It makes no sense, says novelist Tibor Fischer, and it hurts British writers. “British writers aren’t eligible for the big American awards. The stipulation that American writers have to be published in the UK doesn’t help much as, by definition, the strongest and most successful American authors are the ones that cross over.”
Tag: 10.17.17
Learning From Ken Kesey And Other Literary ‘Misfits’
Lidia Yuknavitch: “If he had not whispered into my ear the words that he did the first time I met him, ‘I know what happened to you. Death’s a motherfucker,’ bonding us in a single second with two dead children between us, my beautiful tiny girl infant and his beautifully strong wrestler son, second selves, hovering between our bodies, I don’t know if I would have trusted anyone or anything in the world again.”
Marian Cannon Schlesinger, Author And Eyewitness To History, Dies At 105
Schlesinger, who was saw the Kennedy White House up close during her husband Arthur’s time as JFK’s “resident intellectual,” was 8 when women got the vote in the U.S. – and she immediately canvassed, with her mother, for a woman mayoral candidate. She published a memoir in 2011, when she was merely 99.
Want To Vacation In Modernist Houses Built By Famous Architects?
You know you do – and there’s an “AirBnB alternative” that has you covered. No, really: PlansMatter is “a platform for the architecturally inclined traveler to explore new places while staying in modernist homes.”
How Would You Explain Opera? Here’s One Attempt
One would think that in an era of immersive realities, opera would have tried to aim for higher levels of verisimilitude, would have become grittier and true to life, but in the age of cinema, the opposite happened. Twentieth-century opera became more amorphous, less plot-driven. Watch something like Nixon In China, with its listless, meandering scenes and droning, repetitive music, and you will start yearning for a king disguised as a peasant and a letter given to the wrong princess. Opera does not attempt real social commentary or naturalism well: it is a heightened reality, a dream. Opera is crazy and intense like dreaming, another heightened reality, and we often wake from dreams wishing we could enter them again.
Minneapolis Police Dept. To Start Running Bookmobiles
“Community policing officers will carry books while they are making their rounds on the city’s North and South sides. They’ll still respond to certain emergencies, but won’t be dispatched to calls for help, freeing them up to visit neighborhoods without libraries and give away books to anyone who wants them. The program is the first of its kind in the country, organizers say.”
Puerto Rico’s PBS Station Is Shut Down
Sistema TV in San Juan has been taken off the air because, following Hurricane Maria, the university holding its license decided to cease all non-academic activities.
Canadian Opera Co. Extends Alexander Neef’s Contract To 2026
“This means that by 2026, Neef will be the longest-serving General Director of the COC (18 years), after Richard Bradshaw.”
Enough With The Star Actors Playing Hamlet Already!
“If, in any given year, somewhere up and down the UK, you can see a starry production of Hamlet being staged with Big-Name Acclaimed Actors showing off their Big-Name Acclaimed Acting Chops, then the cachet of that role is reduced. No question. It’s the basic economics of scarcity: when every Tom (Hiddleston), Dick (Burton) and Jude Law has had a crack at moodily wafting on stage, like a Smiths fan in search of legitimate melancholy, then theatre’s great and good might consider that it is time to call a moratorium on more Hamlets.
How Kazakhstan Became The Starchitects’ Fantasy Playground
“No other modern-day leader has used the myth-making power of architecture to construct a sense of national identity like Nazarbayev,” says Frank Albo, author of a new book on the Kazakh capital, Astana: Architecture, Myth and Destiny. “What you see here is a blend of postmodernism, Central Asian art, Islamic decor, Russian baroque, neoclassicism, orientalism, all melded into something that looks like Las Vegas meets Disneyland on nationalist steroids.” In a bid to cast off the shackles of the Soviet era, the president has embraced practically everything else.