Reviews and News:
Benjamin Riley reviews Simon De Pury’s unintentionally revealing The Auctioneer: Adventures in the Art: “The trouble starts on the first page of Simon de Pury’s memoir, The Auctioneer. What could one expect of a book that begins with the sentence: ‘If anybody needed a rebound, it was I’? He uses the word ‘tycoon’ twice and bellows the faux-literary exhortation—’O Captain!’ There is no relief to be found on the second page where de Pury, the former president of the Phillips de Pury auction house, compares the breakup of his affair (with ARTINFO’s patroness, Louise Blouin MacBain) to the felling of the Twin Towers by al Qaeda.”
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The storage vault of the Musée Girodet has flooded. Hundreds of works have been damaged.
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Matthew Walther attends the Reason Rally in D.C.: “On my way to the rally, just outside the World War II Memorial, I see my first two attendees—unless they are just random tourists wearing ‘There is no God. Have a great day!’ t-shirts—lose control of their Segway electric scooters and crash into one another. ‘Oh, F—!’ one of them shouts. An older couple standing about 20 feet away looks over at them. The man, who is finishing a Popsicle, rolls his eyes, but the woman bows her head thoughtfully. I think she has decided to be embarrassed on their behalf.”
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B. Mitchell Cator has been accused of plagiarizing in his recently released All The Good That Remains.
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The new Harry Potter play apparently contains a number of surprises. (None of which are revealed in this article.)
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Remember the Endeavour voyage of 1768: “No European ship had ever charted this part of the largely unknown continent before. Nor had it yet acquired its name of Australia. Banks, when he went ashore, was so thrilled by the new and wonderful plants he found that Cook named that part of the coast Botany Bay. The expedition then sailed northwards, battling its way for a thousand miles along the labyrinthine length of the Great Barrier Reef, before finally being able to turn westwards into the archipelagos of what is now Indonesia. And so back home.”
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David Bahr reviews an “exceptional collection” of Greek artifacts.
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Essay of the Day:
In Humanities, Jennifer Howard tells the story of how hypertexts were first used in an English classroom over 40 years ago:
“Worried about the decline of literacy, an overworked English professor turns to technology to engage students daunted by complex literary texts. It could be a 2016 case study in humanities education. But that scenario played out more than 40 years ago at Brown University, when Robert Scholes, a professor of English, wanted to find a fresh approach to teaching English and American poetry to easily distracted, poetry-averse undergraduates.
“Help arrived in the form of Andries (‘Andy’) van Dam, a professor of computer science at Brown and a giant in the field of computer design. Students of van Dam’s went on to influential jobs, working with Steve Jobs at Apple and at Pixar Studios. Stories circulate that the character Andy in Toy Story is based on van Dam, and that Andy in the film has a copy of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice, a classic coauthored by the Brown computer scientist, on his bookshelf.
“Digital humanities projects have come into their own in recent years, their rise fueled in part by grants from NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. But in the 1970s a computer scientist still seemed like an unlikely pedagogical ally for a humanities professor.
“Van Dam, though, had been exploring how to use computing power for all kinds of research, defying administrators who believed that expensive mainframe time should be reserved for the hard sciences. Humanists, one told him, should write their papers on typewriters and leave computing to physicists and engineers.
“Undeterred, van Dam secured a grant from the education division of the National Endowment for the Humanities to support what he called ‘an experiment in computer-based education using hypertext.’ He and Scholes set out to test whether computers could engage students in deeper analysis of undergraduate-daunting poets like Wallace Stevens.”
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Image of the Day: Surfing in Sydney
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Poem: Debra Bruce, “Swim for the Cure”
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