“If you walk around with your eyes open, you’ll quickly discover that there are more monuments and memorials in this country to World War I than to any other war. So for some years after the war ended, it was terribly important to people that it and the people who fought it be remembered.”
Tag: 05.24.13
The BBC Scraps £100 Million Digital System & Apologizes To License Fee Payers
“Mrs. Hodge described the episode as ‘a terrible shock and clearly completely shambolic.’ The corporation said the initiative had been badly managed and outpaced by changing technology, and that to carry on would be throwing good money after bad.”
Binge Watching Is Changing Our Narrative Culture
“We binge on TV to craft time and space, and to fashion an immersive near-world with special properties. We enter a world that is, for all its narrative complexity, a place of sudden continuity. We may have made the world ‘go away’ for psychological purposes, but here, for anthropological ones, we have built another in its place.”
Westminster Abbey Gets Some (Very) New Stained-Glass Windows
“Mr. O’Donoghue was determined from the start to incorporate striking colors and religious symbols–but noted the challenge in carrying this out tastefully in a room containing 95 statues of saints and oak seats carved with monsters.”
Can A Dancer Stay With Just One Company Anymore? Ask Ivan Vasiliev
“‘I would love to dance everything,’ he said, laughing. ‘I would love to make new work, too. I’m available. Can I leave my number? Choreographers, call me please.'”
A Major Critic Says We’ve Forgotten How To Read
“You have to learn the public criteria for what counts as excellence – you can’t just make up criteria, for fiction no less than for Scotch – and you have to practise those criteria in public, testing and adjusting them against new books and other judgments. We learn how to understand and appreciate literature through public practice.”
Museums Say It’s Time To Return Bones And Artifacts To Indigenous Peoples
“Collecting such remains in pursuit of scientific knowledge once went unchallenged, but now institutions face the quandary of how to display Egyptian mummies in a respectful fashion. What is the purpose of displaying shrunken heads or tattooed Maori skulls or bone flutes? And should curators return remains that have been transformed into works of folk art?”
Women *Do* Write About Film – If You Know Where To Look
“Women who are doing criticism and commentary have made their advances in formats other than day-of-release, up-or-down reviews in big outlets, which is essentially what interests Rotten Tomatoes and other aggregators that try to come up with a number that represents “critical opinion.'”
Stunning Numbers Detail Absence Of Women Artists
“People were saying: ‘I find I can’t even have this conversation about equality in the art world’ because so many people think it’s already been achieved. Because figures like Tracey Emin have defied the statistics, their rare success misleads people into thinking women get an equal shot.”
Publisher Cuts Back As Poetry Market Slumps
“We’ve seen our sales [of single-author collections] decline by over a quarter in the past year, and our sales have halved in the past five years.”