theater

Jacket Copy: “Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ to be film”

David Strathairn, Alan Alda, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker and Paul Rudd will join the cast of the film “Howl,” according to today’s Hollywood Reporter. […] The roles of the new cast members — lawyer, judge — indicate that the film will highlight the 1956-57 obscenity trial against publisher City Lights.

Jacket Copy: “Neal Stephenson: a deeper look”

Author Neal Stephenson (“Cryptonomicon,” “The Baroque Cycle,” “Snow Crash”) has just published a new novel, “Anathem.” L.A. Times staff writer Scott Timberg talked to Stephenson for an upcoming profile. But since you’ll have to wait a few days for that, we thought we’d share some excerpts from his recent interviews with the author.

Weekly Standard: “Forty Years On: Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and the end of the Soviet empire.”

By Stoppard’s own admission, the play is a modified rendering of the extended argument that took place between Václav Havel and Milan Kundera about their country under communism. Stoppard tells us in his excellent introduction to the Rock ‘n’ Roll script that Jan was originally called Tomás, not just because this is the playwright’s own birth name but because it is that of Kundera’s lothario physician in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Jan’s friend and sparring partner in Prague, the passionate intellectual Ferdinand, is named for Ferdinand Vanek, Havel’s alter ego in three of his plays, Audience, Private View, and Protest. So here, roughly, are our stand-ins for a great Czech debate between two titans of 20th-century resistance.

April 23rd is shared as a birthday by several people of importance to me, one of whom is of the greatest importance of all. :)

First up, in 1564, a certain William Shakespeare who wrote, amongst other famous works, a sonnet which was read at Denyse’s and my wedding:

CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me prov'd,
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Next up, in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov — my favorite writer. He wrote this:

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

And finally — Denyse, my amazing wife. Our 10th wedding anniversary is coming up in June, and it feels simultaneously like it went by in a flash and like we’ve been together forever. Happy birthday and much love to you, D!

This is what I like to see — futuristic technology married to historical information. From the Google Earth Blog:

Google Does Shakespeare - Google Earth Files Available

Recently Google Books created a dedicated web site to the works of Shakespeare which includes the complete plays available for viewing online. It also includes links to Google searches in the Google Images, Scholar, Groups, and News. They even mention that if you download Google Earth you can find the famous location in England where Shakespeare’s original plays took place - the Globe Theater, as well as a model of the theater….

There is also an excellent collection of placemarks showing the places quoted in Shakespeare’s plays…