Author: Laura Collins Hughes

Go Ahead: Crack That Spine!

“I find it difficult to respect books as objects, and see no harm whatsoever in abusing them. … Once a book is mine, I see no reason to read it with kid gloves. And if you have ever seen a printing press disgorge best sellers at 20,000 copies an hour, you might be tempted to agree. It is the content of books that counts, not the books themselves — no matter how well they furnish a room.”

The New Medievalism: Fortresses Grow Around Us

“After 9/11, a craving for the solidity of walls reasserted itself. … Four years after the American invasion of Iraq, this state of siege is beginning to look more and more like a permanent reality, exhibited in an architectural style we might refer to as 21st-century medievalism. Like their 13th- to 15th-century counterparts, contemporary architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense….”

Diagnosing Philoctetes (And His Physicians)

What does Sophocles’ “Philoctetes” have to teach medical students about their troubled patients and themselves? “We have created a subclass of patients like Philoctetes with modern medicine,” said a director who staged a reading for some first-year Cornell students. “They are abandoned on their islands to live long, but have we risen to the challenge of taking emotional care of them?”

From Novelist To Library, A No-Strings $100K

“Count best-selling novelist James Patterson among the admirers of the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library. Count him an admirer to the sweet tune of $100,000. That’s the amount that the Florida writer will contribute to Center for the Book over the next four years, as it is the top winner of Patterson’s second annual PageTurner Awards.”

ACT Head Turns Fundraiser; Replacement Is A Novice

“Longtime ACT Theatre managing director Susan Trapnell is stepping aside to make room for a new top administrator: Jolanne Stanton. The widely respected Trapnell is not leaving ACT but will take on a newly created position as executive director of endowment funding. … Stanton, who will run the day-to-day business at ACT, is a Seattle resident who joined ACT’s board of directors in 2006 and has worked on its strategic planning as a volunteer.”

Auden At Centennial: Popular, And Still Defiant

A century after his birth, W.H. Auden “resists the efforts of readers to delimit him or publishers to comfortably sell him…. The poet who makes me go to his beloved OED to find out what those obscure, toothsome words mean is the same poet who demanded that the poems in his first Collected Poetry in 1945 be printed alphabetically according to the first word of each poem rather than chronologically, so as to frustrate readers’ preconceived notions about him.”

Influential, Unacknowledged, Feminist Art Gets Its Due

“As we head into a month full of exhibitions devoted to feminist art — including the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles — a reasonable question might be: Why now? Why, 30 years after the heyday of the feminist art movement, are we putting this work under the lens?”

Staging Woolf’s ‘Lighthouse’: Bad Idea. Here’s Why.

“There may be more difficult novels to adapt to the stage … but Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ is right up there with the most intractable. Scant of dialogue and old-fashioned plot, this classic of modernism defies anyone to spin a play out of its flowing stream of consciousness. Berkeley Repertory deserves credit for undertaking the project, though the solutions it advances … confirm the obvious: Some art — the greatest perhaps — can only be fully appreciated on its own inflexible terms.”