Tag: 04.11.05

A Lit Experiment

The new Lit Blog consortium is an experiment in literary sociology. “Can a group of people frustrated with prevailing trends in the publishing industry (which is constantly on the lookout for the next Da Vinci Code, as if one weren’t enough) and with mainstream media (where reviewing space shrinks constantly) win recognition for a worthy, but otherwise potentially overlooked, piece of fiction? Or, to put it another way: Do literary bloggers have any power? Considering  how many novels and short story collections they now publish, university presses may well want to monitor the results.”

American U’s Fall Back In Programming Competition

“American universities — once the dominant force in the information technology world — fell far down the ranks in a widely watched international computer programming contest held this week. Asian and Eastern European schools have been scoring increasingly well in the world championship. A U.S. school hasn’t won since 1997, when students at Harvey Mudd College proved best.”

Has Opera Lost Its Personality?

Lisa Saffer on what’s wrong with today’s opera world: “I think the business has shifted recently: money speaks more than it should, and that means taking safe choices: people have become too afraid of making mistakes. Singers get talked at the whole time and coached within an inch of their lives – and the result is a passivity which depresses me. There’s plenty of polish around, but the rough edges which give the music character are being ironed out. We need more singers with something of their own to say, singers who engage spontaneously with the music.”

Judith Regan – The Angriest Publisher In New York?

Judith Regan is “arguably the most successful publisher in the world today, she runs a small imprint with a huge hit rate. So far this year, ReganBooks – part of the HarperCollins empire – has notched up 11 titles in the New York Times bestseller list, including four number ones in the space of six weeks. Even her critics describe her as the smartest woman in publishing. And yet they also have a few more superlatives for her, including the “angriest woman in the media” and – if Vanity Fair magazine is to be believed – a strong candidate for the nastiest person in New York.”

Mona Lisa In Her New Home

The Mona Lisa gets a new gallery home of her own, and crowds throng to the Louvre. “The Mona Lisa is not so much “hung” on its special wall as set, like a jewel, within it. With its stylishly brushed sgraffito surroundings, at once bare and luxurious, and its solitary magnificence behind glass, it’s for all the world like a watch in Cartier’s window. You need to be in the right frame of mind, but you can, for the first time in my memory, get a decent acquaintance with the Mona Lisa. Intimacy, even. So it’s finally possible to ask yourself critically: is she worth it?”

France: Fighting Off Google’s World-Wide Domination

Does Google’s global reach create “the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world?” The president of the Frnech National Library believes so. “Europe, he said, should counterattack by converting its own books into digital files and by controlling the page rankings of responses to searches. His one-man campaign bore fruit. At a meeting on March 16, President Jacques Chirac of France asked Mr. Jeanneney and the culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, to study how French and European library collections could be rapidly made available on the Web.”

Vintage US Propaganda Films From The Marshall Plan

The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe after WWII. “But in addition to rebuilding, it also plowed about $650-million into information dissemination, including the creation of more than 260 films to help convince the populations of 16 disparate countries to jointly accept American aid and embrace U.S.-style democracy. The films were seen everywhere, from movie palaces in big cities such as Paris to tiny, mountainous villages in countries like Portugal and Italy. But until recently many of them had never been seen in the United States because of a 1948 law prohibiting Americans from being propagandized with their own tax dollars, a restriction removed only 15 years ago.”

US Scientists Fight Legislation That Would Restrict Kennewick Man Study

Scientists are opposing a bill in the US Congress that would “allow federally recognized tribes to claim ancient remains even if they cannot prove a link to a current tribe.” That could block study of the ancient Kennewick man. “Scientists fear that the bill, if enacted, could end up overturning a federal appeals court ruling that allows them to study the 9,300-year-old skeleton, one of the oldest ever found in North America. The skeleton was discovered in 1996 along the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash., and has been the focus of a bitter nine-year fight.”

NY Public Library To Sell Off Art

The New York Public Library has decided to sell some of its art work so it can compete better in buying books, manuscripts and other works on paper and bolster its endowment. “Sotheby’s, which has been retained by the library, estimates that the works will sell for $50 million to $75 million. The transactions will be handled either privately or by public auction.”