Although Americans may find it convenient to think of the Middle East as a land of barbaric, uncultured souls prone to unstoppable violence, the recent horrific and systematic destruction of Iraq’s cultural firmament points up how wrong these misconceptions truly are. When Baghdad’s central library burned to the ground last week, centuries of irreplacable cultural scholarship were lost to the world. Iraq has always taken great pride in its culture and its history, and has catalogued both with a meticulousness which ‘cultured’ Americans have never matched. “Since 1967, the country has had stringent laws preventing the export of antiquities. One of the saddest ironies of the destruction is that Iraq’s defense of its cultural heritage was considered a model for the region.”
Tag: 04.18.03
Reality Film (AKA Documentaries) Making Comeback
Filmmaker Michael Moore’s huge success with “Bowling for Columbine” has “energized nonfiction filmmakers and piqued moviegoers’ curiosity about fare drawn from real life, and encouraged distributors to put more documentaries into theaters. But this doesn’t mean his style of documentary – sar- donic, polemical, and propelled as much by his own ego as the cause he’s fighting for – will now dominate the field.”
Reading In Iraq
“In Iraq, and in the Arab world as a whole, public libraries are extremely under-funded and cannot even remotely satisfy the needs of those who want to read. People like me, who had to walk long distances to visit a public library only to be asked to pay huge fees which I could never afford, had no choice but to turn to the libraries of our mosques, which were even poorer than the public ones. The network of bookshops in Iraq is denser than in many other Arab countries. People know about the Iraqis’ eagerness to read. During the 1980s, Iraqi booksellers still ordered several times the volume of what their Egyptian colleagues ordered. And despite the embargo and the weak purchasing power of the past years, every new publication sold like hotcakes.”
Unifying Through The King James
The King James Bible, first published in 1611, isn’t just a book, of course. But it isn’t just a bible, either, reports a new book on the making of the King James. It “was composed in an English that had never been spoken in the street. This was the language of deliberate godliness, yet grounded in easy words and simple things: able to swoop in one verse from the sublimity of the eternal to the clumsiness of a fisherman jumping from a boat. There was a political purpose in this. James I, baptised a Catholic but brought up by Scottish Presbyterians, dreamed of bridging in this Bible his kingdom’s religious divides.”
Music Education, Interactive Style
The Philharmonic of New Jersey’s “Discovery Concert Series of interactive music-appreciation events is attempting to extricate classical performances from the miasma of modern life, where it plays second fiddle to everything from linguine to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since it began last year, the concert series has proven to be a huge success, selling out months in advance. Concerts take place in Newark at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and are aired on local and, increasingly, national PBS stations. The concerts are interactive in the style of a college class in music theory and have covered pieces by Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, and Claude Debussy.”
The Passions Of JP Getty
“At heart, JP Getty II was a scholar manque. His greatest passion was his collection of rare books, which included a number of priceless medieval manuscripts; and only recently he paid Oriel College, Oxford, £3.5 million for a First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. He absorbed himself not only in the texts and their provenance, but also in the practical art of fine book-binding. He was a cinema buff and an authority on the work of Howard Hawks and Charlie Chaplin; his video library was vast. He also had a wide knowledge of music. At the other end of the scale, Getty was an inveterate watcher of television soap operas, with a particular affection for the Australian series Neighbours.”