“Over a career spanning 50 years, [Juan Carlos] Onetti depicted Uruguay in short stories and novels as a place marked by pettiness, idiocy and squalor — a Gogolian province in the tropics [sic] — and populated by characters who are by and large unhinged. However unflattering, his portrait of his country was one in which Uruguayans recognized something of themselves.” – The New York Times Book Review
Tag: 11.05.19
The YouTube Post-Prison-Transition Counselor
After Christina Randall was released from jail after a three-year term for battery and robbery, she finished a bachelor’s degree and hoped to get into social work — but with her incarceration history, she couldn’t get hired. So she started a YouTube channel on which, “in addition to sharing beauty tips, … she also talks candidly about life behind bars and the process of re-entry” to more than 400,000 subscribers. – The New York Times
What It’s Like To Study Ballet While Black
Felicia Fitzpatrick: “With its European roots, ballet has always valued Eurocentric body shapes and skin color, leaving little opportunity for Black ballerinas to even attempt to engage with the art form. Even if they were allowed to participate, they were still othered and singled out for their race.” – Zora
Playwright William B. Branch Dead At 92
“As a playwright Mr. Branch delved into the black experience, both in the 20th century and earlier, in Off-Broadway plays like A Medal for Willie, about the bitterness that ensues when a black World War II veteran who had been mistreated in the service is decorated posthumously; A Wreath for Udomo, with its theme of colonial oppression in South Africa; and In Splendid Error, about the tangled relationship between the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown.” – The New York Times
Ernest J. Gaines, Author Of ‘Autobiography Of Miss Jane Pittman’ And ‘A Lesson Before Dying’, Dead At 86
“Mr. Gaines, who spent his first 15 years on a plantation near Baton Rouge, later moved with his family to Northern California, but in many ways he never left the landscape, rhythms and painful history of his childhood. … In eight novels and many short stories, Mr. Gaines created a fictional world surrounding a town called Bayonne, in St. Raphael Parish, not unlike his boyhood home.” – The Washington Post
Nigeria’s First-Ever Oscar Entry Disqualified From Best Foreign-Language Film Category
Lionheart, by director Genevieve Nnaji, includes only 11 minutes of dialogue that aren’t in English. A statement from the Academy said that even though the name of the category was changed this year from Foreign Language Film to International Feature Film, the rules have not changed, and they require that a candidate film must have “a predominantly non-English dialogue track.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Sean Spicer Is A Dancing Trainwreck. So Why Does He Keep Surviving “Dancing With The Stars?”
Gia Kourlas: “He had a different partner this week because his regular one, Lindsay Arnold, had a death in her family. It didn’t make his dancing better or worse. It remains consistent in its awfulness.” – The New York Times
New Pompidou Centre Opens In Shanghai
Situated along the banks of the Huangpu River on Shanghai’s version of Museum Mile, the new outpost is a collaboration with the West Bund Group, a Chinese state-owned development corporation that together with the local government has reportedly invested more than $3 billion in recent years to transform a former industrial neighborhood into a 7-mile waterfront cultural corridor. – The New York Times
The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (16)
The first Wal-Mart outside Arkansas opened in 1968 in Smalltown, U.S.A. Its record section had three bins of classical albums, many of them from Victrola, RCA’s budget line, which featured reissues from the golden age of 78s. For me that meant, first and foremost, the man B.H. Haggin called the greatest of all orchestral conductors. – Terry Teachout
After 48 Years, Guardian Theatre Critic Michael Billington Is Retiring
Says Billington, who began at the paper in 1971 and has written roughly 10,000 reviews, “I shall shortly be 80 and, with the years, the stress of writing to a deadline doesn’t get any easier. Giving up will be a wrench but I feel now is the right time to do it.” (And yes, the paper will hire a successor.) – The Guardian