Flimm To Leave Salzburg Festival After 2011

Jürgen Flimm, artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, “told a meeting of the supervisory board on Tuesday that ‘he will no longer be available for further talks after 2011,’… Flimm’s decision to throw in the towel came after a bitter dispute with the festival’s drama chief, Thomas Oberender, over the standing of spoken theatre within the month-long festival of music, opera and theatre.”

London’s Holocaust Musical To Close

Fulfilling the predictions of many a dubious observer, Imagine This, a let’s-put-on-a-show musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto (and said show is about Masada, no less) is closing after only a month on the London stage. Producer Beth Trachtenberg blames the press for its “narrow-minded critical belief that musicals are limited in their emotional impact and ability to deal with meaningful subject matter in a powerful and sensitive manner.”

A Final Book From David Foster Wallace

“While some rumors persist that there’s an unfinished novel David Foster Wallace was working on before he died in September, at least one work from the author is definitely on the horizon. Wallace’s publisher, Little, Brown, is going to release This Is Water in April 2009, which is the address the author delivered at Kenyon College’s commencement in 2005.”

Come Now, Britain Hasn’t Changed That Much

A brouhaha has broken out over changes on the vocabulary included in the latest version of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. New additions include blog, broadband, bilingual and biodegradable. Fair enough. But missing from the children’s reference are monarch, duchess and coronation; altar, bishop and vicar; and beetroot, marzipan and porridge. Even moss and fern are gone. OUP points out that today’s UK is much less rural and more multicultural than in the past, and that “We are limited by how big the dictionary can be – little hands must be able to handle it.”

Bring Back The Federal Writers Project

“Barack Obama sounds like he wants to reach back to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration to jump start the economy with an economic stimulus proposal featuring infrastructure repair. If so, it may be time for the man who would be FDR to take a look at another successful–but largely forgotten–jobs program from the Depression era: the Federal Writers Project.”

Tuition Fee Would Reconcile Labels With Downloading Fans

“U.S. universities are getting a glimpse at a plan that would build a small music-royalty fee into the tuition payments they receive from students. If successful, the model — proposed by digital music strategist Jim Griffin on behalf of Warner Music Group — could be expanded to make ISPs the collector of such micropayments,” which would free fans up to continue their downloading without the legal worries.

Yes, Those Are Mine. Please Don’t Make Me Read Them All.

Far better to buy some new books than to ponder the countless unread volumes we already own. “The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it’s a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it’s a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime.”