“One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, nihilism was born. Its midwife was the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose greatest work, Fathers and Sons, appeared in the spring of 1862 and heaved the immense figure of Yevgeny Bazarov into the world. Doctor by vocation and nihilist by avocation, Bazarov today would scarcely recognize what has become of the philosophy he launched. Nihilism is not what it once was and we are marking the most meaningless of anniversaries.”
Tag: 05.04.12
A Book Of Taliban Poetry (The UK Army Commander Doesn’t Approve)
Retired army colonel Richard Kemp accuses the publishers of “giving voice to terrorists.” The anthology’s editors “argue that its 235 [translated] poems, including love poems, verses exulting in the Afghan landscape and patriotic ballads, provide a unique insight into the human side of the Taliban.”
British Museum May Have Found 400-Year-Old ‘Lost Colony’
“For centuries, the Tidewater coast of North Carolina has held one of early America’s oldest secrets: the fate of more than 100 English colonists who vanished from their island outpost in the late 1500s. … The shroud of mystery may finally be lifting.”
Nobody Cares About Your Fixed Costs, Publishers, So Stop Talking About Them
“We recently pointed out that publishers are fooling themselves by thinking that they must charge super high prices on ebooks. That post seemed to set off some angry folks inside the publishing industry who did the standard thing: talking about all of the overhead that goes into publishing a book. We hear this all the time. But it’s meaningless. It’s cost-based accounting, rather than value-based accounting. The consumer doesn’t care how much it cost you to make the original.”
Crowdfunding Artists – Without The “Funding” Part
Caroline Woolard: “OurGoods asks participants to involve themselves fully in exchange. If this kind of deep thinking-doing is social practice, then OurGoods is a social-practice project. At Creative Time, we often found people reluctant to fully engage. This could be because art is often experienced as an abstract idea or proposal to discuss, not a plausible reality to fully involve oneself in — both in body and mind.”
Why Would Anyone Want To Be Studio Chief At Disney?
As a matter of fact, no one seems to want it at all. Why? “The way things are presently organized, overseeing the Disney studio is a lot more like being a brand manager at Procter & Gamble than being a successor to Irving Thalberg, Robert Evans or any other fabled studio chief, let alone Walt Disney himself.”
Kid Takes History Class, Finds Big Mistake In Map At The Met (Seriously)
“The map purported to show the Byzantine Empire at its largest size in the 6th century, but he noticed that Spain and part of Africa were missing from the depiction.
Benjamin Lerman Coady knew he was right, because he had just studied the empire in school before last summer’s trip to the museum with his mother. He was told to fill out a form.”
Met Live In HD Broadcasts Are Ruining Opera For Everyone
“For all the praise HD deserves, and it deserves a great deal, this disconnect is damning. What the audience in a movie theater experiences is not just the opposite of opera. It is the undoing of opera, an art form in which a present, active audience is fundamental.”
Playing An Older Man – 50 Years Older – For Laughs
“TAKE a floppy-haired Muppet. Dress it as a waiter. Rearrange its face until its features slope to one side. Throw it across the room. Repeatedly. If that puppet came to life it might look something like the actor Tom Edden in the British comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, now on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.”
Philip Glass: Go Ahead, Fall Asleep During Einstein
Glass has a fair amount to say about Einstein on the Beach, about to be performed in the U.K. for the first time during the Olympics festival. “It was a very avant-garde tradition-breaking piece when it happened in 1976. The odd thing is that theatre’s not changed that much since then – if anything most theatre has become more conventional, probably because of the influence of television and film.”