Richard’s Blanco’s One Day
Nothing like an inauguration and a pop of poetry to inspire one’s day. Happy MLK Day to all. “One Today” One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One...
Carlos Fuentes, “The Old Gringo” novelist, essayist, 1928-2012
“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns...
Ken Russell, Film Director 1927-2011
The Music Lovers. Women in Love. The Devils. The Boyfriend. Tommy. Altered States. Could anyone combine the prurient and the literary, the highbrow and low rent more effectively than Ken Russell? His best films actually look better now than when they were made; the worst (Lizstomania, Gothic, The Lair of the White Worm) remain loopy...
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Season’s Dreams
A reason for the seasons was what I got when, in grade school, I was taught the myth of Demeter and Persephone; the idea that a spell could be cast to wither grass and leaves made a stronger impression than the myth’s true focus: a mother’s longing for a daughter she could only see six...
Lanford Wilson 1937-2011, Farley Granger 1925-2011
Angels Fall. Burn This. Balm in Gilead. The Fifth of July. Redwood Curtain. Lanford Wilson wrote these and more; when I saw them back in the 80s I felt privy to what seemed a golden age of theater. To experience his plays is to witness the theater at its most human, but also its most...
Worry World
Like the weather, the gloomy words of literature threaten to upend. I’ve been reading Christopher Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River; last night I got to the part where one of the characters commits a heinous act. I was so mad at him I almost threw the book across the room. I tossed...
An Understanding of Our Nature
“I wanted to sound an alarm. But nothing had happened.” Alfieri, A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller. In the current revival of A View from the Bridge, the alarms ring throughout. The play’s big Greek epiphany centers on a matter of trust: Eddie Carbone, the dockworker, commits a betrayal so huge that...
Lucille Clifton, Poet 1936-2010
sisters by Lucille Clifton me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time...
J.D. Salinger 1919-2010
Or Jerome David, as he was known to his folks. Author of the penultimate coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye (and my personal favorite half-novel Franny and Zoey). RIP.
The Strange Ways of Love
Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Before Decreation, the new William Forsythe work that appeared this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Gilman Opera House, there was Anne Carson’s Decreation, the title of a book and essay. The word doesn’t appear in Webster’s, but Carson defines it as “… an undoing of the creature...
