“There is no shame in being a minor writer. Some of my favorite writers were, in their day, considered minor writers: Nathanael West, Charles Bukowski, Mikhail Lermontov, Blaise Cendrars, Flann O’Brien, and even Gertrude Stein. It is an honorable way to make a living. Certainly I’ve done less damage to the forests of America than my better-selling peers. And while a major writer can be reassessed and reduced in stature in posterity, for a minor writer, there is only potential upside.”
Tag: 05.24.18
Did The Young Mark Twain Pull A Con Job On A Group Of Boston Abolitionists?
“The renowned Thoreau scholar Robert Sattelmeyer spotted an odd entry in the Boston Vigilance Committee’s accounting books and wondered: is that the Samuel Clemens, who grew up to be Mark Twain? The committee used most of its funds to help runaway slaves escape to freedom, in direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. But in an unusual expenditure in September 1854, the radical abolitionists sent $25.50 to a Samuel Clemens for ‘passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston — he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.'”
Could A Classical Music Talent Show Become A TV Hit? (Well, It Worked In Hungary)
“Virtuosos is a talent contest which already has a track record of attracting a mass viewership – in its native Hungary. It was started in 2014 by entrepreneur Mariann Peller, … with impressive results: the show’s fourth series has been reaching audiences of over 700,000 per episode, with the 2017 final not far short of the million viewer mark – nearly one in ten of the country’s population, which is comparable to the reach in the UK of mass market talent shows like The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent.” Now Peller is going to try bringing the show to Great Britain and the U.S. – with no less than Plácido Domingo signing on to be a guest judge.
What Improv Does To Your Brain
“Does the brain of a comedy improv actor or freestyle rapper work in a particular way? Is it measurably different? Is it processing language (or sound) faster than a regular, lower-improvising brain? … We asked our pal Ari Daniel from our partner program NOVA to look into this. As it happens, he found a group of researchers and a group of professional improvisers working together on some of these questions.”
Why We All Need Our Personal Space (And How We Define It)
The most consistent finding out of this vast literature, the one fundamental result, is that personal space expands with anxiety. If you score high on stress, or if the experimenter stresses you ahead of time—maybe you take a test and are told that you failed it—your personal space grows with respect to other people.
Man Who Accused George Takei Of Drugging And Sexual Assault Admits It May Not Have Happened That Way
“A fabricated coffee meeting. Key facts withheld or walked back. A ‘great party story’ about a sexual assault — which the accuser now says may not have actually happened. What happens when an activist’s legacy is tarnished by the story of an old friend who later says it could have all been a misunderstanding? And how do we process such an anomaly in an era of overdue social justice?”
After Giving Birth To Her Fourth Child, Conductor Joana Carneiro Resigns From Berkeley Symphony
Not only does the Portuguese conductor have a new baby, but her triplets are still toddlers. She leaves the Bay Area orchestra, where she succeeded Kent Nagano as music director, after nine seasons.
Oops – Pay For Canadian Arts Workers Did Not Actually Decline Over The Past Decade (Never Mind That Report)
“On April 19, the Cultural Human Resources Council (CHRC) released a report outlining changes to the not-for-profit arts sector in Canada. The study asserted that from 2008 to 2017, real wages had decreased for those working in the field. This proved to be erroneous, and with some independent calculations of our own, we discovered a significant error in the calculations’ methodology.”
When A Controversial 1950s Erotic Novella Was Illustrated In 2018, People Flipped Out Like It Was Still The Fifties
Natalie Frank, the artist who illustrated “The Story of O,” saw her work get disinvited from at least one gallery because of its content. “O became wildly popular and wildly controversial. In the 1970s and 1980s, some anti-porn feminists railed against it, deeming its explicit content pornographic, dehumanizing and ultimately detrimental to women’s fight for equal rights. In a twist of fate, Frank’s visual interpretations of Aury’s literary smut faced similar allegations in 2018.”
Apparently, Kids’ Brains Are Like Goldilocks (And Reading To Them Is ‘Just Right’)
If a child gets only the audio of a book, as when parents as one of their AIs to read the child a story, the kid might not get engaged – the info is “too cold”. But if the child is looking at a graphic novel, the information may be “too hot.” The best info is an illustrated book, and even better if a caring adult is reading that book to the kid.