“Today’s literary scholarship too often serves as a vehicle for politics, and even professors who care little for public opinion are eager to indoctrinate students in their views. We seem to have given up on the notion that literature itself can be useful. But in doing so, we are forgetting a crucial function of the books we study.”
Tag: 08.20.11
A Pioneering Private Museum (Perched On The Danube) In The Former Soviet Bloc
“Danubiana, a small contemporary art museum that rose up in 2000, on the barren tip of a narrow peninsula in the Danube River, near Bratislava, Slovakia. It was the idea of a Dutch businessman and a Slovak gallery owner whose chance encounter in 1994 led to the opening of one of the first private museums in the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.”
Leonard Slatkin Comes Out The Other End Of A Year Of Trouble
“It’s a great life. I’ve been able to get up and do something few others have a chance to do. I’ve done it OK, could always do better. In that sense, I’m one of the least egotistical people — and here I am making an egotistical remark! But no one can ever say or write about you as scathingly as what your inner self believes to be true.”
SPOILER ALERT: Actually, Never Mind. Read The Spoiler. You’ll Be Happier
Stop being so neurotic about avoiding spoilers, professors and film critics say. “What a spoiler does is enable you to get the plot out of the way and you can watch the thing unfold with greater attention to the cleverness, the beauty, the commentary on the human condition, the examination of a life.”
Will Boys Ever Read Again? Um, Probably.
“Boys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives.”
The Iron Law Of Vampires, Fairies and Pushcarts — Economies For Kids
“Children’s books provide ripe material because literature deals with everyday life — a terrain shared with economics.”
First Novel by American Woman Wins Oldest Book Award In Britain
The James Tait Black Prize for fiction goes to a novel about an American photographer in Vietnam. “Tatjana Soli, a Californian novelist and short story writer, based the story on intense research of the Vietnam War and experience of the immigrant Vietnamese community in her home state.”
Last Gasp For The American Folk Art Museum?
Money troubles have grown so dire that New York’s American Folk Art Museum may dissolve, moving its collections to Brooklyn and the Smithsonian.