“The writing reared up and resisted what normally happens when I make friends with a text… Beckett has taken phrases that sound like real speech, yet they disintegrate just as the images form. The effect on the hearer is genius: instead of frustrating the audience, he keeps them on tenterhooks hoping that the launch of the next phrase will make sense of what has gone before.”
Tag: 10.02.08
London’s New Venue Sounds Terrific (So Far)
“What is immediately obvious about Hall One at Kings Place, however, is that the acoustic is warm, clear and absolutely merciless. Classical music sounds terrific in here, with every note, texture and colour perfectly audible over an extreme dynamic range. Yet the acoustic is also capable of exposing the slightest slip in technique or intonation. And it picks up every bit of extraneous noise.”
Financial Crisis Becomes Online Mini-Series
Crisis in the Credit System is “a 40-minute online drama described by its makers as ‘bizarre scenarios reflecting the strangeness of our situation today: life governed increasingly by abstract exchange and the accumulation of profit’. Confused? You will be, almost certainly.”
iTunes Lives!
“Royalties paid to publishers and songwriters for the sale of digital downloads remained unchanged at 9.1 cents per download Thursday. Apple had threatened to pull the iTunes plug if the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board increased the fees paid to publishers and songwriters.”
Entire Staff of Canadian Oxford Dictionary Cut
“The entire staff of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has been laid off because of declining sales, which the book’s publisher attributes to the proliferation of free online dictionaries … [Oxford University Press] will publish future editions of the [dictionary] with the assistance of freelancers and the lexicography department in Oxford, England.”
Christie’s Unwittingly Sells Stolen Art
“Fourteen stolen portrait miniatures were inadvertently sold in Christie’s King Street saleroom [in London] on 10 June, because their loss from a UK public gallery had not been publicised.”
Rambert Dance Company’s Planned HQ in Jeopardy
“Plans for Rambert Dance Company’s new £14 million purpose-built home [in south London] have been thrown into question, following English Heritage and Westminster City Council’s decision to legally challenge a proposed 144-metre tower block development which will house the venue.”
Where Conspiracy Theories Come From
According to new research, “[a] perfectly healthy human mind can trick itself into seeing things that are not there… It turns out that the less control a person feels, the more likely they are to see patterns or make connections that don’t exist.”
‘The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists’
A Stanford researcher has laid out seven reasons that terrorists so often fail to achieve their ostensible goals – and suggests that the primary reason people join terrorist groups is not at all what we might have thought.
Writers’ Trust Shortlist Released
“Sixteen writers, including Miriam Toews, Rawi Hage and Margaret Visser, are in competition for a total of $155,000 in prize money as part of the annual Writers’ Trust of Canada awards honouring excellence in fiction and non-fiction.”