“[It] is strange that the idea of rights versus responsibilities does not preoccupy me. I feel that I have only rights, and that my sole responsibility is to the reader, and is to make things work for someone I will never meet. I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.”
Tag: 07.14.12
La Jolla Playhouse Ignites Controversy With Colorblind Casting
The theater on Thursday set off a social-media firestorm over the casting of its upcoming production of “The Nightingale.” Although the Hans Christian Andersen tale is set in Feudal China, the cast contains few Asian actors.
Sartre, Camus, And New York
“In December 1944, Albert Camus, then editor of Combat, the main newspaper of the French Resistance, made Jean-Paul Sartre an offer he couldn’t refuse: the job of American correspondent. … Camus himself would make the trip soon after, only to return with a characteristically different set of political, philosophical and personal impressions.”
Why Gossip Is Important
“When gossip is recorded we start to obtain details of personalities, choices, quirks, likes and dislikes, the weird and the dull traits that make up an individual. Paradoxically, the more trivial and ephemeral reports of our ancestors became, the more seriously we could think about them.”
Publisher Criticized For Mimicking Icon Book Cover
“At the centre of the current row is a virtually identical jacket on Harry Lipkin, PI. This book’s publishers and author, Barry Fantoni of Private Eye fame, call it an “affectionate homage” to Hawkey, although they admit it is used without acknowledgement or authorisation.”
Are Our Aesthetic Tastes Determined By Our Ages?
‘Why can’t a 15-year-old like Wagner? Why can’t grandad keep up with the latest trends in drum’n’bass? To expect the aesthetic preferences of the generations to have impermeable walls around them is to have frustratingly low expectations of what people are capable of.”
More Artists Jump Ship From LA’s MoCA Board
“In another vote of no-confidence in the current direction of the Museum of Contemporary Art, prominent Los Angeles artists Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie have resigned from the museum board. John Baldessari left Thursday, making Ed Ruscha the only remaining artist-trustee on the MOCA board.”
New Vivaldi Opera Discovered In Library Archives ‘A Gift From Heaven’
“In a development described by music experts as ‘a bombshell in the world of Baroque opera,’ a new version of Vivaldi’s opera Orlando Furioso has been discovered, 270 years after his death.” Written 13 years before the composer’s other, well-known opera by the same name, it contains at least 20 new arias.
Those BBC Shakespeare Films You’ve Watched For Years? Crap, Says Director Sir Richard Eyre
In the 1970s at the BBC, the director of the new The Hollow Crown says, was “an ageing producer who had been ‘put out to grass’ with the brief to televise the complete works of Shakespeare. ‘The result was a catastrophe, because…'”
P.D. James On Writing Like Jane Austen, Evil, And Autumn As A Time For Murder
“As a crime writer, surprise is PD James’s forte. Her ability to keep readers guessing has not failed her in half a century. And it is characteristic that, towards the end of her writing life, she should elect to spring a new surprise on us.”