Listeners to the UK’s Classic FM radio station have voted Vaughan Williams’s work Lark Ascending the most popular piece of British classical music. “Edward Elgar came second and third with Cello Concerto in E minor and then Variations on an Original Theme. Welshman Karl Jenkins – the only living composer in the top 10 – was fourth with The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.”
Tag: 05.03.06
The Art Of Book Blurbing
“The blurb is a longstanding practice in publishing — nowadays, it’s jarring to find a book that isn’t garnished with adoring verbiage. While there’s no empirical proof that blurbs help sell books, no publisher would dare print a book without one.”
Broad Foundation Buys 570 Beuys Works
“The Broad Art Foundation has purchased 570 works by the late German artist Joseph Beuys, an influential thinker and socially conscious force in avant-garde 20th century art. The acquisition comprises a nearly complete collection of the artist’s ‘multiples’ — groups of mostly three-dimensional works produced in more than one edition to make them widely available. These works are regarded as the essence of his production.”
Behind The Book “Packager”
What exactly is this “Alloy Entertainment”, the book packager responsible for the now infamous Kaavya Viswanathan book now withdrawn for plagiarism? “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.”
Study: Girls Come Out Ahead On Technology
“After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.”
Rare Blake Watercolors Sold
Nineteen rare watercolors by William Blake were auctioned Tuesday in New York. “The works, illustrations for “The Grave,” a 1743 poem by the Scottish writer Robert Blair, were discovered five years ago by two British booksellers. At the time, experts heralded them as the most important Blake discovery in a century and said the illustrations should stay together. It appeared that the public agreed; some in the audience spoke of the breakup of the collection as a criminal procedure.”
Bid To Buy Waterstone’s Fails
Waterstone’s founder Tim Waterstone has withdrawn his bid to buy back the bookseller from HMV. “Mr Waterstone, who founded the business almost 25 years ago, claimed HMV had imposed ‘ludicrous’ conditions for the deal, leaving him and his backers, Lazard European Private Equity Partners, with no alternative but to withdraw.”