Reviews and News:
What makes a podcast successful? "Even though podcasts share no particular style and very few conventions, a sense of high purpose lingers around them. Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university, or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage. Both types of show are somewhat educational, in the sense that they expose listeners to unfamiliar subjects and subcultures. But the essence of a podcast is to be esoteric, specialized. And sometimes it's hard to draw a line between the specific and the trivial."
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The first episode of a BBC adaptation of Decline and Fall airs Friday.
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Peter Leithart: "Why are Dostoevsky's novels so compulsively readable? What makes his characters seem so alive?"
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Charles Murray edits his Southern Poverty Law Center page: "For years, the protesters I have encountered at colleges have gotten their information about why I am a terrible person from the Charles Murray page at the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). For all of those years, I have ignored that material. But in the aftermath of the Middlebury affair and the attendant publicity citing the SPLC's allegations that I am a white nationalist, white supremacist, racist, and sexist, people who wonder whether these allegations have any basis need to know what I have to say about them. What follows is an edited and expanded version of the SPLC page that I can live with."
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What's happening to Venice? "Seduced by modernity and overwhelmed by tourists, it has neglected its soul: The city's population has declined from its peak in 1951 of 175,000 to less than 60,000 now, and the fabric and detailed dealings of the city's life have been turned over to tourism. To serve it, the Venetians have given their homes over to hotels, becoming commuters from the mainland."
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How painting influenced 19th-century French novelists: "Balzac put more painters into his novels than he did writers, constantly name-checking artists and using them as visual shorthand (old men looked like Rembrandts, innocent girls like Raphaels). Zola, as a young novelist, lived much more among painters than writers, and told Degas that when he needed to describe laundresses he had simply copied from the artist's pictures…Flaubert's favorite living painter (also that of Huysmans's Des Esseintes) was Gustave Moreau, and his Salammbô is like a massive, bejeweled, wall-threatening Salon exhibit—this being both the novel's strength and its weakness."
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Essay of the Day:
Danny Rubin wrote the script for Groundhog Day. None of his scripts have been produced since. Now he's written Groundhog Day the musical. What's it like to be associated with one story for so long? S. I. Rosenbaum finds out:
"After the film Groundhog Day was a success, Rubin started getting calls to work on scripts. He was now a known quantity — he was the guy who wrote Groundhog Day — and all producers seemingly wanted was for him to write the same movie again. A rom-com. Something quirky. But not too quirky. Maybe something with a time warp or a weatherman.
"'They'd say, "Just write something normal and it'll come out Danny Rubin–y. It'll be great,"' he says. 'But I don't want to write something normal! It's messing with the premise and the structure that makes it exciting!'
"It didn't help that he'd moved his family to Santa Fe, New Mexico, before Groundhog Day had even finished shooting. At first, L.A. tried to woo him back, regularly flying him into town. Rubin's brother Michael, who also worked in Hollywood, knew how this was supposed to go: 'They want to meet you for lunch at the Ivy and they want to think you're a totally fun guy,' he says. 'You get in the door because you wrote a hit movie, but they want to see you as a guy they can play with.' But Rubin wouldn't play.
"'It would be like, Goldie Hawn has a dysfunctional family, none of them get along, so they go camping and in the end they all learn to love each other,' Rubin recalls. 'Typically I would say, "Okay, I am going to tell you your movie."' He'd lay out a perfectly respectable studio picture, with a three-act structure and a conventional conclusion. 'And then I'd say, "Under no circumstances am I going to write that movie."' He sighs. 'It took me years to understand that's why the business started disappearing.'"
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Photo: Tardigrade
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Poem: Peter Austin, "The Playground"
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