We Found Shakespeare’s Personal Dictionary on eBay!, Say Book Dealers
“For more than half a century, many scholars have believed that Shakespeare consulted a 1580 dictionary published in London called An Alvearie, or Quadruple Dictionarie.” Now a pair of antiquarians claim they’ve found that very volume, complete with Shakespeare’s own handwritten notes. Naturally, some scholars disagree. Robinson Meyer runs down the arguments for and against.
There’s a Lost Generation of ’90s Indie Filmmakers
Richard Brody: “The paradox of independent filmmaking is that it often replicates, on a low budget and a small scale, the commercial mainstream’s production process and approach to acting. On the one hand, that’s why many independent filmmakers of that time turned out to be Hollywood-ready when things worked out right. On the other, that’s why, for some, it was tough to come up with a cinematic Plan B when they didn’t.”
Houston Symphony Musicians Get a Raise
“The symphony’s musicians will get a 2.85 percent annual raise under terms of the four-year deal, which will take their annual salary from $86,840 today to $97,240 during the 2017-18 season.”
Thomas Piketty’s Economic Argument Applies To Art, Too (And How)
“The French economist’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a historic survey of wealth concentration that has quickly become a go-to text for the gathering debate on income inequality. … It is worth considering how the unprecedented amounts of money the wealthy have recently been spending on trophy artworks might be a natural extension of his argument.”
How to Forge a Masterpiece (It’s in the Court Documents)
“The indictment reads in places like a forger’s manual, laying out the materials needed to forge masterpieces and how to create a fraudulent history of a painting’s creation, ownership, custody and location, known as its provenance.”
The Damien Hirst Forgery Trial: A Juror Speaks
“[Such trials] are fairly banal legal processes, cases settled by a jury of peers that considers the facts and comes to a conclusion. But these human beings also become, for a period of a few hours, days, or weeks, endowed with a unique power and perspective: critics with the force of law.” Hyperallergic offers a Q&A with a member of the panel that convicted a Florida pastor of selling fake Hirsts.
Artist Accuses Turkish Government of Deliberately Dumbing Down Populace
Ali Kazma: “Statistically, educated Turks do not vote for AKP … It seems like the interest of AKP lies in mobilizing the regressive parts of the society financially upwards while maintaining their low education levels, gender inequality and intellectual curiosity.”
‘He Was The Greatest Of Us All’: Salman Rushdie on Gabriel García Márquez
“I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it – not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous ‘wonder tales’ of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism.”
Torvill and Dean: How We Made ‘Boléro’
The legendary ice dancers recount how they created the program that won then the gold medal at the 1984 Winter Olympics – and that remains, 30 years later, one of the most storied performances in the history of the discipline. (Surprise: the Ravel piece was considered a radical choice back then.)
NY Times Architecture Critic Dives Into Transit Policy: Build A Brooklyn-Queens Streetcar!
Michael Kimmelman: “So while Mayor Bill de Blasio continues to refine his agenda, including that promise of 200,000 units of affordable housing, he might consider a streetcar connecting Red Hook to Astoria. … I’m not talking Ye Olde Trolley. This is transit for New Yorkers who can’t wait another half-century for the next subway station.”
Andrei Konchalovsky, Director and Master Aphorist
Says the man who went from co-scripting Andrei Rublev to making the Oscar-nominated Runaway Train to getting fired from Tango & Cash: “Freedom is not a guarantee of good art. The best art comes in the war or the plague.” “[Art] can help politics when politics are ready to be changed. Not before.” “Opera is much closer to circus than to cinema.” “Tango & Cash, like every real Hollywood film, is a film for people who cannot read.”
The Real-Life Murder Case That Shakespeare (May Have) Helped Dramatise
The darkly comic Arden of Faversham is (closely) based on an actual case: the 1551 murder of a wealthy provincial businessman by his wife and her lover.
Can the Relics of the 1964 World’s Fair Be Saved? Should They Be?
“You can see them from at least three highways in Queens, rising up like futuristic beacons: a giant metal circle on top of 16 concrete pillars and three towers stretching skyward, topped by flying saucer roofs. They look like heralds of a new space age. But they were built for the 1964 World’s Fair, as part of the New York State Pavilion.”
$50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize Goes To Claudia Rankine
She said of the award, “Often a division is made between politics and poetry, and I like to think this is a moment when the intersection is recognized.”
Rethinking How You Sit In The Broadway Theatre
“To deepen the sense of intimacy in the Palace Theatre, “Holler’s” creators decided to radically change its seating, spending $200,000 to reposition the ground-level orchestra seats into the kind of stadium seating common in movie theaters.”
Mariss Jansons To Leave Concertgebouw
Mariss Jansons, who has been the chief conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra for nearly a decade, plans to resign his post there after the 2014-15 season, the orchestra announced on Tuesday.
Scotland’s Massive New Public Art Project. It’s Bad
“Scotland has unveiled the latest misbegotten “masterpiece” of public art. It is big. It is bold. And it is rotten.”
The Difference Between Literary Fiction And Genre Fiction
“A genre novel is governed by limitations, and the whole of the writer’s skill is directed towards creating the best possible novel within those limitations. A literary novel is governed by nothing – nothing I can think of, not even the requirement to be comprehensible – and the whole of the writer’s skill is directed towards creating the best possible novel.”
Literary Fiction? It’s Nothing But Snob Marketing
“All books can be thrust into a genre, and lit fic is simply one of many. As a tag, it tells us nothing about the intrinsic value of any individual title.”
Want To Eradicate Misuse Of The Word “Literally”? Try This Plugin
Built by a programmer named Mike Walker, it’s an extension for Google’s Chrome browser that replaces the word “literally” with “figuratively” on sites and articles across the Web, with deeply gratifying results.
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Our Transition To A Culture Of Lifelong Learning
“After years of talking about lifelong education, the rhetoric has finally reached reality. Accessing education no longer requires months and years of planning, countless applications, tapping savings or taking out huge loans, and giving up months or years of your life to match some random institutional schedule.”
In The Internet Age Do We Still Need Editors Of Vision?
“The role of editor emerged in an era of constraint: there are only so many words and pictures you can fit into fifty pages of newsprint. We now live in the age of abundance, in which anything and everything can be published. There is, in theory, less need for an editor to say what works and what doesn’t.”
Gentrification – It’s Not Just About Real Estate
“Distilling the gentrification problem, a tension exists between the inefficiencies of the labor market and the inefficiencies of the real estate market. The inefficiencies of the real estate market receive all the press. What little attention the inefficiencies of the labor market receive, nobody links it to gentrification.”
Netflix Now Accounts For Half Of All Streamed Internet Video
44 million people around the world have signed up to its video-on-demand service.
Why Performance Art Is Stupid
“Performance art is a joke. Taken terribly seriously by the art world, it is a litmus test of pretension and intellectual dishonesty. If you are wowed by it, you are either susceptible to pseudo-intellectual guff, or lying.”