Putin on art, and what it is like for a Canadian woman to have dinner with him. And another piece with “He considered the fact that primarily women were responsible for Russia policy in the Obama administration to be an intentional attempt to humiliate him.” Link here here
Putin has said that at one stage he was reduced — while still a serving lieutenant colonel of the KGB — to moonlighting as a freelance taxi driver in order to supplement his income.
Here is a very good FT article, mostly about the elite circle surrounding Putin, by Anatol Lieven
14 Contemporary Artists on How Reading Influences Their Work
“Words are what culled my inner artist from the dead.”
It’s safe to say that most artwork is visual and that most writing is aural. Despite the fact that we use our eyes to read, we don’t so much see words as hear them. Words dance around in our cochlea, tapping their serifs to various tempos, whether or not they are technically articulated. Artists have an eye; writers, an ear. As an artist—or even an art dealer—it is easy to become visually overstimulated. Our eyes become numb as we stare at the same palette, same bodies of work, day after day, month after month, year after year. We look for ways to move forward. For visual solutions to our visual problems. But the harder we try to find the answers with our overburdened, desensitized eyes, the more infuriatingly elusive they become.
- Ranking Columbia
- 'Audience-ology'
- Putin's gambit
- TB or not TB
- Deaths of liberalism
- Cancel Tchaikovsky?
- Cornel West on culture
New Books
Who has power and who doesn’t? That question goes a long way toward explaining our discourse of shame
50 best sci-fi books ?
Yet more lists: at Esquire Adrienne Westenfeld offers a list of The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time -- though they undermine that claim by having the ridiculous "one book per author"-limitation (that remains far too popular with these kind of lists).
With Neal Stephenson placing 49th (with Snow Crash), Stanisław Lem 46th (with Solaris), and William Gibson 45th (with Neuromancer) they're setting the bar pretty high -- and there is a bit of a contemporary bias (i.e. more relatively recent works than deserve to be there), so overall it is, as most such lists are, a mixed and debatable bag. Still, a lot of good books here.
