Tag: 05.21.06

Literary Success – It’s All In The Timing

“The divide between sales of literary and commercial fiction has always been vast — the 345,000 copies that Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 novel “Gilead” sold in hardcover and paperback is an impressive figure, but not when compared with the more than 18 million copies of “The Da Vinci Code” in print in North America, and more than 60 million worldwide. These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume.”

Columbia Campus Vs. The Neighborhood

“When Columbia announced its plans to build a much-needed new campus in a corner of Harlem called Manhattanville, it saw a gritty neighborhood of auto-repair shops, tenements and small manufacturers that would probably pose little obstacle to its ambitions. Columbia says that the project will advance a vital public interest and help revitalize parts of Upper Manhattan. Yet the university has met remarkable resistance. One man’s urban improvement, it seems, is another man’s urban debacle.”

The China Puzzle

“For architects, China is the land of dreams. The construction statistics tantalize. The Chinese consume 54.7 percent of the concrete and 36.1 percent of the steel produced in the world, according to a 2004 report in Architectural Record. Hungry architects are drawn to China by the abundance of economic opportunities. But Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed the stadium, doesn’t need to drum up business. It has more work than it can handle.” And yet, the promise of China is also the problem with China…

Biloxi And The New Urbanism

“New Urbanism arose as a reaction to sprawl, the default American landscape of highways lined with strip malls and big-box stores and suburban subdivisions populated by a homogeneous and insulated middle class. The New Urbanists proposed higher-density, pedestrian-friendly communities: old-fashioned neighborhoods with schools and shops, parks and offices, single-family homes and low-income apartment buildings, all mixed together and connected by shady streets and wide sidewalks.” But is that what Biloxi wants?

Architecture In The Breach

“In recent years, it is architecture more than any other aspect of contemporary culture that has touched the rawest nerves. It was architecture that Saddam Hussein used to consolidate his grip on Iraq. And it was architecture that the Serbs and the Croats deployed in the first stages of their bloody battle over the division of the former Yugoslavia… Often quite wrongly, architecture is equated with political beliefs…

A Baryshnikov Plan

The new Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York aims to correct some balance in American cultural life. “Misha feels America has let the arts down. There’s no money for arts in education, artists aren’t subsidized – in fact, they’re looked at as liberal freaks. It’s a very sad state of affairs. Everything we’re doing is to make it better.”

It Ain’t Art Unless It’s Making People Angry

Architecture may be the only artistic pursuit left that we really argue about. That isn’t to say that people don’t have musical, artistic, and theatrical preferences, but architecture remains “a subject that is fraught with genuine conflict, and it seems to have acquired an extraordinary capacity to make all kinds of people extremely angry about issues that range from the most intensely personal to the most diffusely political.”

A Broadway Season That Didn’t Deliver

“The dispiriting quality of last Tuesday’s nominations for the Tony award — including double-digit nods for “The Drowsy Chaperone” and “The Color Purple” — are hardly cause for celebration. True, bulletins on the musical’s failing health have been posted with weary regularity since at least the 1960’s. But in the Broadway season that just ended officially, this once lively art seemed finally to have crossed the border that divides flesh from ectoplasm.”