“Some 47 years ago C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, two of the greatest names in postwar American historiography, laid out a plan for a multivolume history of the United States. The series, to be published by Oxford University Press, would be a grand summation of their generation’s understanding of American history, combining high politics with social and cultural history and bridging the widening chasm between professional historians and intelligent lay readers.” Half a century later the project is still only half done…
Tag: 12.24.06
Robert Hughes, After The Crash
Critic Robert Hughes has “never made any secret of his snobbery, in the cultural if not the social sense: ‘I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness’.”
YouTube – Dawn Or Twilight?
“Here in the Western world, we live defined by media: We are what we watch, what we listen to. (A few of us are still the papers we read.) And because this identification is so strong and thoroughgoing, one can feel that anything that has ever been recorded or taped or filmed should be available to hear or see, and that there is even something heroic, in a Promethean way, about those who arrange to make this happen.”
A Utopian Cast Of Riches
The amazing cast of young actors at Lincoln Center for “Utopia” is “a reminder of the richness of this generation of actors, whose commitment to unabashedly literate theater parallels their characters’ more fanatical devotion to finding progressive solutions to the systemic social problems of their homeland.”
A Plague Of Reeds
“Arundo is considered a botanical pest to nearly everyone but certain musicians. The flammable, nonnative plant spreads prodigiously, destroying ecosystems, redirecting river flows, igniting fires, causing flooding and creating expensive beach cleanup projects once it washes out to sea.” But it also provides material for the perfect reed…
A Top-Ten Year For Broadway
“But this is the first year in my decade as chief theater critic of The New York Times in which Broadway, all by its big, bloated self, provided enough laurel-worthy shows that even a list of 10 can’t include them all.”
Peer Pressurey (Does It Matter?)
New research is trying to determine what happens to a group when someone with different abilities than the rest of a group is added. “When my neighbor, classmate, or housemate is particularly smart, dishonest, or lazy, what does that do to me?”
Bio Hazard
“Nadine Gordimer — the South African writer who helped bring the world’s attention to the evils of apartheid and won the 1991 Nobel Prize for her efforts — had a bitter falling out with Ronald Suresh Roberts, the young biographer to whom she had granted extraordinary access during his five years of research. Since it appeared last year, Roberts’s biography, ‘No Cold Kitchen,’ has been the talk of literary South Africa.”