Tag: 04.13.16

The Fascinating Publishing Life Of The “Other” Knopf

“Over the years there would be female secretaries, copywriters, reviewers, and editors at Knopf. There would be women in charge of little magazines and the children’s-book divisions of big publishers. But there would be no other woman in the publishing industry with the status of Blanche Knopf—either in the 1920s, when she signed Langston Hughes and Willa Cather, or in the 1950s, when she celebrated Albert Camus’s Nobel prize and oversaw the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. And despite it all, although her husband swore he’d put her name on the masthead, he never did.”

Library Anxiety (Yes, It’s A Thing)

“That term is hardly a household name among students, but say it to a college librarian, and he or she will know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s the feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden. In some students it’s manifested as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there. … ‘Why would anyone think we are intimidating?’ writes Michel C. Atlas. ‘What is intimidating about a master’s-prepared professional earning $35,000 a year?'”

Classical Raves Aren’t Good For Classical Or Dance Music, And They Need To Stop (Says Nightclub Critic)

John Thorp: “The current trend for high-concept classical ‘raves’ in prestigious venues feels at odds with dance music’s forward-thinking worldview. … Getting an orchestra to play dance anthems may come off as a gilded seal of prestige or legacy but it drains them of their naive simplicity and euphoria.”

Africanizing Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’

“Both stories share the premise of a human body undergoing a change so abrupt and so drastic that the old body is unrecognizable in the new one. But there is a key difference. The Metamorphosis tells the story of a man named Gregor Samsa who wakes up one non-descript morning and finds he is a human-size bug. But in Blackass, Furo Wariboko wakes up and finds he has been transformed into a white man while his buttocks remain black.”

It Ain’t Necessarily So: Cost Disease And The Arts

“When I’m forced to justify the arts in a narrow outcomes-based context I feel like I’ve already lost, because the reason art is so interesting is how hard it is to pin down to just one dimension. I like to argue like this: we need to make a commitment as a society to paying health care workers, educators, and artists enough to support them as well as any typical worker in our society.”