Daniel Mendelsohn: “In the nineteen-seventies, when I was a teen-ager and had fantasies of growing up to be a writer, I didn’t dream of being a novelist or a poet. I wanted to be a critic. I thought criticism was exciting, and I found critics admirable. This was because I learned from them.”
Tag: 08.28.12
How A Small-Town Indian Railway Worker’s Son Became An International Public Intellectual
“In 1988 Pankaj Mishra was a recent university graduate in the northern Indian city of Benares with big literary ambitions he had little idea how to fulfill. But when he heard that a local library was going to be auctioning back issues of The New York Review of Books as waste paper, he knew exactly what to do.”
Textbook Prices Keep Rising – Damn Right They Do, Say Publishers
“‘If you want a concept book in black and white, go get it, and it will be incredibly cheap,’ says Bruce Hildebrand, executive director of higher education at the Association of American Publishers. ‘What faculty are looking for are calculus books that have interactive components and have applications’.”
Free Kindles?
Amazon will start giving away Kindles – because the money’s not in the device, says Farhad Manjoo.
What Do Fundamentalists Have Against Dance?
Music and dance have not been banned under most forms of Islam – but some of the Taliban’s beliefs fall in line with fundamentalist Christian fears over dancing and, er, immoral acts.
$100,000 Art Prize In LA Has Artists Buzzing (And Not Happy)
The prize, offered by the Hammer Museum and decided by a public vote, riled artists who object on several grounds…
Musicians Seek Clarification Over Airline Rules For Bringing Musical Instruments Aboard
Recent incidents have “raised new questions of how airlines set their own rules about which musical instruments are allowed on board. Cellos are particularly problematic, not being able to fit in overhead bins and generally requiring their own seat.”
Indianapolis Symphony Management Wants To Slash Pay, Abandon Year-Round Season
“According to committee chairman Rick Graef, a horn player with the ISO for the past two decades, management wants to reduce the number of musicians under contract from 87 to 63, cut wages by 45 percent, reduce the schedule from 52 to 36 weeks and revisit the terms of the musicians’ pension.”
Plants Have (At Least) Five Senses, Too
Researcher Daniel Chamovitz: “Some people may not be comfortable describing what plants do as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. They certainly lack noses, eyes, ears, mouths and skin, but in what follows, I hope to convince you that the sensory world of plants is not so very different from our own.”
Indian Classical Dancer Wins Canada’s Top Performing Arts Honour
“Classical Indian dancer and choreographer Menaka Thakkar has won the 2012 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.” Among previous winners of the $30,000 award, given by the Canada Council for the Arts, are choreographer Margie Gillis, composer R. Murray Schafer, and theatre director Richard Rose.