The Browser - Arts & Literature

Note To Our Readers: RSS Feeds | Robert Cottrell | The Browser | 28 March 2013

The Browser — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:06:01 +0000

As part of our move to a new platform and new hosting today, we are consolidating our RSS feeds into a one full feed, to which you can subscribe at this address (if it's not live now it will be soon): http://thebrowser.com/feed

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Roman Abramovich And The Desecration Of London | Harry Mount | Spectator | 28 March 2013

The Browser — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:04:57 +0000

London's finest houses are being hollowed out and knocked through to suit billionaire buyers who want huge, swanky living spaces. "Those handsome corridors, stairs, doors and walls are heading for the skip. And, with them, goes the odd, private, shy genius of the British terraced house: our greatest contribution to world architecture"

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Spitballing Indy | Patrick Radden Keefe | New Yorker | 26 March 2013

The Browser — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 06:21:50 +0000

How to make a Hollywood blockbuster — in this case, Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Notes from conversations in which George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan hashed out ideas for plot and hero, “the doctor with the bullwhip”, whom Lucas first wanted to call Indiana Smith, and who borrowed much of his style from Bogart

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Is Wagner Bad For Us? | Nicholas Spice | London Review Of Books | 26 March 2013

The Browser — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:51:22 +0000

"If there is a common denominator to the attacks on Wagner’s work as bad for us it is the idea that it causes a loss of self-control or volition in the listener: that, in representing emotional states beyond normal bounds, it lures us into these states so that we lose what Auden called our ‘dream of safety’." But how does Wagner achieve this?

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Trip To Nowhere | John Podhoretz | Weekly Standard | 23 March 2013

The Browser — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:41:19 +0000

"I won’t say Spring Breakers is the worst movie ever made, because it should bear no distinction, even one designed to indicate the depths of its wretchedness. This dreadful waste of time scrapes the bottom of the pop culture barrel so severely that, by the end of its 80-minute running time, even the dregs have found a way to escape"

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The Chapman Brothers On Life As Artists' Assistants | Stuart Jeffries | Guardian | 13 March 2013

The Browser — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 10:52:07 +0000

"The relationship between artist and artist's assistant is vexed, ripe for oedipal tensions, mutual resentments, or at least spitting in the great master's lapsang souchong". Dinos and Jack Chapman worked for Gilbert and George, colouring prints, before making names for themselves: "We coloured in Gilbert and George's penises for eight hours a day"

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An "A" From Nabokov | Edward Jay Epstein | New York Review Of Books | 22 March 2013

The Browser — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 07:07:52 +0000

Reminiscence. "I wandered into Lit 311 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Cornell in September 1954. I was just shopping for a class that met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. The professor was Vladimir Nabokov, an émigré from tsarist Russia. About six feet tall and balding, he stood, with what I took to be an aristocratic bearing"

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Celebrity Britten | Ian Bostridge | Times Literary Supplement | 20 March 2013

The Browser — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:17:33 +0000

If the subject of Benjamin Britten doesn't enthral you to start with, you may find this piece heavy going. But if it does, then this is an expert treatment of Britten's life and work on the centenary of his birth. Admirers thought him the equal of Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Critics found his work thin and schematic — all head and no heart

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Ten Most Influential Travel Books | Tony Perrottet | Smithsonian | 21 March 2013

The Browser — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 16:05:30 +0000

"What follows is a brazenly opinionated short-list of travel classics—some notorious, some barely remembered—that have inspired armchair travelers to venture out of their comfort zone and hit the road." From Herodotus to Peter Mayall by way of Marco Polo, Mark Twain, Norman Douglas, Freya Stark, Jack Kerouac and Bruce Chatwin

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Truth And Melodrama And Phil Spector | David Mamet | Medium | 20 March 2013

The Browser — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 07:57:45 +0000

Playwright discusses the structure of melodrama. "We know any drama ends when we find the answer to the question which gave rise to it. When we discover the answer simultaneously with the hero, the dramatist has done a very good job indeed". Casablanca is an excellent example. Rick himself doesn't know how it will end, until it ends

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