Hamlet
Why Do People Love 'Catcher in the Rye'?
For the Love of Culture
Fright Night, DC Style
With just over a week until trick or treat, NY mag's "Vulture" has posted its very helpful list of 7 Halloween Costumes to Avoid (paired with savvier alternatives.) READ MORE >>
Out Of Africa
South Africa, to be precise, where I had been previously on four occasions. I promised in my last posting upon my arrival eleven days ago to write when I could. I assured you that I had wi-fi and that the places at which I was staying had wi-fi also. Well, they didn't ... quite. So I piled up my impressions and waited till I returned. Which I have now done. From the warm climes of a South African winter to the torrential rains of a cold east coast summer. READ MORE >>
Will Shakespeare's Come And Gone: Does The Bard's Poetry Reach Us Like August Wilson's? Come On--really?
Reading the deserved critical huzzahs for the current production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone has me thinking about a bee always in my bonnet. Critics swoon over the "poetry" of Wilson's language--but Shakespearean language is equally poetic, and yet I suspect his poetry reaches far fewer of us across an entire evening than Wilson's can, and the reason is language change and how hard a time we have dealing with it. READ MORE >>
Supreme Leader: The Arrogance of Anthony Kennedy
On March 15, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Justice Anthony Kennedy presided over the trial of Hamlet. “All rise!” commanded a bailiff in Elizabethan ruffles. “The Honorable the Eastern High Court for the Kingdom of Denmark is now in session!” As the sold-out house rose to its feet, Kennedy strode onto the bare stage in his black robes, taking a seat behind a judge’s bench framed by an American flag and an enormous portrait of Shakespeare. “Please be seated,” he said graciously. READ MORE >>
The Gift
Marcel Mauss: A Biography By Marcel Fournier Translated by Jane Marie Todd (Princeton University Press, 442 pp., $35) READ MORE >>
The Moral Baby
Wodehouse: A Life By Robert McCrum (W.W. Norton, 530 pp., $27.95) READ MORE >>
War Time
Vachel Lindsay, the poet who was for a time the film critic of The New Republic, published a book in 1915 called The Art of the Moving Picture, a pioneer work in the field. In one of its many comprehensions, he said: "The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it." I thought of Lindsay while I was watching Troy, the latest in a very long line of films made to give us those things that other mediums could not provide. READ MORE >>
New Places Within
SON FRÈRE (Strand) I’M NOT SCARED (Miramax) READ MORE >>
