Tag: 12.23.19

Barbara Testa, Who Discovered One Of American Literature’s Great Missing Links, Dead At 91

“Barbara Testa had enjoyed a perfectly anonymous life in Hollywood until she crawled up in the attic one day and opened a steamer trunk left behind by her grandfather, a 19th-century attorney with powerful friends. Inside … was a handwritten manuscript that would solve a century-old literary riddle and plunge Testa into the headlines in a mounting dispute over ownership of the precious document, the missing first half of the original [manuscript] of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” – Los Angeles Times

You Probably Don’t Know This Young Indian-Canadian Poet, But She May Be The Writer Of The Decade

“[Rupi] Kaur’s achievement as an artist is the extent to which her work embodies, formally, the technology that defines contemporary life: smartphones and the internet. … I’d argue that many of the writers currently being discussed as the most significant of the last decade write in direct opposition to the pervasive influence of the internet. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner (to name but three of our best) are interested in the single analog consciousness as a filter through which to see the world. If you think their experiment is the most important of the last 10 years, you’re probably (sorry) old.” – The New Republic

Why Doesn’t Ballet Training Teach Women To Dance Allegro The Way It Does Men?

“With technically demanding feats, male ballet training tends to emphasize jumps and batterie. In general, men are more privy to additional allegro combinations at the end of multi gender classes, as well as male-only technique classes. … And the women? Most female ballet dancers today perform both classical and contemporary repertoire interchangeably, and this can include exuberant jumps similar to traditional male variations.” So why aren’t they being taught the same way? – Dance Magazine

How Culture Was Used As A Weapon During The Cold War

Not only was literature politicised: sometimes it seems that any cultural initiative had the secret services of the US or the USSR behind it. We find the Soviet Union was backing the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace, whose sponsors included Leonard Bernstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. The CIA, set up in 1947, had an equivalent faith in the potency of literary debates and publications. – The Guardian

How International Multi-Company Ballet Auditions Work

“For directors, they provide a way to evaluate dancers they might not otherwise see. For dancers, they expedite the cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming auditions process. But multi-company auditions don’t follow one recipe. As these three examples prove, they’re varied in their goals, demographics and pricing, so it helps to know what each offers.” – Pointe Magazine

French Protest Proliferation Of Street Advertising Everywhere

High tech video billboards are multiplying in city spaces across the world, woven into the fabric of everyday life, from ribbon videos down escalators on the London underground, to French metro corridors, New York taxis, bus-shelters, newspaper kiosks, and – increasingly – broadcast from shop windows onto the street. They are becoming more sophisticated and interactive, with the potential to collect data from passersby; increasingly bright and inescapable – impossible to click off or block like you can online. But in France, there is fresh debate on how urban planners and local councils should limit them in the public space for the sake of our overloaded eyes and brains. – The Guardian

Ugly Eddie Murphy-Bill Cosby Exchange Bespeaks History Of Bad Blood

In response to a quip about Cosby that Murphy made during the opening monologue of his return to Saturday Night Live, the now-jailed rapist‘s publicist said that Murphy “was given his freedom to leave the plantation, so that he could make his own decisions; but he decided to sell himself back to being a Hollywood Slave.” Reporter Elahe Izadi reviews the long and unhappy relationship between the two comedians. – The Washington Post

Hollywood Is Digitally “De-Aging” Stars – What Will This Mean To The Business?

As Hollywood continues to enjoy its ability to recast mega-stars as their younger selves, it has brought fears that younger and less experienced actors are being pushed out. At the same time, some experts fear the rise of the digital actor could one day threaten the livelihoods of all actors, with the possibility of a movie starring a fully artificial performer potentially just beyond the horizon. – CBC