More Irish singers are being heard in more varied roles than at any other stage in my professional lifetime. Irish works are being taken abroad. The company has been rewarded with international awards and award nominations. – Irish Times
Lucette Destouches, Widow Of Paul Céline, Has Died At 107
Destouches defended the French writer, and their anti-Semitic and intensely pro-Nazi stance, for decades. “‘She followed him into the depths of hell with a love, an admiration and an affection that was absolute,’ Frédéric Vitoux, one of Céline’s biographers, wrote of Ms. Destouches.” – Washington Post
Little Women, The Book, Was Radical And Feminist In Its Day
And Greta Gerwig’s new movie version of it makes an attempt to reflect that. “We may these days … be surrounded by books containing extraordinary girls – Lyra, Hermione, Katniss – but it is striking that they are exceptions, and often alone; groups of girls in, say, the Gossip Girl books are toxic and destructive. Little Women is about ‘a world of women, of value in and of itself.’ It is also, Gerwig has said, ‘one of the few books about childhood that isn’t about escape. There is bravery, but it’s a hero’s journey contained inside the home.'” – The Guardian (UK)
Trying To Leap The Three Big Arts Barriers With A Dance Company In San Diego
Peter Kalivas says his PGK Dance Project, begun 25 years ago while he was working as a professional dancer in Munich, “must always be attempting to resolve the three main barriers the professional arts constantly face: affordability, accessibility and relevance.” – San Diego Union-Tribune
How Would An Ideal World Look, And Why Were Books Better Before The Nuclear Bomb?
The author of Ducks, Newburyport (yes, the 1,000-page, one-sentence novel) has some ideas. Lucy Ellmann: “I find the annual celebration of contemporary writing, the Xmas lists of 2019 books, quite offensive. It seems so arrogant. These lists suggest that the most relevant books must be the ones most recently published. That’s daft. It’s nice of people to take an interest in new writing of course, especially when one has a book out that year oneself, but let’s face it, it’s a marketing ploy. They want to shift some books, and to do so they glory in the ‘now’ – while everybody knows readers would get more from reading Ulysses or Woolf or Kafka.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Best ‘Cats’ Joke, Among Quite A Few Contenders, Is In ‘Angels In America’
Truly, if you’ve seen the movie trailer, there’s no missing the multitude of jokes just sort of … oh, let’s say it … hanging there to be batted around. However, Angels in America won the competition long ago with Roy Cohn making a joke about the musical: “It’s the rare Cats joke that successfully makes fun of Cats and also punches back at people who think they’re interesting for making fun of Cats. It’s appropriately as chaotic as Cats itself.” – Vulture
One More (Rather Judgmental, As Is The Point) Voice Against The Collective Turner Prize
A judge for next year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction probably won’t be awarding multiple prizes, looks like: “If you can’t get past this inherent flaw in the business of prizegiving – that there can only be one winner – then frankly you can’t be involved on any level and you should absent yourself from the process, whether as a judge, nominee or fan.” – The Observer (UK)
Online Film Critics Give ‘Parasite’ Best Film And Best Director Nods
Ironically, the New York Film Critics Online meet in person to vote on the awards. (Also awarded: Lupita Nyong’o, Joaquin Phoenix, Laura Dern, and Joe Pesci.) – The Hollywood Reporter
Women Keep Novels, And Reading In General, Alive
Who buys 80 percent – that’s a super, super, super majority – of novels? You knew it: Women. But our love for novels, as the narrator in Anna Burns’ The Milkman experiences, seems to be a challenge for some other humans. “William Thackeray called fiction ‘sweets’ – to ensure a balanced diet, he also recommended ‘roast,’ by which he meant nonfiction. It’s surprising how enduring these puritanical associations have proved; fiction is still seen as ‘a slippery slope to idle self-indulgence,’ as Taylor has it. One of her correspondents wrote: ‘having an affair is dangerous, masturbation requires solitude and privacy. Reading a book offers both without anyone noticing.'” – The Observer (UK)
A Performance Artist Ripped The $120,000 Banana Off The Wall At Art Basel Miami – And Ate It
The New York-based performance artist David Datuna recorded for Instagram (of course) the removal and eating of the banana, a much-discussed artwork by Maurizio Cattelan. But, plot twist: “Gallery officials replaced the banana with another one, saying that the artwork was not destroyed and that the banana was simply an ‘idea.'” – The New York Times
This Nobel Prizewinner Says The World Demands A New Narrative Style
Olga Tokarczuk, in a lecture in Sweden, said it’s time for a sort of fourth-person narration: “We can regard this figure of a mysterious, tender narrator as miraculous and significant. This is a point of view, a perspective, from which everything can be seen. Seeing everything means recognizing the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.” – Washington Post (AP)