New Orleans is still laid flat, but musicians are returning. “New Orleans has a uniqueness that no other city has, and that’s part of all us. We need to get back, and when we do, in terms of its musical atmosphere, New Orleans will start to return to what it was. But it’ll take a while, because the poor were such a big part of that city. They were the ones who made so much of that great music. You had your white collars and your blue collars – but you also had your dirty collars. And that’s where soul and groove and all that came from.”
Tag: 11.17.05
Mailer: Almost Comic Obtuseness
Norman Mailer was honored for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards this week, and he was feisty as ever. “The passion readers used to feel for venturing into the serious novel has withered,” he said. Mailer, whose other books include such award-winning nonfiction as ‘The Armies of the Night,’ disparaged commercial fiction and likened himself to a carriage maker watching the ‘disappearance of his trade before the onrush of the automobile’.”
R U Reading Yet? (Shakespeare-As-Text-Message)
Dot mobile, a British mobile-phone service aimed at students, says it plans to condense classic works of literature into SMS text messages. The company claims the service will be a valuable resource for studying for exams. Academic purists will be horrified. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” becomes “2b? Nt2b? ???”
Recognition A Long Time Coming
This year’s winners of Canada’s two biggest literary awards belong to a similar demographic: middle-aged writers who have toiled in relative obscurity throughout their careers, “producing novels that are tight, spare in length and written in a distinctive style” without ever capturing more than a cult following. All that has changed now for Giller winner David Bergen and Governor-General’s Award winner David Gilmour, and both authors admit to a certain feeling of redemption after years of disappointment. “The real enemy for a writer, it’s not booze. It’s vanity that will kill you deader than anything else.”
Music As Brain Food
“Stanford University research has found for the first time that musical training improves how the brain processes the spoken word, a finding that researchers say could lead to improving the reading ability of children who have dyslexia and other reading problems. The study, made public Wednesday, is the first to show that musical experience can help the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language.”
Teen Poetry Recitation Contest Announced
“The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts are to announce Thursday the national rollout of their verse-recitation contest for high schoolers… Some $50,000 in scholarships and school stipends are to be awarded at the national finals, including a $20,000 scholarship for the grand winner… The organizers hope to tap into the popularity of poetry slams among teens. But this contest will emphasize memorization and performance skills, not creative writing. Contestants will select poems from a special anthology to be distributed to schools or from a Web site being set up for the event.”
ICA Looking Forward To New Home
Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Arts is on track and on time for next September’s opening of its much-anticipated new home on the city’s waterfront. “The new ICA, designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will be marked by a distinctive glass cantilever that stretches out toward Boston’s harbor. Inside, it will feature a 325-seat theater and two-story educational center. The 65,000-square-foot museum will triple the ICA’s current exhibition space… ICA leaders hope the museum will transform an institution that’s been considered no match for its counterparts in other major cities.”
Editors Jump From Penguin To Random House
Two highly successful editors from the Penguin Group have announced that they will leave the company to head up a new division at Random House. “The move by the editors, Celina Spiegel and Julie Grau, was a major loss for Penguin, where [the imprint they brought to prominence] is celebrating its 10th anniversary and is having a stellar year, with nine of its books having reached The New York Times’s best-seller list, two of them climbing to No. 1.”
Nat’l Book Awards To Vollman, Didion
“Europe Central, a sprawling series of 37 intertwined stories by William T. Vollmann that examine the moral decisions of characters, some real and some fictional, in Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II, won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night… It was a surprise victory over for Mr. Vollmann over E. L. Doctorow, a previous winner and literary lion; Mary Gaitskill, a sentimental favorite for her piercing stories that demonstrate a willingness to challenge societal norms; and two other finalists.” In the non-fiction category, Joan Didion took home the top prize for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.
Swiss Art Seizure Denounced As ‘Financial Terrorism’
The businessman behind Swiss authorities’ seizure of 54 paintings from Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum this week has been trying to collect a debt from the Russian government for 14 years, and his “relentless legal assault on Russian assets abroad has previously been denounced… as “financial terrorism’… This is a man, after all, who once filed suit to seize President Vladimir V. Putin’s personal jet. In 2000, he impounded a Russian sailing ship in the French port of Brest, along with its crew, for 11 days. He nearly seized two Russian fighter jets at an air show in Paris a year later.”