Novelist M.O. Walsh (from Louisiana): “Here’s my idea: the southern gothic is like a trusty bicycle. (Note: this is not simply because southerners talk too slowly for a car metaphor to work. It is instead a kinship in the way the two things are assembled and ornamented. Stay with me.)”
Tag: 07.04.15
Remembering Louis Armstrong’s Influence On Music (Not Just Jazz)
“Except for true jazz believers in his own country and throughout the world, this concept of Louis Armstrong as a most serious, stunningly innovative artist is unfamiliar. He was often seen in the movies and on prime-time television variety shows, and he had a number of hit records, but he was by no means held in awe by the general public. Yet this was the man who had changed the very shape of jazz as fundamentally and permanently as Beethoven had changed the shape of the symphony.”
Only Two In Ten Spaniards Have Read Spain’s Most Important Writer
“Don Quixote is the most important Spanish literary work; its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is one of the four main writers of world literature, along with Homer, Shakespeare and Dante; the plot and the various episodes of the novel are known by almost everyone, and everyone talks of Don Quixote and Sancho or have heard of them and their adventures; but only two out of ten Spaniards say have read Cervantes’ masterpiece complete. And four out of ten they have done for personal interest or general culture.”
Delaware Art Museum’s Deaccession Gambit Didn’t Pay Off So Well
The plan was to sell four works – including a Calder, a Wyeth, and a Winslow Homer – for $30 million or so, using the money to retire the debt from a 2005 expansion and add $10 million to the endowment. But that isn’t quite how it worked out.
Is It Okay (Even Moral) For Your Search Engine To Lie To You?
“So when should a search engine act like an expert? When should it direct searchers as neutrally as possible to the Web pages that they’re seeking? And to what degree should it consider the interests of people other than the person searching?”
Even Dadaism Had A Racial Subtext
Tzara composed what he termed “African poems,” and his girlfirend led a danse nègre at the Cabaret Voltaire. Grosz danced jigs while wearing a straw hat and blackface. Picabia painted two canvases he titled Negro Song. Clément Pansaers published a pamphlet titled Le Pan Pan au Cul du Nu Nègre. “Clearly, Norman Mailer did not invent the ‘white negro’.”
Why Isn’t There A Lot More Booing At The Theatre? [VIDEO]
“It’s not as if actors can only work in respectful silence.”
Australia’s Arts Groups Are In The Depths Of A Sudden, Terrifying Funding Crisis
“After more than 400 organisations spent months developing their applications, the entire round was cancelled after Brandis ripped $104.7m from the Australia Council’s funding in the May budget, in order to create his new national program for excellence in the arts.”
Hollywood Gets Calls To Action For The Apparently Endangered American Movie Star
“The invasion of British and Irish leading men in Hollywood has now gone beyond a joke for many in the American entertainment industry. First noticed some time in 2011, the trend was initially dismissed as a novelty: an interesting phase that would pass, rather than as a threat. But this summer actors and directors are calling for action to mobilise American drama teachers and schools to counter it.”
Maybe We Love British TV So Much Because American Literature Is Too Dark For TV
The executive producer of Masterpiece: “This is a huge generalization, but [American novels] have tended not to have all the elements that make it good for television, whether it’s too interior or there’s not enough action.”