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Sunday, June 12, 2022

Do The Arts Have Too Many Managers?

Two workers rescued from chocolate vat at Pennsylvania Mars Wrigley plant NBC


Laura Elizabeth Woollett is a rising literary star, a much-praised author of a short-story collection and two novels. She is 29, with a creative-writing degree, and has never had a full-time job. 

She used to tell herself this was a lifestyle choice, so as not to kill her creativity. In reality, she’s never had an offer. Like many writers, she patches together a precarious income from casual work. Her best job was in a call centre. 

In The Newcomer We Have a Slavic Surname in NOVAK which means NEW


For a rising star with two novels, writing isn’t as glamorous as it may seem


‘What was it Richard Flanagan said, when he won this award back in 2014? Money is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. I like this statement. But I also know Flanagan wasn’t working in a call centre when he made it.'


A master of “intelligent meanness,” Elizabeth Hardwick did not exempt her own work from such treatment 


Still Grappling With The Point Of Book Reviews

If, in fact, book reviews are on the whole too positive, as some suggest, does this mean that the purpose of book reviewing is to sniff out what’s rotten? Or, if book reviews are too negative, does this mean that public-facing literary criticism’s purpose is to highlight what’s worth...

Has The Great Majority Of The World’s Greatest Literature Been Lost?

Researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains. - The Guardian

Straddling The Boundary Between Historical Fiction And Nonfiction Novel Is An Epistemological Feat

"Both (Benjamín Labatut's) When We Cease to Understand the World and (Danielle Dutton's) Margaret The First blur their relationship with historical fact, shifting between essayistic writing and vivid flights of imagination, ... (a) delicate balancing act. Both also, interestingly, explore questions of philosophical and scientific truth." - 

Why People Love Sending Gifts To The Queen

For the last year, we have conducted interviews with people who have given at least one gift to a member of the royal family to try to understand the motivation of these present-givers. - The Conversation

The prehistoric artefacts, all made to a similar shape and template, are found in enormous numbers across southern Africa across vast distances


India’s First Prime Minister Himself Decided Whether “Lolita” Was Too Obscene To Be Allowed Into The Country

It was quite the literary drama: Customs in Bombay had impounded the first shipment of Nabokov's novel, the ministers of justice and finance were involved, and back then (1959) there was no Censor Board. So Jawaharlal Nehru himself read the book and rendered his decision. - Scroll (India)


Do The Arts Have Too Many Managers?

Half of all public and private grants now pay administrators’ salaries – only a quarter fund arts production. Even if many are wonderful, managers are collectively the greatest obstacle to balancing budgets. - The Stage


The Man Who Spent 60 Years Building His Own Cathedral

The cathedral’s crypt would be his burial place. And he’d be buried there because it was his cathedral. He’d designed it entirely in his head, without a single measurement or calculation on paper, without a record of any of the materials he’d used. And he had done it largely by himself....