The news about Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb squelching Opera News is pretty juicy stuff. While I can sympathize with the man’s wincing at criticisms of his productions in his magazine, surely he must have known that there’s no way the new policy is going to do any favors for him or the Met. And with La Cieca’s editorial cartoon on the topic, I rest my case.
The ruckus did send me over to the May SLJ on my desk, hoping to find something with which to threaten Rebecca Miller with a chair over the head and thus prove the editorial independence of both our journals but, alas, I found myself in complete agreement with her editorial. I suppose I could find some scorn in my heart for the campaign to get a librarian on Glee, but I can’t blame SLJ for the inexorable fangirling of our profession. But anyone who expects that said librarian character should “smash stereotypes” obviously doesn’t watch the show.
[UPDATE: The Met reversed the ban.]
About Roger Sutton
Then there is the “Amazon v newspaper: which is the more valuable review?” debate: http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/may/22/amazon-newspaper-review-fiction?cat=books&type=article
I remember when Betsy Hearne invited one of her former students to report back to our Children’s LIt class about being a Chicago Public librarian. Roger, you might remember who it was. Twenty-five years later, all I can remember is her frustration at having more than sixty kids show up at the same time in a library the size of a small shop, all of them wanting exactly the same books because they had a sheet of trivia questions they had to answer by the next day. I think she confessed to posting all the answers so the kids could just copy them down.