Moreover

The literary lion of Park Avenue

A SUPERB interview with Louis Auchincloss, as he approaches 90, in today's Financial Times.

Two stand-out quotes. The first is from a Gore Vidal piece in the New York Review of Books:

[O]f
all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our
rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices
and their clubs. Yet such is the vastness of our society and the
remoteness of academics and bookchatterers from actual power that those
who should be most in this writer's debt have no idea what a useful
service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, betraying his
class.

The second is Auchincloss on his school, Groton, and its part in shaping his cohort's character:

"Bill Bundy and I shared a study at Groton, and one day he came in from a football game, and I said: 'Who won?' and he said: 'We lost,' and then he burst into tears. You cannot lose. Groton cannot lose. That's what they believed in, no matter what," explains Auchincloss. "They all would have all been willing to die, if they hadn't already been in high positions. They believed America cannot lose. We stand for every virtue and right that's in the world."

The playing-fields of Eton, Vietnam edition.


Technorati Tags: Auchincloss, books, Groton, Bundy, Gore Vidal

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where you will find (we hope) a near-identical twin of Moreover, to say nothing of its talented sibling, Furthermore.

Our apologies for the inconvenience.

Robert Cottrell

The empathic reader

IN AN article called "Chief Fiction Officer" in The Economist two weeks past, Joseph Finder, an author and Ivy League graduate, says that his thriller novels, often set in boardrooms and other business environments, contain valuable information about company dynamics: 

Business journalism may provide plenty of facts and figures, Mr. Finder argues, but it seldom gives readers much of a feel for corporate life. Fiction, in his view, can provide a more accurate picture than anything found in newspapers or management literature.

Present in the idea that CEOs should look to Mr. Finder's novels for something more than a pleasant thrill ride is the suggestion that these books contain such accurate and nuanced portrayals of the business world that they are capable of eliciting an empathic reaction from their readers.

This idea, that the "feel" for something that a work of fiction creates could be related to the ever-elusive human trait of empathy, is not a novel idea, so to speak. A mere Google search led me to an article in Psychology Today from 2006 about a study describing the link between narrative fiction and empathy. The study showed that

frequent readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than did readers of expository nonfiction. A follow-up study showed... People assigned...[a] short story did better on a subsequent social-reasoning task than did those who read an essay from the same magazine.

So perhaps Joseph Finder (and bookworms everywhere) may be on to something. One only needs to think back to elementary and middle school English coursework to notice that many of the novels, besides being quality reading for young minds, are also specifically designed to elicit what Dictionary.com describes as "the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another." From "Number the Stars" to "Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry" we are constantly learning through fictionalized accounts how to relate to people experiencing what we are not.

I may be biased, but I am inclined to extend the hand of friendship between novels and empathy towards poetry.  In my post a few weeks ago, I discussed what I thought was a very interesting review of "Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak" by Dan Chaisson in The New York Times Book Review on August 19th. The reviewer grapples with the effectiveness and honesty of the book. He indicts the collection, callings the poems "the kinds of things sad or frustrated people always have written."

This past week the letters section of the Book Review featured a letter to the editor by Robert Epstein, which responds to Chaisson's commentary, rooting the issue in the knowledge that

even the most liberal Americans have been made so cynical by endless war...that they can no longer even recognize the common humanity in direct statements of injustice and despair.

The point of all this lengthy back-story is that both men are really talking about empathy. For Chaisson, the book fails in cultivating it, whereas for Epstein, the American public (at the hands of the government) fails to produce it. In the pared down and subjective world of poetry empathy also insists on showing its hand.

I would like to end with a poem that I feel is particularly empathic. This seems to be a bit of a conceit, and like saying that I have found poem that is about human emotion, or I have caught a fish in a barrel. But the poems of the Polish poet Anna Swir are, for me, always about empathy. In a poem entitled "She does not Remember," Swir writes about an evil stepmother:

She shudders
Like a clutch of burnt paper.
She does not remember that she was evil.
but she knows
that she feels cold.

In this short poem Swir provides the reader with a visceral experience of cold that permits us to empathize with the most evil fairy tale character of all. Although we lack a complete story, we still understand cold, and that, for us empathic and well-read humans, is enough.   

We are happy to ignore you

VIEWED from afar, it's easy to miss the humour in Andy Freeberg's latest collection of photographs. Indeed, the images might be mistaken for abstracts—they are soberly composed interiors, all geometric forms, stark white planes and diffused light. But look closer, and you'll see Mr Freeberg's subjects: behind the white boxes are people, the crowns of their heads just barely visible. And the boxes are really desks, for the photographs were taken in the entryways of major art galleries in Chelsea. With these deadpan portraits, Mr Freeberg reveals the absurdity in gallery administrators' habit of barricading themselves behind tall facades. The exhibition, titled "Sentry", is on view at Danziger Projects in New York.

A blog to read before you die

PLEASE, stop whatever you are doing and read The Smart Set, an online magazine from Drexel University in Philadelphia. It's just absurdly good. Here's Morgan Meis reviewing an anthology of paintings called "1001 Paintings You Should See Before You Die":

The amazing thing about 1001 Paintings is thus the breeziness of it all. It is a dilettante’s book. Its intended reader is surely someone like the woman pictured on the cover, standing with her back to us, wearing a tasteful black dress and expensive, though not gaudy, earrings. She went to Brown, I think, where she studied English literature and wrote a thesis on Wordsworth. She still loves reading Keats when she gets the chance but her career in financial services and her role as board member for several non-profits prevents her from dedicating as much time to art and literature as she would like.

The current contents include pieces on creationism in Kentucky, centenarians on Sardinia, castrated opera stars, re-reading Homer,  the golden age of sportswriting, and torrid affairs in Bhutan and Polynesia. That's me done for the weekend.

To criticise the critic

NO, SERIOUSLY, that Steve Wasserman essay in CJR is a compelling read. It's the fullest account you're likely to get (or want) of the decline of book reviewing in American newspapers over the past ten years or so, and it has lots of inside detail from the author's nine years running the LA Times's book section.

It's also a noble failure. Wasserman wants to make the case that a literary elite is essential to the health of a liberal society, and that good serious newspaper book-reviews are essential to the preservation of that literary elite. But he never quite nails down either half of the argument.

He winds up asserting (I paraphrase crudely) that newspapers—save for the New York Times—are too stupid to recognise that they get net benefits from producing book sections at a loss. But somewhere between the reputational gains and the accounting minuses I lose track of the math.

The great thing is that the piece is packed with honest anger and funny stories along the way, including the author's encounter with Arthur Sulzberger Jr, publisher of the New York Times. He asked Sulzberger if the Times's book section had ever made money:

He looked at me evenly and said, “I think, Steve, someone in the family would have told me if it had.”

The bibliomanes of Beverley Hills

STEVE Wasserman's encyclopaedic essay in CJR, on the decline of book-reviewing, is full of interesting details, not least this one:

In some years the average per-capita sales of books in the Los Angeles metropolitan region had often exceeded—by some $50 million—such annual sales in the greater New York area.

Hard to think how they find time to read them all.

Bleak but clear

The stage for "Iphigenia 2.0", Charles Mee's adaptation of Euripides’ "Iphigenia at Aulis", is unimpressive. The grey walls are hardly decorated. They are covered on one side in what appear to be the tops of sails, and bare on the other. The harsh lighting emphasises the set's bleakness, leaving it up to the actors to fill in the emptiness, which they do with ready ease.

Mr Mee has successfully modernised the original source without losing any of its complexity. His opposition to the war in Iraq is clear, but more central to the drama is the hypocrisy of parents who teach their children the importance of self-sacrifice while refusing to let them fight in Iraq. Still, the play has its perplexing moments. When soldiers begin stripping and grinding to rap music, you wonder if Tina Landau, the director, has lost her mind. You wonder if a five-minute interlude of Greek dancing is really needed to convey the love felt between Agamemnon and his daughter, Iphigenia.

But the play comes together at the end. As Iphigenia leaves the wedding ceremony to be sacrificed, the guests remain. Loud cries by her mother, Clymenstra, are drowned out by music and revelry; champagne bottles are broken against a wall; plates are dropped. Finally, Agamemnon enters the stage again, carrying his daughter. Both are covered in blood. Darkness swallows his final cry.

Above the fold

Rumours are running that MTV will air a taped performance of Legally Blonde, the musical, on its channel for a month, though producers are insisting that no contract has been signed yet. Sources are saying that advance ticket sales are beginning to fall and ticket sales will decrease in the coming few months. The move would be new for the industry; rarely have musicals allowed for taped performances to be broadcast during their run.

An 18th century horse head from the Qing dynasty owned by a "Taiwanese collector" will be auctioned off at Sotheby's in October. Expected to sell for $7.7 million, the auction has upset the Chinese government. The figure, originally one in a set of 12 bronze heads to represent each animal of the Chinese zodiac, was looted from the imperial summer palace in 1860 by British and French troops. The Chinese government has only recovered four bronzes to date. Though the government has argued that the bronze is a national treasure and should be returned to China, Sotheby's has said that the sale is legal according to the United Nations Unidroit Convention, which states that claims can only occur within 50 years of the theft.

Jack Romanos, current  president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, the publishing company, has announced that he will retire at the end of 2007 (though he will remain a consultant until 2009). He will be succeeded by Carolyn Reidy,  who is now president of the company's adult publishing group. Romanos has been with Simon & Schuster for 22 years. In an interview, he predicted that the future for the publishing industry lies in digitalization.

An act by Eddie Griffin, the black comedian, was cut short when his overuse of the n-word caused his sponsor, Black Enterprise, to turn off his microphone. Black Enterprise, a magazine, said that Griffin would be paid his fee but would not be allowed to continue, stating that the magazine stood for "decency, black culture and dignity."

Everywhere or nowhere

Moreover would like to draw your attention to this excellent post by Mary Beard, a classicist who blogs for the TLS. In it she defends herself (more than ably, I might add) from the controversy sparked by her previous post (or, more accurately, by an apparently shoddy Greek translation of a previous post), in which she admits, in light of the Greek fires, to "feel[ing] grateful for the dispersal of antiquities around the museums of the world:

This is not an argument about the quality of care these monuments are given whether in Greece or abroad (and almost all guardians of the Greek heritage -- Greek or foreign -- have something to be embarrassed about). It is more the “stuff happens” problem. Nature sometimes seriously messes up. In other words, like it or not in aesthetic or political terms, there is a very practical point to these Wonders of the World being split up."

Unfortunately, the Greek press skipped that bit and reported, according to one of Ms Beard's Hellenophone correspondents, that she proposed dispersing Greek antiquities around the world. All too predictably, howls followed: "WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT OUR HERITAGE?", screamed one anonymous post. "LEAVE GREEKE PEOPLE TO PROTECT THEIR MONUMENTS AND THEIR HISTORY THEY ARE CLEVER MORE THAN OTHER PEOPLE ALL OVER WORD!!!!!!!!!!GREECE BELONKS TO GREEKS AND NOBODY ELSE," bellowed Marianikolopouloi.

But why do works created by ancient Greeks belong (or even belonk) to modern Greeks exclusively? Ms Beard says she likes seeing English artefacts in New York: it shows foreign interest in her culture. I agree, though it does, of course depend on the product (better Sonny Rollins than McDonald's, for instance). Also, one suspects that the spittle-mouthed lunatics who attacked Ms Beard want people to have an opinion of Greek heritage: they want people to revere it. The trouble is, you cannot demand exclusive reverence; to revere is, in some way, to lay claim to. But Ms Beard does a far better and fairer job with her critics than I do. Worth a read, a thought and perhaps a comment too.

Above the fold

Lucianno Pavarotti, the Italian tenor famous for clutching a white handkerchief during performances, died today in his hometown of Modena, Italy after fighting pancreatic cancer for one year. He was 71. The son of a baker and a factory worker, Pavarotti said that he dreamed of becoming a singer after hearing his father sing in church. Pavarotti was not discovered as a child, however. He taught elementary school for two years and worked as an insurance salesman before winning the Concorso Internazionale in 1961 and making his opera debut as Rodolfo in Puccini's La Boheme. He performed at the Metropolitan Theatre two years later. He announced his retirement in 2004 but continued to give concerts until 2006 when he was first fell ill. In a 2006 interview, Pavarotti had spoken about "starting [singing] again next year."

The cramped Philadelphia Museum of Art expands this fall: a $90m, 114,000-square-foot addition opens on September 15. The former office building will be used to house prints, drawings and photographs; costumes and textiles; and modern and contemporary design galleries. Admission to the new addition will be free through 2007 thanks to corporate donations.

The management for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is trying to renew a contract that would prevent musicians from going on strike for the first time since 1987. The musicians, who make a minimum of $98,800, say that the original proposed contract would introduce three unpaid weeks a year. Though their salary will increase slightly over a period of three years, it is not enough to compensate for the other parts of the contract.

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world:

The Asia Society, founded in 1956 by John D Rockefeller and his wife, Blanchette Ferry Hooker Rockefeller, is starting a drive to collect contemporary Asian and Asian-American art, particularly in video and new-media. The collection aims to be selective rather than encyclopedic. Eventually, the Asia Society, which sponsors music and dance performances, films and lectures, hopes to exhibit the works in New York, and at some of its other locations like Hong Kong and Houston.

A new film about Bob Dylan takes an abstract look at the musician's life, using seven different actors to play different versions of Mr Dylan, most of which did not exist (the film imagines Mr Dylan as Rimbaud, Billy the Kid, and a black folk singer). Most surprising is Cate Blanchett's impersonation of Mr Dylan in the 1960's when he toured London, complete with shades, curls and his defiant attitude. This is the only dramatic representation of Mr Dylan's life for which he has given approval; Todd Haynes, the director, attributes that to the expansive, experimental interpretation of his character. 

David Maisel's ecological photographs, on display at the National Gallery of Sciences in Washington, DC, are designed to resemble abstract art. But his aerial pictures are more substantive than they seem: a black and red photo that could be a Rothko is actually a bacteria bloom. His works depict man's degradation of nature, and he cleverly conceals the actual subject of his photos, saving them for a separate website.

A study of North American and British rock-stars reveals that they are 2-3 times more likely to die prematurely than the rest of the population. According to the study, completed by the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, of 1,064 musicians living between 1956 and 2005, 100 of them died before their time, with 25% of those deaths due to drugs or alcohol. Death rates within the first 5 years of fame triple, but if musicians in Britain manage to survive 25 years of fame, their mortality rate falls to match the general population's. Due to an obsession with reunion tours, their American counterparts aren't so lucky. 

Fifty years of solitude

Fifty years ago today, "On the Road" was published. By now it is, one supposes, that most wooden and moribund of all things, a classic, in honor of which Slate publishes a pair of articles, one by Walter Kirn and Meghan O'Rourke, two modern critics, discussing whether "On the Road" holds up, and the other a series of reflections on Kerouac himself by people who knew him. The most telling bit for me: Kerouac was repulsed by hippies and the claims they made on him. The most interesting comments belong to Carolyn Cassidy, who appeared in the book as Camille, and whose ex-husband Neal was one of the book's inspirations and thinly disguised main characters. She tells us that Kerouac was disgusted by hippies: "They thought Jack gave them freedom to turn the world into chaos. They thought he was giving them carte blanche to be selfish. That's why he vowed to drink himself to death." Later she says, "Most people don't realize how much fiction there is in 'On the Road'."

This is why the book has always left a bad taste in my mouth: its most passionate defenders treat it as a sacred text, and seem to think that feeling—depth of feeling, loudness of feeling, existence of feeling—somehow justifies a piece of writing or an opinion, as though art were all about self-expression rather than artifice. "On the Road" is not a howl, it is a novel (even "Howl" is not a howl; it is a poem), and writing is not about expressing oneself but about arranging that expression artfully. Not only did Kerouac do that, but he made it look artless and natural, which is the most difficult thing of all.

Above the fold

The Italian Culture Ministry has issued guidelines for protecting its vulnerable artistic structures from tremors. Though the region is not known for earthquakes, 491 events last year registered above 2.5 on the Richter scale. Government officials have been told to take steps to reduce that risk by joining walls with steel chains or placing carbon fiber strips in walls.

Though the credit crunch has pinched the wallets of many former art patrons, Christie's International and Sotheby's, the auction houses, have offered $1 billion in price guarantees to sellers of works by Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning. Christie's and Sotheby's are hoping that Russians and Asians will continue to support legendarily high art prices. According to one of Christie's heads of contemporary art, Russians tend to favour modern art as an affirmation of wealth and class.

Christian Reiter, a Viennese forensic expert, has examined strands of Ludwig van Beethoven's hair and says that Beethoven was killed by Andreas Wawruch, his physician. Reiter says that Beethoven died from his doctor's lead treatments. Wawruch was not aware that Beethoven had cirrhosis and continued to puncture the composer's abdominal cavity and seal it with a lead poultice to treat an infection that caused Beethoven's abdomen to swell.

A New York filmmaker claims that artwork he found in his parents' storage wrapped in a brown paper bag titled "Pollock Experimentals" are by Jackson Pollock. The paintings are now on exhibition at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art. The organizers of "Pollock Matters" have taken the safer road and do not name the artist in the artworks. Forensic and circumstantial evidence have cast doubt  on the verity of the claims. A study earlier this year at Harvard University has said that pigments found in the paintings were not available in Pollock's time.

Pregnant pauses

A depthless love for The Goldberg Variations is not required to write for Moreover, but I can't think of another single piece of music that so many of us revere. We may disagree on recordings - Gould's 1981 has burned into my brain; listening to anything else is like wearing shoes a half-size off - but this article, on Simone Dinnerstein's new recording, will probably make all of our hearts beat faster. The article itself takes on the purplish hues almost inevitable when writing about music one loves, but Ms Dinnerstein's backstory (self-financed recording made while pregnant; globe-trotting tour schedule preceding a label contract) is intriguing, and audio samples are the first recording I have ever heard to make me think the Gould's 1981 performance might, just might, have a peer.

Ms Dinnerstein is playing the Goldbergs four times this month - in Baltimore, Dallas, Philadelphia and upstate New York - and once in October in London. Moreover will try to catch at least one of those. Stay tuned.

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world:

TO RAISE money for a new campus, London's Royal College of Art is selling "Study of the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light", a painting by Francis Bacon, a 20th century Irish artist, that he gave to the college in lieu of rent in 1969. The work, one of a series of male nudes painted by Mr Bacon, will be a highlight of Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London in October, and is expected to fetch around $18m. Earlier this year, his "Study from Innocent X" sold for $52.6m at Sotheby's in New York.

Plans to build a skyscraper near an 18th century cathedral in the centre of St Petersburg by Gazprom, the state-owned gas company, has provoked local opposition and international disapproval, namely by UNESCO, for the damage it may do to the city's historic centre. UNESCO has even threatened to remove St Petersburg from the list of World Heritage Sites. Gazprom is considering designs for the 900ft glass and steel tower, known as "Gazprom City", from seven different architects.

Spike Lee, an American director, has teamed-up with Babelgum, an internet company that streams videos online, to create an online film festival which will allow filmmakers to submit their films online regardless of their location.. Babelgum users will vote on entries in different categories, and Mr Lee will choose the winners.

A building once used by the Federal Reserve to store billions of dollars and emergency supplies in case of a nuclear attack is now home to over 6m original films, audio recordings, screenplays and television shows, as part of the new National Audio-Visual Conservation Centre. Only an exhibition area and an art-deco movie theatre will be open to the public, but many of the artifacts, which have been digitalized, will be available online in reading rooms at the Library of Congress.

Letter from Paris

Our friend and colleague Sarah Dallas, editor of Cities Guide on Economist.com, sends us a first letter from Paris:

“La rentrée” is a serious matter in Paris. From late August, as families reappear after three-week holidays, and shops and bistros gingerly roll back their shutters, the city begins to bristle with a back-to-school charge. This year, the sense of anticipation is especially palpable: President Nicolas Sarkozy made a stunning three-month debut; what will the man, dubbed “the human bomb” by the New Yorker, do next? And then there is the matter of the mayoral elections. Will Bertrand Delanoë, the environmentally-minded socialist mayor, sail into a second term next March, or will Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party come up with a candidate sparkling enough to swing this essentially conservative city back to the right?

On the cultural front, this autumn’s leading exhibitions include a display of paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg by Arcimboldo, an unnervingly surreal 16th-century court painter who made his name with portraits composed of still-life objects (fruits, grains, books). If that doesn’t tempt (some of the paintings are oddly unappetising), the Musée Jacquemart André has an astonishing collection of works by Frangonard in its 19th-centry palace, while the Musée d’Orsay is profiling Gustave Courbet, a 19th-century pioneer of Realism. The show includes the groundbreaking “Burial at Ornans”, a huge canvas which Courbet saw as his “burial of Romanticism”.

On the other side of the river, two orchestras currently in dazzling form swoop into the refurbished Salle Pleyel: Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (October); and Antonio Pappano’s London Symphony Orchestra (November).  Opera and ballet fans will have to wait until 2008 for this season’s big hitters (such as a visit from the Bolshoi Ballet), but French-speaking theatre-goers should note a daring new production of “Cyrano de Bergerac”, which will be performed in 20 different venues in Paris, including Sainte-Chapelle (of the famous stained-glass windows) and the city’s Oscar Niemeyer-designed communist party headquarters.

After a drizzly summer, the sun is shining and there is promise in the air. France is back on the global stage, and Parisians are sashaying into September looking decidedly jaunty. Many will have tucked into their bags a copy of the season’s most talked-about paperback: "L'aube, le soir ou la nuit" ("Dawn, Evening or Night"), a portrait of the limelight-loving president during his election campaign, by Yasmina Reza, a French playwright (whose works include "Art"). The New York Times calls it "fall’s literary sensation".

Suffering slings and arrows, and buckets of paint

GAWKER hosts Elizabeth Currid's refreshingly lucid musings on the international urban art scene. She illuminates the tension between underground heroes who have found mainstream success—Banksy, Swoon, Ryan McGinley—and their young, art-schooled detractors, a disgruntled and increasingly vocal minority. Her examples include New York's pet villain, "the splasher", and an artist named Laura who executed an amusing parody of Damien Hirst's "For the Love of God".

"A stroll through the art districts of New York or Los Angeles or London gives you a sense of the buzz surrounding the contemporary street art movement," Ms Currid writes, "something unseen since the days of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat."

But the commercial success of those artists is controversial, even today. Juan Puntes, a director at New York's nonprofit White Box gallery, put it this way to an Economist interviewer in July: "The work of Basquiat bores the hell out of me. This guy was the typical thing--was from New York, made friends with Andy Warhol, and everybody loved him. They killed him. They gave him too much money, too much coke. They fucked him too much. And then he was gone. Right? Let's cry. And then let's sell the work, and everybody makes millions."

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world:

A $2m lawsuit against Augusten Burroughs, the best-selling author of the memoir "Running with Scissors", has been settled for an undisclosed sum. Mr Burroughs says the book is an account of his time with the Turcottes, a family in Northampton, Massachusetts, with whom he lived when he was a teenager. The Turcottes have sued Mr Burroughs for distress and defamation, as the book alleges that they condoned sexual encounters between children and adults and that Mrs Turcotte ate dog food. As part of the agreement, the book will be referred to as a "book" instead of a "memoir" in the author's note, and Mr Burroughs will acknowledge that the family's memories are rather different from his own.

The Mabou Mines theatre company has embarked on a new venture: performing on barges. Their latest show, "Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting", will premiere tonight off the shore of Long Island City, Queens. For the six actors and eight musicians involved, preparing for the show has been tricky. First conceived in 2002, it was never intended  to be performed on water. But the director chose the site as it "is the one thing that connects all the boroughs."

OJ Simpson's book has made headlines again. After Barnes and Noble refused to stock copies of the book in its bookstores, the book climbed to No. 1 on the bn.com bestseller list. The book has also reached the top 100 selling books on Amazon.com. Now, after reconsideration, Barnes and Noble has reversed its decision and will sell copies in its stores "because our customers are asking for it." The publisher has announced that he will be printing 25,000 more copies.

The Liverpool Culture Company, which is overseeing the city's celebrations as the 2008 European Capital of Culture, has rejected a plan called the Liverpool Mural Project. This would have seen 12 murals about the Beatles--those home-grown heroes--painted in working-class areas of the city. The artists, an unlikely collaboration between a former republican prisoner and the son of a famous loyalist leaders, have already worked together on some murals in Belfast. Their work was spotted in 2005 by two Liverpudlians, who proposed the idea of the larger Liverpool project, which now has the backing of local academics and writers. The Company complains that it has already been swamped with proposals for the festive year.

Clever Junot Diaz

WITH his new novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", Junot Diaz has finally delivered on the promise he made 11 years ago with "Drown", his slangy, artfully visceral book of short stories about Dominican immigrants in the Jersey diaspora. As everyone's been saying, this is a novel worth waiting for. It's about three generations of a Dominican family--the patriarch is a prominent, respected surgeon in Santo Domingo; alas, the grandson is Oscar, a fat, lonely, comic-book-loving "ghetto-nerd" in New Jersey.

What's fascinating about the storytelling is the way Diaz shoves a third-person narrative into a first-person observer. The story is told mostly from the perspective of Yunior, a family friend, who laces his nearly omniscient narration with the rare bit of personal observation. This is a smart (and not uncommon) technique for juicing up a story--making it the story observed. Philip Roth has done this in most of his later books: Nathan Zuckerman, no longer the virile, charismatic, story-making hero of his youth, is left observing the trials and tragedies of his friends and colleagues. (Frankly, I find these novels lack the verve of the earlier Zuckerman books, when it was Nathan himself who was sweating and suffering and sexing.)

Anyway, Diaz spoke on the subject of third-person narration at a reading in Los Angeles a couple of years ago (there's a good recap on Laila Lalami's blog). He argued that a detached perspective leaves a story feeling cold and stuffy and "white", and not at all conducive to the urban English of writers of colour.

I have my own prejudices against third-person omniscience (Jane Austen notwithstanding), as it lacks the nostalgic kicks and sneaky unreliability of first-person grasping. But I had never heard of a racial bias against the whitey straightjacket of third-person. It takes little more than the kinetic, lively feel of Diaz's new novel--a tragedy lightened by its casual delivery in the Spanglish vernacular--to be convinced that Diaz may be right.

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world.

Finally, Damien Hirst's “For the Love of God”, a platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, has been sold for $100m to an investment group. Mr Hirst still owns a share of the skull, whose creation he financed, and is in charge of a world tour for the skull next year. The sale brings total revenue from his June exhibition to $350m. According to Mr Hirst, his next work will be "Two diamond skeletons shagging -- no just kidding."

In her book, "I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny Cash", Vivienne Cash, the first wife of the renowned country singer, gives a fresh perspective on their life together. It consists mainly of a collection of romantic letters Cash wrote to his future wife while he was stationed in the Air Force in Germany. The letters feature confessions of his deep love, his obsessive plans for their future and signs of his early struggles with alcohol abuse. With limited commentary from Ms Cash herself, the book presents a striking contrast with the image of their relationship depicted in the recent biographical film "Walk the Line", and lends insight into Cash's complex personality.

Frank Gehry will design a $2 billion development project that will feature an amphitheatre, hotel, shopping centre, restaurants, housing and man made-lakes in Lehi, a small town 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah. Mr Gehry will also design a 10,000-seat sports arena to house the town's basketball team. The final designs have not yet been completed, but about 70% of the project will be reserved for water and greenery.

Entries for the Blake Prize for Religious Art, on display at the National School for Art in Sydney, Australia, are causing quite a stir. Christian groups are outraged by works such as "Bearded Orientals: Making the Empire Cross", a picture of Jesus Christ from one angle and Osama Bin Laden from another, both in a Christ-like pose, and "The Fourth Secret of Fatima", a statue of Mary covered in a blue burqa. Australia's prime minister is also miffed. Representatives of the competition support the works for promoting discussion about spirituality and religion in society. 

Hollywood goes Berlin

After years of struggling to stay alive, the Babelsberg Film Studio seems to be enjoying some success. Founded in 1911 in the beautiful town of Potsdam, south of Berlin, the film studio had been adrift ever since the UFA closed up shop. The UFA was Germany’s pre-war film production company, which produced such gems as the famous “Der Blaue Engel” ("The Blue Angel"), starring  Marlene Dietrich.

But the studio's luck is changing. There are some big German productions at Babelsberg right now, such as “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex”, a film about the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, based on the bestseller by Stefan Aust, editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, and produced by Bernd Eichinger. Many of Germany’s best actors are involved, such as Bruno Ganz (who played Adolf Hitler in “The Downfall”), Martina Gedeck (who was Christa-Maria Sieland in “The Lives of Others”) and Moritz Bleibtreu (from "Run Lola Run").

Hollywood has also started to descend on Berlin in full force. The city has hosted crews for “Valkyrie”, a film about the legendary plot to kill Hitler, directed by Bryan Singer (United Artists). It stars Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who made the assassination attempt. Earlier this year, Studio Babelsberg produced “Speed Racer”, another big-budget film (a German-UK production), featuring John Goodman and Susan Sarandon. A Hollywood adaptation of "The Reader", Bernhard Schlink’s award-winning novel, is also expected to come to Berlin and Babelsberg this autumn. Nicole Kidman will star as Hanna Schmidt, an illiterate former SS guard in post-war Heidelberg who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy.

According to Carl Woebcken, the studio’s chief executive, 11 movies (four of which are international) will be produced in Babelsberg in 2007. That doesn't include all the TV productions lined up for this year.

What explains this turn-around? Mr Woebcken says there are several reasons for the sudden boom, but the main catalyst was a new system of state subsidies provided by the National Film Board, regional film boards and the German Film Fund. And, he says, Berlin is still “the most lively, most creative and cheapest city in Germany”. According to Berlin’s traffic coordination office, every day there are a dozen locations in the city where some sort of filming is going on.

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world:

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band will reunite for a tour, their first in five years, to coincide with the release of his new album "Magic", recorded with the band. "Radio Nowhere", the first single from the album, was released today and will be available for free download all week on iTunes. Mr Springsteen generates much more revenue with the band than when he tours alone--they grossed $157m the last time they performed together.   

Colin Powell, a former American Secretary of Defense, and Sandra Day O'Connor, a former Supreme Court justice, and some other well known figures will participate in book readings and discussions for a new series on XM Satellite radio. "The Big Read", created with the National Endowment for the Arts, will feature readings and discussions of literary classics, beginning on September 10th with Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451".

On the subject of Mr Bradbury, Zack Snyder, director of the testosterone-injected film "300", will direct a new version of "The Illustrated Man", an array of science-fiction stories written in 1951. And Mr Bradbury himself, who recently turned 87, will publish drafts and forgotten works later this year, including "Leviathan ’99”, a Moby-Dick in outer space story, as he describes it. 

A collection of 25 paintings and 22 drawings, based on photographs and descriptions of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, may find a permanent home at the University of California, Berkeley. Fernando Botero, the artist who created the works, which are valued at between $10m and $15m, refused an offer to house the pieces from Kunsthalle Wurth museum near Stuttgart, Germany, believing they should be displayed either in America or in Iraq.

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world:

Two creative development projects may breathe life into the architectural recovery of New Orleans. Plans for a New Orleans National Jazz Center (the largest project since the Superdome), and a six-mile-long park and development along the Mississippi river could help replace the dismal strip-malls of downtown with a large music centre, terraces and a public amphitheatre.

A new videogame, which will be released later this year for PlayStation Portable, a gaming console, is an adaptation of the artwork of MC Escher, a graphic artist. Users control a marionette through Escher's twisting staircases and deceptive shapes, and must rotate objects so the marionette travels safely. Which raises the question: why isn't there more art in the world of video games?

At the Venice Film Festival, which opens tomorrow, films about the Iraq war, Egyptian police brutality, corruption, and the Italian mafia will compete for the Golden Lion award, the festival's top prize. The 11-day event will open with "Atonement", the film version of the novel by Ian McEwan, which tells the story of a false accusation made by a 13-year-old against her older sister's lover, and the effect it has on their lives. Atonement is a theme that runs through other films as well.

According to a study released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the ability to accurately identify pitch may be determined by one's genes. Only one in every 10,000 people have absolute or perfect pitch, a skill musicians train for years to develop. Apparently, I'm not one of them.

A good summer for Shakespeare

SHAKESPEARE in the Park, a treasured New York institution, courtesy of the Public Theatre, has been particularly good this year. Earlier in the season, the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park hosted a transporting production of "Romeo and Juliet", in which the young lovers cavorted above and splashed through a large, dark pond in the middle of the stage. (Lauren Ambrose's Juliet, with her remarkable red hair and powerful line-readings--full of giddy vulnerability and adolescent angst--handily stole the show.)

A strong cast and inventive set injected new life into the tired tragedy. Though there were moments when some of the water-splattering seemed gratuitous (and unpleasant for the actors on chillier nights), the pond lent an unexpected beauty, a sodden romance. When still, it was like a mirror; in motion it seemed treacherous. It was portentous throughout.

And now, as a consolation prize for summer's waning days, there is a spectacular production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", directed by Daniel Sullivan (a member of New York theatre royalty). This is worth waiting in the unbearably long lines for. (Terry Teachout agrees.)

All of the unrequited-love romping is entertaining, largely owing to the awkwardly endearing performance of Martha Plimpton, a wonderfully charismatic, surly actress in a reedy frame. The Victorian costumes--full of wedding-cake bustles and crushed velvet--hover between romantic and silly, but create an appealing sense of place (Athens upon Avon, perhaps). But really, the side-splitting pleasures come from the "rude mechanicals", the amateur acting troupe who come to perform before the royal audience. Ben Brantley has it right:

And as they stumble through their memorized lines and artificial movements, occasionally interrupted by unwanted commentary from their onstage audience, they brim with a warm, hopeful eagerness and uncertainty that brings tears.

Yes, they're hilariously incompetent. But more than in any other version of this vignette that I have seen, their performance becomes a sublime, funny valentine to the agony and ecstasy, the power and powerlessness, experienced by actors on a stage.

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard at the theatre.

Fugitive peace in the cinema

Our friend and colleague Gideon Lichfield, The Economist's Jerusalem correspondent, came back from a trying night at the cinema to file this post to his beautiful new blog, Fugitive Peace. We hope to be borrowing from Gideon's blog as often as Gideon will let us:

JUST BACK from seeing “Jerusalem—The East Side Story”, which was being screened to a selection of Ramallah’s great and good, among them Rafiq Husseini, Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff. Unlike “West Bank Story", an Oscar-winning musical comedy about rival Israeli and Palestinian falafel families, this is a worthy but relentless litany of the injustices Israel has visited on the Palestinians of East Jerusalem in its attempts to create a unified Jewish capital.

The film is largely (and tragically) accurate, but like most propaganda in this conflict, makes too few nods to the other side’s narrative to win over many viewers who don’t already sympathise with its message. For 70 minutes the narrator pummels us in the doom-laden tone that wildlife presenters usually reserve for the moment when a nestful of cute goslings is about to be devoured by a feral cat. You come out wanting to slit your veins, or preferably the narrator’s. Still, it has two good moments.

One is an interview with Husseini’s boss, the president of Palestine, recounting one of his favourite to-camera stories: how he showed the map of Israel’s separation barrier to George Bush in 2003. According to Abbas (though it varies slightly with each telling), Bush was furious and told Dick Cheney, “this is not a state”. Abbas looks proud and self-satisfied. The audience, until then respectfully transfixed, started laughing and jeering. They jeered even more when Bush appeared, awkwardly telling the press, “This wall is… uh… a problem.” I wished I could have seen Husseini’s face at that point.

The second is of an elderly Palestinian woman, with title deeds and old photos in hand, coming to see the house in West Jerusalem that she fled as a child. The camera follows her as a group of Israelis strolls past. She watches them recede, then sums up the whole conflict as well and as succinctly as anyone I’ve ever heard. “We live in fantasy,” she sighs, “and they live in denial.”

Above the fold

A round-up of news from the arts world:

“Takva: A Man’s Fear of God”, a Turkish film directed by Ozer Kiziltan, has won the Heart of Sarajevo Award for best film. This year's seven-day Sarajevo Film Festival featured more than 170 films, shorts and documentaries. Mr Kiziltan's work tells the story of a pious Muslim whose morals are challenged when a religious group recruits him to collect rents in Istanbul. The film has already collected several awards, including the Fipresci award in Berlin and the Discovery prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra of Germany will perform selections from Brahms and Bach in Tehran this Wednesday and Thursday, as part of a cultural exchange between the two countries (the Tehran Symphony Orchestra  performed in Osnabrück last year). This will be the first visit by a Western orchestra to Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

A sketch by John Constable has been found in a bound volume of over 1,600 portraits, engravings, drawings and letters by 18th- and 19th-century British artists, which was donated to the British Museum by an art collector in 1902. Constable's sketch of Hyam Church, in his native town of Suffolk, was only recently discovered by Felicity Myrone, curator of topography, who is pouring over the volume for the first time.

Steven Kutcher, an entomologist with experience handling insects for films such as "Arachnophobia" and "Spiderman", has taken his passion for four-legged critters to a new level: as tools for creating art. He has made over 100 brightly coloured paintings by dipping the legs of insects into paint (non-toxic, of course) and manipulating the bugs across canvases. Mr Kutcher hopes to create prints and greeting cards of these works, and is amassing a collection for a travelling exhibition to natural history museums in America.

In praise of the really terrible

The “Really Terrible Orchestra”, reports the New York Times, is the hottest ticket at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival next weekend. The band lives up to its name, as its principal bassoonist proudly admits. He doesn’t play C sharps, and one cellist has the names of the strings written on his instrument as an aide memoire. The orchestra’s chairman explains its philosophy:

We knew there was no market for a good amateur orchestra, because a poor professional one would always be better. But there is a market for the R.T.O. And that our concerts sell out in advance, to audiences who just love to hear us scrape through easy arrangements of Bach or the last 40 bars of the ‘1812’ Overture — the rest is far too difficult — is proof. There’s always thunderous applause, especially if we’ve got lost in something and ground to a halt. Always a standing ovation.

The chairman is a top investment banker. Its principal bassoonist is a best-selling writer, Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books. No doubt that is part of the draw. A really terrible theatre troupe of players who have made their names in other endeavours might be a logical next step. There is, after all, a repertoire waiting for them: the “Plays for Coarse Actors” by Michael Green.

Reading for Shi Tao at the Edinburgh book festival

Our friend and colleague Adam LeBor sends us a second letter from the Edinburgh book festival (read his first here):

I'VE NEVER met Shi Tao, but I would like to. Hopefully we will get together one day at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where we recently held a reading for him under the auspices of Scottish PEN and Amnesty International. Shi Tao is an imprisoned Chinese poet and essayist. There is a photograph of him on the Amnesty website: he is handsome, with intelligent eyes and oval wire-rimmed glasses. He is wearing an olive-coloured suit with a dark shirt, and he looks wryly amused.

Not any more. In November 2004 Shi Tao was arrested and charged with "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities". In April 2005 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. His crime was to send an e-mail to a pro-democracy website, based in America. The e-mail summarised government instructions on how to downplay the forthcoming 15th anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations, which ended in the massacre at Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government used information supplied by Yahoo! to convict Shi Tao.

While we celebrated our books and literary life at Edinburgh, Shi Tao and other prisoners of conscience languish in jail. Shi Tao is held at Chishan Prison, in Yuanjiang, Hunan Province, where reports say he is forced to perform harsh labour. It is not enough for the Chinese government to imprison Shi Tao. Its officials have also pressured his wife to divorce him and have harassed and intimidated other relatives.

China, you will recall, is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. That is the same United Nations whose Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression". And the same China which is hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. But there is no freedom of expression or opinion in China. According to Amnesty International, as of July 2006, 54 internet users were imprisoned for exercising their rights to free speech.

Watching short films in Sao Paulo

LAST night the 18th Sao Paulo International Short Film Festival opened in the glitzy Kinoforum venue here in Sao Paulo. The festival, which will eventually show over 400 films in venues around town, began with just five last night, but they gave a good idea of the range to expect from this quirky genre.

"Film Noir", the opening film by British director Osbert Parker, made for a prime example of why shorts can be hard to enjoy: a three-minute animated homage to noir style, with neither dialogue nor plot. Ho-hum. But the films took off from there: "I'm not here today", from Argentina, follows a young man around town, who hides from life in improbable (but artfully geometric) nooks and crannies, until he meets a kindred spirit. "Madame Tutli Putli" is a macabre Canadian animation in which a train-traveller meets gradually escalating horrors.

"Taxi to Daydreams", made by Asgar Ahlers, a German, and Eder Augusto, a Brazilian, follows a kindly old cab driver who stuns his roughneck clientele by flitting back and forth between Germany and Brazil (the film was shot in both countries). This is the first in a projected series of bi-national shorts, explained Mr Ahlers at the reception afterwards. It's a promising start.

Finally, "The Mozart of Pickpockets", by Philippe Pollet-Villard, a Frenchman, was a nourishing counterbalance to the festival's underwhelming start. Three full characters--two hapless thieves and the deaf-mute boy they recruit--wander through a story with setup, development, crisis, resolution and twist--all in 30 minutes. The laughs were frequent, the characters lovable and the ending satisfying. The film received a grateful round of applause from the audience, made up of Brazil's cinephiles and cineastes. Everyone likes a good story. And it needn't take long to tell one.