Sunday links
After a (rather wonderful) week in Yorkshire I feel connected again – our house had no wi-fi and the 3G felt more like 0.0003G for much of the time. So it’s back to the Links, which are now presented in a stripped-down form (you’ll note I have taken that explanation out of the title) and lacking credits where they have been recommended to me by someone else. Apologies for the latter omission, but – as I have discovered previously – if I try to do that properly I never complete these posts – nor anything else in my life. So these are simply things I have found useful, engaging, compelling and enriching over the past fortnight or so.
• Zip, zero, zeitgeist: David Bordwell as good as ever, reflects on the absurdities of reflectionism.
• The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, review – ‘a fine, packed volume’: Kazan (that’s him above) is an endlessly interesting figure, and for the Telegraph Philip Horne welcomes an edited volume of his letters.
• What hurt feelings – the untold story of the 31-year battle over Flashdance: Soraya Roberts at BuzzFeed on a cautionary and compelling tale from the 1980s.
• Vertical framing – authenticity and new aesthetic practice in online videos: a truly stimulating article by Mirian Ross at Refractory, which is accompanied by this video essay:
Vertical Framing Video Essay from Miriam Ross on Vimeo.
• Live from the moon: Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker on television’s live coverage of the first moon walk.
• Colour music: Luke McKernan is fascinating on the history of the ‘colour organ’ and the art of playing colour music.
• The Ajanta cave murals – ‘nothing less than the birth of Indian art’: William Dalrymple for the Guardian.
• What cartoons can do: beautifully written by Bob Mankoff for The New Yorker, and beautifully illustrated.
• Garry Winogrand’s lonely America: an interview by Eve Bowen with photographer Dominque Nabokov at the New York Review of Books.
• Interactive timeline of Concretopia: a terrific complement to John Grindrod’s excellent book (which I would have loved to have turned into a TV film).
• Paper palaces: another New Yorker piece, in this case a profile of architect Shigeru Ban written by Dana Goodyear.
• Meet me at the fair – a World’s Fair reader: newly published by Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press – and free to download – collection of essays edited by Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse, Bobby Schweizer; strongly recommended.
• Early modern porn wars: a short but satisfying post by Hal Gladfelder for the OUP blog.
• Visualizing The White Devil: at her Digital Shakespeares blog Erin Sullivan discusses some of the visual references for Maria Aberg’s current RSC production of Webster’s tragedy (which I would have also loved to make as a television film).
• Tolstoy translated: the Russian author’s biographer Rosamund Bartlett, who has a new translation forthcoming of Anna Karenina, writes for the Financial Times about others who have rendered the great writer’s words into English.
• It kills everything it touches: on the perils of studying Geoff Dyer: Daniel Marc Janes at a conference about, and with, the writer, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
• The spy who loved me: exceptional journalism from Lauren Collins for, yes, The New Yorker, about the undercover police spies in Britain in the 1980s.
• John Curry – the ice king: from Observer Books, a remarkable biographical tale by Bill Jones.
• How the web lost its way – and its founding principles: Stuart Jeffries for the Guardian.
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