“James Richard Shinn was a master book thief. Using expert techniques and fraudulent documents, he would ultimately pillage world-class libraries to the tune of half a million dollars or more. A Philadelphia detective once called him ‘the most fascinating, best, smartest crook I ever encountered.’ And yet, despite the audacity of his approach and the widespread effects of his crimes, Shinn has been relegated to a footnote in book history.”
Tag: 07.20.17
With TV Producers Running Out Of Books To Adapt, Where Are They Turning? Podcasts
“When television networks resort to adapting books that haven’t even been written yet,” – and that’s what the Game of Thrones folks are doing at this point – “it’s time to start looking for new source material. Luckily, salvation might be as close as their smartphones. As the supply of books and comics ripe for adaptation dwindles, TV producers are looking to podcasts for fresh material – and finding stories with audiences as loyal as any book club’s inner circle.”
With Foreign Actors Flooding Peak-TV Hollywood, Somebody Has To Teach Them Good American Accents – Here’s One Of The Teachers
“Television viewers, exposed to hundreds of different dialects every day, are increasingly aware of the tiniest differences in how people speak, even as the number and degree of distinctions continue to expand. … But the specificity isn’t relegated to stars. [Coach Samara] Bay says she was recently dispatched to the set of another TV show to work on a bit player’s Haitian Creole.”
Stephen Sondheim Is Fine With A Female Bobby In ‘Company’
“If you’ve got somebody as distinguished and inventive and good as [director] Marianne Elliott, and she says, ‘I would love to do Company with a female central character.’ … What is there to lose? It can only make the play either interesting or, if you dislike it … dislikable … but still. I’m fumfering here, but the point is: That’s what keeps the theaters alive. So I’m always open.”
Librettists Get More Prominence In The New, Evolving Opera Landscape
“Although the status of librettists has waxed and waned over the centuries, it’s time to recognize their importance again, particularly in the creation of contemporary opera. The resurgence of storytelling, along with the heightened media attention accorded premieres, has helped fuel the commissioning of a plethora of new operas in the U.S. in recent years. And the seemingly insatiable appetite of presenters for “celebrity” operas, as well as adaptations of well-known films and books, has put leading librettists like Mark Campbell, Gene Scheer and Royce Vavrek in great demand.”
Avant Garde Theatre Is Mainstream In The Netherlands
Can the U.S. ever catch up? Hm. “Americans say we are modern and experimental. … But for me, I don’t see that. I don’t think it’s that much of a provocative performance at all.”
Have Selfies Gotten In The Way Of Real Experiences?
“A symptom of modern living, but a no less inevitable one, require we live in a state of constant negotiation: between the pull of the world and one’s own conditioned desires. The writer Jenna Wortham, in 2013, described selfies as part of “a timeless delight in our ability to document our lives and leave behind a trace for others to discover.” If social media first intended to connect us, its promise has taken a sharp, inauspicious turn inward: the self has become paramount, the correspondence second.”
French Singer Dies In Mid-Performance Onstage
Barbara Weldens was singing at a church in the village of Goudron in southwestern France as part of the Festival Léo Ferré when she collapsed mid-song. There are conflicting reports regarding her cause of death with some reporting that she suffered a cardiac arrest and the BBC saying that she may have been electrocuted. Police are investigating, and the remainder of the festival has been canceled.
When Empathy Was “Aesthetic Empathy”
The feeling we call “empathy” has shifted dramatically over the last century from a description of an aesthetic response, to a moral and political aspiration, to a clinical skill, and today, to the firing of neurons. Returning to empathy’s roots—to once again think about the potential for “in-feeling” with a work of art, a mountain, or a tree—invites us to re-imagine our connection to nature and the world around us.
The Precariousness Of Publishing In Today’s Market (And Why Small Presses Might Be The Future)
“That Big Publishing remains conservative and homogeneous — and viewed with increasing ambivalence and disdain by the larger population — should not be surprising or contentious; axiomatic in antitrust law is the idea that a reduction in market participants, whether a result of competition, attrition, or consolidation, correlates with a reduction in consumer choice. We’ve seen this across any number of industries in our society, including airlines, automobiles, banks, pharmaceuticals, newspapers, and commercial publishing, where somehow Penguin Random House isn’t the punchline to a joke. Then there’s Amazon.”