Cynthia Haven had posted on Robert Harrison’s meetings on Boccacio’s The Decameron, the book that seems to all be the rage given the situation now. Her posts can be found here and here. If, like me, you missed the meetings, you can listen to them at his Entitled Opinions website: Pandemic, Dread, and Boccaccio’s Decameron […]
Once again, many thanks to Terry Teachout for directing me to American Shakespeare Center’s online productions. From his wsj.com article: To date I’ve watched “Much Ado About Nothing” and both installments of “Henry IV, ” all of which are part of ASC’s “Actors’ Renaissance” series, which takes Elizabethan-style authenticity a radical step further. These productions, […]
Many thanks once again for Terry Teachout’s post on Houston Alley Theatre’s production of 1984, available online through April 12. More information can be found at their website [Note: link no longer available], and the playbill can be found on issuu. I’ve found Terry’s blog extremely informational and enjoyable. His posts in the last few […]
Just when I think reality can’t get any weirder, I find out it already did. Thanks (I think) to DangerousMinds.net for their article The Oddly Inappropriate Spec TV Commercial for Never-Produced Caligula Action Figures. I’ve seen a lot of strange things, and I’m happy to say the 1980 movie Caligula directed by Penthouse owner/editor Bob […]
Many thanks to Terry Teachout for the article on Syracuse Stage’s video production of the stage play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer. As Teachout notes, Syracuse Stage’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” directed by Robert Hupp, is a thrilling staging of one of the best English-language plays of the 20th century, and it comes across online […]
Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos, 1797–1798, Etching and Aquatint.From Wikipedia CommonsAt the risk of overwhelming you with Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, I wanted to relay this complete essay by László F. Földényi at The Paris Review posted last week. I’m only about a third of the […]
Beginning tonight and continuing each day for the duration of the Met’s closure, an encore presentation from the company’s Live in HD series will be made available from 7:30 p.m. EDT until 3:30 p.m. the following day. More information at the Met’s website. Quite an impressive line-up for the first week: Monday, March 16: Bizet’s […]
Travel & Leisure recently posted an article titled Stuck at Home? These 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take on Your Couch. The twelve museums are British Museum, London Guggenheim Museum, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Musée d’Orsay, Paris National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Pergamon Museum, Berlin […]
It seems like a good time for long articles to read while at home. One article I highly recommend is Mike Shropshire’s article in the October 1987 D Magazine titled “The Silent Spring of Walker Railey” regarding the attack on Peggy Railey, wife of high-profile Methodist minister Walker Railey. I lived in Dallas at the […]
Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a conservative German legal, constitutional, and political theorist. Schmitt is often considered to be one of the most important critics of liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and liberal cosmopolitanism. But the value and significance of Schmitt’s work is subject to controversy, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with National […]
Last week, TCM aired the 1963 TV documentary Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment directed by Robert Drew. From the linked DrewAssociates link: When Governor George Wallace literally stands in the schoolhouse door to block the admittance of two African-American students to the all-white University of Alabama in June 1963, President Kennedy is forced to decide […]
Kafka, Čapek, Kundera and Havel, these are all world renowned names, but what about all the others? How well are Czech authors actually known abroad? Can you find a bookshop in Berlin, Madrid, Moscow, Paris or New York that aside from classics such as The Good Soldier Švejk also sell the works of contemporary Czech […]
(Pictures from hlo.hu) László F. Földényi was author of the month for February at Hungarian Literature Online, and they have closed out the month with a bang. Today they provided one of Földényi’s essays, “Goya’s Dog,” at their site. The translation is by Ottilie Mulzet, the same translator for the collection of essays Dostoyevsky Reads […]
Last night I attended a lecture by Maria Pia Paganelli, president of the International Adam Smith Society. The talk was part of the Adam Smith Lecture Series at Boise State University. Some of the previous years’ lectures are described at their site as well as links to recordings of them. It looks like quite the […]
There’s also a great entry in one of Hawthorne’s journals about when Hawthorne became the ambassador to England. He invited Melville to come visit him and they walked on the moors. Apparently Hawthorne wrote something like: “Out rambling on the moors all morning with Melville this morning. God again.” That’s an eloquent two word summary […]
Sorry for the extended silence, but it’s been an eventual couple of months during the sale and move. The move-in is more or less complete, tons of unpacking still needs to be done (including all my books), and we’ll actually all be together here before the end of the month. For someone whose life ambition […]
Things are going to be busier than normal until year-end. We’re packing up our house over the next week, then camping out in our home for a couple of weeks before the sale closes. Working on finishing up the semester for the boys is taking more work than getting them enrolled in their new schools, […]
One of my favorite magazines/journals has been Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, published by Contra Mundum Press. Unfortunately there hasn’t been an issue in four years (see update) but there should be a new issue available later this month. The CMP folks were nice enough to send me the table of contents for the […]
We’ve all heard the quote attributed to Cicero. I’ve still got the Amazon refrigerator magnet with the quote. But is it really a body without a soul? Especially when books and souls meant something completely different to Cicero than they do to us today. Without a doubt, I can say the house feels emptier without […]
Many thanks to Michael Orthofer at The Literary Saloon for passing on information about the George Eliot Archive. The George Eliot Archive is an extensive resource for anyone studying the author best known as George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans), one of the most highly acclaimed novelists in Western literature. The Archive provides free access […]