“Z is a nice letter, and I am glad it is not Y, I do not care for Y, why, well there is the reason why, I do not care for Y, but Z is a nice letter. I like Z because it is not real it just is not real and so it is a nice letter to you and nice to me, you will see.”
Tag: 05.21.12
Author Of An Officer And A Gentleman Musical Smacks Back At Show’s Harshest Review
Douglas Day Stewart, screenwriter of the Oscar-winning film and co-writer of the stage show: “After four decades in this business I can tell you this was not a review by any standards. It was an ‘execution’ by someone clearly unable to feel human emotion, or to put it in a kinder way, by someone whose highbrow tastes do not represent you.”
My Grandma And Martha Gellhorn
Amy Shearn’s family found, among her grandmother’s papers, a stack of elegant and quirky letters from the famous writer and war correspondent, who had been an old family friend in St. Louis. (The whole bit about having been Mrs. Ernest Hemingway barely figured.)
Spoilers Just Make You Enjoy The Story More (According To Research)
“[In] a controlled experiment, ‘subjects significantly preferred spoiled over unspoiled stories in the case of both … ironic twist stories and … mysteries.’ In fact, it seems ‘that giving away … surprises makes readers like stories better.’ perhaps because of the ‘pleasurable tension caused by the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character’.”
Philip K. Dick, Gnostic Philosopher
“[His] vision is not quite Christian in the traditional sense; it is Gnostical: it is the mystical intellection, at its highest moment a fusion with a transmundane or alien God who is identified with logos and who can communicate with human beings in the form of a ray of light or, in Dick’s case, hallucinatory visions.” (All this from a dose of sodium pentothal …)
Michael Kaiser On Watching A Good Turnaround Plan Stall
“There is no disagreement among senior staff; they all agree that these steps are critical and should be pursued. But nothing has happened. Every time I meet with them they raise questions about the wording of the plan, the timing for involving more staff and board members in the planning process, and the need for further discussion.”
England’s Northern Ballet In BBC Arts Troubleshooter Documentary
“The programme follows Michael Lynch, former Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre in London & the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, as he works with Northern Ballet’s dancers and staff to discover what’s going wrong and how they can prevent the impending loss of dancers following a 15% cut in Arts Council funding.”
Beyond L.A.’s Giant Rock: The Logistics Of Getting A Henry Moore Sculpture Into A London Gallery
“The epic seriousness, the male and female interplay, the weathered air of age: Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms evoke all these things in their first ever indoor show at the Gagosian Gallery in London. Yet they also pose a rather mundane question: how on earth did that get in here? Extremely carefully, is the short answer.”
Read Ernest Hemingway’s Reporting For The Toronto Star
“The legendary writer’s reporting from the Toronto Star archives, featuring historical annotations by William McGeary, a former editor who researched Hemingway’s columns extensively for the newspaper, along with new insight and analysis from the Star‘s team of Hemingway experts.”
Meet ‘The New Elizabethans’
To celebrate Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, BBC Radio 4 listeners and a panel of historians and writers selected 60 of the Queen’s subjects (i.e., from the Commonwealth, not just the UK) who had the greatest impact on the 60 years of her reign.