On Friday, “an assortment of academics, federal bureaucrats, and staffers from private think tanks and research organizations will assemble in Washington, and in cyberspace at www.nea.gov.” The forum is an attempt “to broaden and improve the statistical evidence” that what artists do “is not just fluff and filigree, but part of the dollars-and-cents fiber of the country.”
Tag: 11.19.09
Oh, The Shame: Bookish Women Fall For Twilight
“‘Twilight’ came for the tweens, then for the moms of tweens, then for the co-workers who started wearing those ridiculous Team Jacob shirts, and the resisters said nothing, because they thought ‘Twilight’ could not come for them. They were too literary. They didn’t do vampires. They were feminists. Then something happened: the release of the ‘Twilight’ movie….”
NY Public Library Pres. Paul LeClerc To Step Down In 2011
The 68-year-old LeClerc “has presided over the sprawling library system during a revolutionary period of change, as the world has shifted to the digital era. When he first came to the position in December 1993, the library did not even have a Web site.”
This Year’s The Wrestler? Oscar Buzz Builds Around Crazy Heart
“A few weeks ago Crazy Heart was just another invisible movie, one with so little promise that the company that made it refused to put it into theaters. Now, suddenly, this low-budget film about a washed-up country singer finds itself at the heart of the Oscar race, with … its star, Jeff Bridges, a likely best actor candidate.”
Armenia’s New Arts Center: ‘A Mad Work Of Architectural Megalomania’
Michael Kimmelman on the Cafesjian Center for the Arts in Yerevan: “Imagine an Art Deco version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon stretching nearly the height of the Empire State Building, its decorations coded with Armenian symbolism. Did I mention the artificial waterfalls?” What the Center will house, however, is a different question.
National Book Awards To Colum McCann, T.J. Stiles
McCann took the fiction prize for Let the Great World Spin; Stiles collected nonfiction honors for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won the poetry award, and Phillip Hoose took honors for Young People’s Literature with Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.