“But what most readers don’t know is that Murakami himself inhabits parallel realities, and not just at his writing desk. One is inside Japan; the other is nearly everywhere else, but especially in the United States. And in each, his behavior and reputation, and perceptions of both, are in many ways starkly divergent.”
Tag: 10.16.12
Revolutionary Architecture: How Cuba’s National Arts Schools Were Disgraced And Reclaimed
Just after the Revolution, Fidel hit on the idea of repurposing a posh suburban golf course as the new national training ground for artists. “[The architects’] design, a spiral of Catalan-vaulted rooms and covered passageways, was, like many acts of revolutionary architecture, a search for new and organic forms.” Alas, before it was fully built, the design was found to be ideologically impure and abandoned – but only for a couple of decades …
Rothko Vandal Pleads Guilty In London
“Wlodzimierz Umaniec, 26, pleaded guilty to criminal damage to property valued at over £5,000 at Camberwell Green Magistrates’ Court.”
Is American Cinema Turning To Magical Realism?
“Generation X always had a fondness for surreal diversions and episodes of gentle, self-imposed exile from reality. And this spirit of pothead poesie – not too far from magical realism – has been breaking through with ever-greater frequency as Gen-Xers continue their directorial careers and get closer to the mainstream.”
So This Is What Joan Didion Thought Of Writing?
“It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions … but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
What If A Bookmark Was Actually An Embedded Book?
“Ironically, the same digital tech that made the Hamlet Bookmark possible is changing our conception of books again, as we watch texts become transmogrified into variably formatted e-books and scrolling webpages.”
In Praise Of Over-The-Top Writing
“Above all else, language should be generous and liberating, and these writers remind us of the pure pleasure to be found in the free play and musicality of words. Their sentences sing rather than grumble or shout, and we are all the richer for them.”
School Teaches About The World Through Lens Of Theatre
“We go to plays not just to be entertained,” he said, “but to learn, and, most deeply, to learn about ourselves. We’re leveraging that by making explicit connections with our classes.”
Hilary Mantel Wins Second Man Booker Prize For Bring Up The Bodies
“The chairman of the Booker judges, Sir Peter Stothard, called Mantel ‘the greatest modern English prose writer’ working today, and said she had ‘rewritten the book on writing historical fiction’.”
Why Stealing Great Art Is A Bad Business Plan
Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI’s art crime team: “[Thieves] read in the newspaper about about the growing value of paintings and the new records that are set every year by Cézannes and Picassos, and then they think that they can get a payday by going out and doing a heist. What they don’t understand is that the value of art is dependent on three things: authenticity, provenance – the history of the art – and legal title.”