“In the pursuit of cultural hegemony, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government has carried out a full-scale assault on the Hungarian cultural establishment, taking over funding bodies, defaming critics and putting loyalists in positions of influence. The result today is almost total conformity to the Hungarian nationalism of Fidesz and the sidelining of independent culture.”
Tag: 09.03.18
On What It Means To Matter
“The notion of mattering is intimately linked with the notion of attention. To say that something matters is to assert that attention is due it, the kind of attention that both recognises and reveals its reality. Something that matters has a nature that demands to be known, and the knowledge may yield other attitudes and behaviour due it. If I say that something doesn’t matter, I’m saying that it’s not worth paying attention to.”
DC’s African American Museum Opens Admission WIthout Reservations
Visitors began lining up before 8 a.m. on the last day of the holiday weekend, which was the first of the museum’s September Walk-up Weekdays. Several hundred were waiting when the doors to the Smithsonian’s newest venue opened at 10 a.m.
So You Think Immortality Would Be Grand, Do You?
The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death.
DC’s National Book Fair Smashes Attendance Records
The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress since 2001, drew at least 200,000 readers to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown D.C. They listened to talks and interviews with more than 100 authors, including Amy Tan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dave Eggers, Meg Wolitzer and Roxane Gay. Packed rooms were the order of the day for almost all the presentations.
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: The First Triumph Of Trans Literature?
Jeanette Winterson: “The novel … begins with a famously disingenuous sentence: ‘He, for there could be no doubt about his sex … ‘ and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that. Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: ‘Different sex. Same person.'”
Is It Exploitive To Use Real-Life Terrorist Attacks As Subjects For Feature Films?
“This year sees the release of two films which centre on the 2011 attack in Norway by rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, which left 77 people dead. … Questions arise around the ethics of this particular docudrama style of film-making – what can a film based on real events tell us that documentary footage or eyewitness testimony cannot?”
Jazz Pianist And Composer Randy Weston, 92
“[He] was among the most prominent ambassadors for traditional African music in the United States. A revered jazz pianist and composer, he incorporated that continent’s complicated rhythms, tonalities and call-and-response patterns in records that ushered in a new era of transatlantic fusion.”
UK National Theatre Artistic Director Goes Onstage With 30 Minutes’ Notice
Rufus Norris stepped in for ailing lead actor Richard Harrington in last Friday’s sold-out performance of Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling. “It’s a last-resort situation,” he said, “But it was only a few days before the show finishes and we couldn’t add an extra date. We had a full house who wouldn’t be able to see it again.”
Van Gogh Museum Sends High-Quality Reproductions On Tour Of U.S. Shopping Malls
It’s a straightforward outreach program to connect with people who may rarely or never visit a museum, let alone Amsterdam. But the reproductions are made with a new process the museum calls “reliefography” – and (this is in a mall, after all) some of them are available for purchase.