Tag: 11.01.17

Has The History Of Books Been Kidnapped By Ponderous Academics?

“Bibliographical analysis, involving patient collation and comparison of printed texts, and the identification of the distinctive ornaments with which printers enlivened otherwise blank spaces, flourish. They remain the bedrock on which, over the last thirty years or more, a ponderous superstructure of interpretation has been erected. Local and national pride have sustained enquiries: a specific town or state is shown to have been in the vanguard of printing and book production; their products exhibit superlative skills in the quality of paper and type-faces, layout, design and binding; the titles are marked by intellectual precociousness or boldness.”

Distraction Has Gotten A Bad Rap. Let’s Reconsider

Distraction need not simply be another name for attention shifted (“I was looking at this, then I looked at that”). Attention is a form of “tension,” but the relaxation here — both that which creates the condition for the new perception and that which follows from it — is primarily conceived as passive (objects fall “upon the eye, are “carried to the heart”).

Don Quixote Fights The Intellectual Property Pirates: How Cervantes Responded To Knockoffs In The Days Before Copyright Law

The first part of Don Quixote de la Mancha may not have been the first novel, but it was the first blockbuster. So some anonymous copycat tried to cash in with a bogus sequel. Cervantes, rightly thinking he had moral rights to the character he created responded with a sequel of his own – and he went meta, depicting the Don doing battle with his fake counterpart and visiting a print shop to find the counterfeit version of his story on the presses.

Cultural Appropriation Versus Censorship

“The accusation that ‘society tends to favor privileged voices’ is, according to some, not only a political analysis but an economic one. “The fear,” one literary agent told me, “is that if a publisher takes on a book written by a successful white male writer about a disabled Native American lesbian, a real disabled Native American lesbian might have trouble placing a book about the same subject at the same house; the publisher already has one.” What this suggests is that books are being categorized—and judged—less on their literary merits than on the identity of their authors. This is particularly true with young adult fiction, whose readers are presumed to be more readily influenced by what they read.”

Did This Marin Theatre Company Play Romanticize A Master-Slave Relationship?

The play is Thomas and Sally, which is about the teenage Sally Hemings, and her owner and the father of her children, Thomas Jefferson. The play’s advertising earned it plenty of protest, and that was before it opened (it closed Oct. 29). It’s garnered much protest, including “an open letter … released by 13 black artists, calling for a public apology from MTC. The letter has received over 1,600 signatures, among them playwrights Dominique Morisseau and Lauren Gunderson (both of whom have affiliations with MTC).”

All Music Starts From Language

“All music exists on some kind of spectrum, from something that involves nothing you’ve ever heard before to music that sounds exactly like everything you’ve ever heard before. I think all great music exists somewhere along that. In music, you’re speaking a language of things heard already. You’re just rearranging it in a way that is unique. You use sonorities that have been heard before, like I use major chords. But even if you don’t use major chords, everything is along the lines of some kind of reference.”

How Virtual Reality Can Change How People Behave

“Last year at the annual computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, they debuted a new version of the game, called I Am A Robot, that allowed groups of people to don headsets and become genderless robots at either a ballet recital, cocktail gathering, or dance party. The response from participants was surprising – men in suits who swore they wouldn’t dance became entirely different people when in the genderless VR world – but it was the experience of two volunteers that moved Daffy most: one had social anxiety and had struggled to enjoy herself at the conference until she put the headset on and, inhibitions gone, danced and laughed for the first time in days. Another said they felt comfortable being gender-free for the first time in their life.”

Why Demand-Based Pricing For Movie Tickets Is A Bad Idea

“Under an ‘alternative pricing model’ the company will pilot in several markets in 2018, Regal [Cinemas] will charge more for tickets to movies people want to see, and less for under-attended flops. … The thinking goes – especially in smaller markets where viewers don’t have other multiplex options – that customers will feel compelled to pay more to see a Marvel movie or Star Wars, the kind of experience audiences still flock to the theater for.” David Sims makes the case for why this won’t work for movies the way it does for Hamilton or airline tickets.