevue Art Museum To Reopen
The Bellevue Art Museum in a Seattle suburb plans to reopen in June as a crafts museum. When the museum abruptly closed in September 2003, the “museum was running out of money and faced low attendance after moving to a new $23 million building downtown in 2001. Some of the problems were attributed to lackluster exhibits, a cold, unwelcoming feeling inside the building, an unclear mission and poor management.”
Brook: Ticket Prices Are Killing Theatre
” Director Peter Brook is on a mission. “Wishing to make theater accessible to all, he’s the first internationally known director to lead the way by insisting that ticket prices must come down. Mr. Brook is saying, in urgent effect, if so many people can no longer afford to go to the theater, what’s the point of theater? It’s the most pressing question of all. The cost of tickets is killing the audience. They’re also killing the future. Kids can’t afford to go. Broadway will always be opportunistic Broadway. The bottom-line choices, the safe, star-driven revivals, are by now normal. We’ve come to expect no better. But in our proudly multi-ethnic city, the loyal audiences at our big nonprofit institutions remain noticeably white, middle-class and aging.”
Capturing Margot Fonteyn (Not Hardly)
They’re trying to make a biopic of Margot Fonteyn. But it doesn’t seem doable, writes Norman Lebrecht. “What Fonteyn possessed, more than the gift for dance, was a presence that transcends charisma or any of the usual qualities of attraction. She was not a woman of great intelligence. Her conversation was mundane and her interests narrow. Unlike world leaders she was not driven by raging ambition or a desire to improve society. She was Peggy Hookham by birth, and Peggy Hookham by nature, pleasingly down to earth. Yet she could enter a crowded room and everyone present knew she was there. Those who worked with her speak of an aura, an impermeable state of being.”
Kahlo Cache Discovered
A two-year renovation project at the home-turned-museum of legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo has uncovered a vast wardrobe of previously undiscovered clothing and other valuable artifacts.
Bellow Was Best
“The greatest of late-20th-century American novelists, Saul Bellow, who died Tuesday at 89, resembled his fellow immortals above in a way Americans especially trust. He won the stats game: three National Book Awards, one Pulitzer, and The Big One, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Yet like any cultural giant, Bellow bestowed more prestige on the prizes he received than they conferred on him.”
Lifestyle Of Fake Architecture
Forget malls. How 90s of you. Today’s temples to shopping aggregation are called “lifestyle centers” (we kiddeth thee not). “While these new malls may appear to be public space, they’re not public at all—at least if you want to do anything but shop. They represent a bait-and-switch routine on the part of developers, one that exchanges the public realm for the commercial one. They’re also enormously successful—by the most recent count, there are about 130 lifestyle centers scattered around the country.”
A Wedding Verse? (How To Make It Memorable) (You Can’t)
One of Andrew Motion’s jobs as British Poet Laureate is to compose a poem to comemorate Prince Charles’ Royal wedding. “Every single time, it’s an impossible job. One’s not entirely clear why anyone bothers to do it.”
Do Pulitzers Proclaim The Best In American Music?
What to think about Steven Stucky winning this year’s Pulitzer for music? Particularly after last year’s decision to broaden the definition of music eligible for the award? Frank Oteri chews on it: “I do think in some ways, we music folk are a little too obsessed with other people determining for us what the best is—residue from Beethoven and the gang, which is the same “masterpiece syndrome” that keeps so many in the classical community from ever paying attention to any new music in the first place. I sincerely wonder if novelists and poets scratch their heads in dismay every year when their favorite writer fails to win a Pulitzer. So then, what to make of the results of the 2005 Pulitzer jury?”