Celebrity role
“Is there a celebrity more reviled than Courtney Love? In the decade since the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain, whose body was found in a garage apartment at his Seattle home on April 8, 1994, we have watched her swear, drug, punch, threaten, litigate, and generally terrorize her way to fame. The spectacle has been alternately riveting and repellant.
“Along the way … Love has made some undeniably powerful music. … Yet these days, when you hear her name, it’s not the music you think of; it’s her drug overdoses, her ’People vs. Larry Flynt’-era makeover, her recent breast-baring for David Letterman. Courtney Love the professional celebrity has eclipsed Courtney Love the professional musician. …
“In short, she behaves like a rock star historically has — drug use, casual sex, and the trashing of hotel rooms were once considered an essential part of the machismo of rock ’n’ roll. … But these days, it seems, we want our rock stars to perform the role of rock star, not actually be one — and when they do behave badly, we want them to apologize for it.”
—Amanda Fortini, writing on “Love Me, Love My Tantrums,” Wednesday in Slate at www.slate.com
Classic dilution
“When my daughter first started enjoying chapter books, I leapt at the chance to share with her my childhood favorites. I had the copies of Kenneth Grahame’s ’The Wind in the Willows’ and E.B. White’s ’Charlotte’s Web’ that my mother had read me and my brother, along with the ’Stuart Little’ that her mother had also read her. One day at the library, I searched for some of my other favorites, like ’Heidi,’ ’Black Beauty’ and ’The Secret Garden.’ Soon I figured out that the library almost exclusively carried children’s classics in a particular series, and I scanned the shelves for the Great Illustrated Classics, greedily filling my arms with them.
“At home, I curled up on the couch with my daughter and began reading ’Black Beauty.’ But was it really this simple, this sparse, I wondered? … Sure enough, although the front cover and the binding offered only the name of the original author, Anna Sewell, small letters on the back said: ’In a specially adapted version by Diedre S. Laiken.’ …
“Taken as a whole, it appears the Great Illustrated Classics has a mission, that being to make all the classics as accessible, and ultimately as vacant, as a third-rate comic book.”
—Hilary Flower, writing on “Abridged too far,” March 29 in Salon at www.salon.com
’Cannon fodder’
“While Paul Hornung has offered an apology for saying Notre Dame should lower its academic standards ’to get black athletes,’ his comments have focused on competitive college sport frenzies that use African Americans as cannon fodder. …
“According to the latest NCAA graduation data, 16 [college basketball] teams selected for the ’March Madness’ playoffs had player graduation rates of 25 percent or less. Four of the schools did not graduate a single basketball player within the six years of the study. …
“Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, has said that his own studies over the past 10 years found that more than 50 Division I basketball programs had failed to graduate even one African American player.”
—Bill Alexander, writing on “Hornung’s Nest Stings Colleges Over Black Athletes; NCAA Data Damning,” April 1 at www.bet.com
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