Tuesday, October 31, 2017

The Remarkable Magnetic North Theatre Festival Gets A Second Chance

"For one thing, it goes to small places other than Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the country, where people are underserved in terms of having access to the work of Canadian artists. It is also a gathering place where everyone from students to audiences to artists can come together to meet and talk; and it is also a showcase for Canadian artists who don't have a lot of platforms for their work. There are more now – but an opportunity for presenters to see a lot of Canadian work in one place in a short period of time is very important."



Article source here:Arts Journal

What Data Scientists Are Learning From Crunching Literature

The oddest finding may be the sharp increase in an innocuous little word: “and.” In 1946, “and” accounted for around 2.6 percent of the words in the reports, a frequency similar to that of average academic prose. But by 2015, as this chart shows, its share had almost doubled, reflecting what the researchers describe as the growing tendency toward long lists of nouns that create the illusion of activity, sometimes despite a “total absence of logic.”



Article source here:Arts Journal

Data: A Revolution In Understanding Literature? (Controversial, To Say The Least)

Literary criticism typically tends to emphasize the singularity of exceptional works that have stood the test of time. But the canon, Franco Moretti argues, is a distorted sample. Instead, he says, scholars need to consider the tens of thousands of books that have been forgotten, a task that computer algorithms and enormous digitized databases have now made possible. “We know how to read texts,” he wrote in a much-quoted essay included in his book “Distant Reading,” which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. “Now let’s learn how to not read them.”



Article source here:Arts Journal

Teachers At NY Arts School Of "Fame" Renown Protest Arts Cutbacks

Founded as an arts school in 1936, LaGuardia was immortalized in the 1980 film “Fame.” Alumni include a galaxy of stars such as Liza Minnelli, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Vanessa Williams and Jennifer Aniston, along with top artists, composers and musicians.



Article source here:Arts Journal

How Hollywood Is Cashing In On The Nostalgia Economy

These companies tap into our emotional longing for simpler times; even Socrates yearned for the days before this new-fangled technology called “reading” ruined everything (paywall). Never content with the cards we’ve been dealt, we keep on turning old ones over, wanting to escape into their familiar embrace.



Article source here:Arts Journal

Being Hemingway (No Piece Of Cake)

"Perhaps a man possessed of an ego the size of a hot-air balloon could only subsist within a myth. To keep himself airborne required so much huffing and puffing that inevitably he ran out of breath. He was jealous, insecure, treacherous to his friends, and merciless toward his promoters—no good turn, no matter how good it was, went unpunished—and although he overestimated his talent, he also largely wasted it, which was precisely the charge he had laid against his old pal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, with The Great Gatsby, surely did write if not the then at least agreat American novel."



Article source here:Arts Journal

And Thus Was The Angriest Librarian Born...

"While I never intended to become The Angriest Librarian, a lifelong inability to hold my tongue—and my frustration with the permeating stereotypes of 1950s-era public libraries—seems to have made it inevitable. So, when I was confronted with yet another blowhard who couldn’t see the value his tax dollars were placing right in front of his face, I had no choice. Over the next few days, I picked up 15,000 followers and found myself in a position to become a public face for my besieged profession."



Article source here:Arts Journal

Academy Decides Not To Bar Streaming Movies From Oscars

The board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “left intact Rule Two, the one that established that a film” — in...