Crossing The Nabokov-vs.-Roth Divide

Joshua Ferris: “In book after book, Nabokov creates idiosyncratic, heightened, elaborately constructed worlds; Roth’s one book investigates and exhausts his world, the given world. When I was younger, I preferred Nabokov. … But you can’t choose what kind of writer you become; aesthetics is handmaiden to temperament. By dint of nativity, or culture, or epoch, or perspective, I was more temperamentally aligned with Roth.”

The Problem With Broadway ‘Commodity Musicals’

Aladdin. Bullets Over Broadway. 9 to 5. Young Frankenstein. The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast. And so on. “The most distinctive feature of these musicals is that they usually treat their source material not as a springboard for fresh, creative endeavor but as an exploitable economic commodity that can be ‘repurposed’ for further profit.”

What Makes The Tango Music For The Whole World

“If you play with sheet music, playing [just] everything written, it’s really a bore, because you don’t know the way to do something different with that, to create some kind of fresh rhythms. It’s the way to move accents, the articulation when you play, and the very fresh manner, very tender with no rush. Most of the classical players play very square and rush.”

Reality TV Is Cheap To Produce. Here’s Why

“I’m tired of fearing that I’m easily replaceable and I’m tired of hearing that this is industry standard. These companies abuse us, they don’t take our concerns seriously, they are taking our wages from us, not providing us with health care or vacation time. These benefits would be provided to any other full time worker and here we are working more than full time.”