George Eliot's Daniel Deronda is rewritten from the anti-heroine's standpoint with intriguing results.
[M]oving Gwendolen on beyond Eliot's ending into the liberating world of fin-de-siecle Bohemianism and allying her to the suffragist movement, the author replaces Deronda's Zionism with a moral cause that sits more comfortably, if predictably, ( Read more... )

Dept of professional aaaaargh: Experience: I bought a long-lost Charlie Chaplin film on eBay. Please, please, tell me you have had it copied from highly unstable nitrate film (a factor you actually mention) on to some more robust medium before it goes up in flames or crumbles to dust.

Dept of, let us try resisting binary distinctions: Oliver ( Read more... )

It seemed particularly apposite to post this in the light of sartorias's post about the perhaps opposite thing of furiously pushing the envelope and walking the cutting edge (ow, ow, said the Little Mermaid) and scorning the mere reader.

Focus groups are muscling their way into the arts. Are they a useful tool - or a death blow to creativity?:
The company ( Read more... )

Some thoughts stimulated by someone's else post (not linking as I'm not sure they'd want that).

In my experience, the more you are of any thing, the more you realise how deficient you are - it's the people who know most about a subject who are cognisant of the gaps in their knowledge and where they fall short. (Indeed, are there any subjects of ( Read more... )