ArtsJournal

You’ll Poke Your Eye Out (With That Stack Of Books)

WORDS Posted:

“Even mediocre plots have a way of sinking their hooks into you, until you find yourself concerned for the fates of characters who aren’t even fully convincing. But even so, there were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself.”

Actor Christopher Evan Welch, 48

PEOPLE Posted:

“Recognizable to many by his unruly mop of brown hair, … [Welch was] an in-demand character actor who appeared in everything from Shakespeare to The Sopranos, including films by Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and Charlie Kaufman.”

Alvin Ailey Co. And Wayne McGregor Stretch Each Other

DANCE Posted:

Artistic director Robert Battle, looking to expand the repertoire and stylistic range of a troupe that had become a bit predictable, engaged McGregor to stage his stark and hyperkinetic Chroma on the Ailey dancers. They’re the first non-classical group to perform the work – and (to McGregor’s happiness) the first that’s dark-skinned.

Federal Judge Gives First Hint Of Detroit Art Collection’s Status In City’s Bankruptcy

VISUAL Posted:

“‘A one-time infusion of cash by selling an asset,’ he [wrote], would have only delayed the city’s ‘inevitable financial failure’ unless it could have also come up with a sustainable way to enhance income and reduce expenses. Judge Rhodes added that in considering selling assets, a city ‘must take extreme care that the asset is truly unnecessary in carrying out its mission’.”

Arabic Music Has A Big New Star – And She’s Blonde

MUSIC Posted:

Jennifer Grout, a 23-year-old from Boston who speaks almost no Arabic, sings it so well that she’s now a finalist on this year’s Arabs Got Talent – the only one performing the classical repertoire in which Umm Kulthum and Fairouz became famous but which most younger Arabs neglect.

One Of New York’s Top Culturecrats To Step Up Campaign For Arts Education

ISSUES Posted:

Mary Schmidt Campbell: “It is a demonstrated fact that if you put well-designed arts programs into the schools – particularly in areas that are underserved – and you integrate them into the curriculum, you can raise the performance in reading, math and science. … It drives me crazy that we are still struggling to make that case around the country.” T

Bob Dylan Charged With ‘Inciting Hate’ Under French Law

PEOPLE Posted:

“To people who follow the pronouncements of Bob Dylan, his comment in a Rolling Stone interview in September 2012 suggesting that American blacks could sense whether whites had slave-master blood ‘just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood’ may have seemed just the sort of vaporously impressionistic, emotionally pointed kind of thing that Mr. Dylan has been known to say for decades.” Some Croatians in France beg to differ.

Rare Biblical Texts From Bodleian And Vatican Libraries Digitized

WORDS Posted:

“A Gutenberg Bible, a dazzlingly illuminated 15th-century Hebrew Bible from Spain and a copy of Maimonides’s 12th-century commentary on the Mishnah written in the philosopher’s own hand are among the rare bibles and biblical commentaries from the Vatican Library and the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford that have been digitized and posted online.”

TV Show Tweets Out Its Script To Build Fans

MEDIA Posted:

Beginning Monday morning, the script of the first episode, written by the show’s creator, Frank Darabont, who developed “The Walking Dead” for AMC, will be released in a stream of Twitter messages in its entirety — except for the surprise ending.

André Schiffrin, 78, A Force In Literary And Cultural Publishing

PEOPLE Posted:

“Taking risks, running losses, resisting financial pressures and compromises, Mr. Schiffrin championed the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Günter Grass, Studs Terkel, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Noam Chomsky, Julio Cortázar, Marguerite Duras, Roy Medvedev, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, Anita Brookner, R. D. Laing and many others.”

Lighting Up The Mysterious Process Of Writing (And Reading)

WORDS Posted:

The Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg is writing a novella “while a battery of sensors and cameras track his brain waves, heart rate, galvanic skin response … and facial expressions.” Fifty readers will also get hooked up to sensors when the book comes out – and then let the data crunching begin.

Rare Book Thefts In Naples (And Where’s The Librarian?)

WORDS Posted:

“The very man charged with protecting these treasures, Marino Massimo De Caro, a politically connected former director of the library, is accused of being at the center of a network of middlemen, book dealers and possibly crooked conservators — all part of what prosecutors say is a sometimes corrupt market for rare books in which much is spent and few questions are asked.”