As you should know by now, I’m easily amused... These resentniks have destroyed the canon yet Lifting Us Up To Do: Let a Thousand Harold Blooms Bloom
It is, alas, the way we love: we are always taking the names of the dead or past characters and applying them to others: I mean all human beings are like this. Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails. But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone... we all live at the heart of a solitude... we all have the consciousness of mortality... I've taught tens of thousands of students, and some of them occasionally come back or send me a letter and let me know that something was communicated to them, that something in their spirit is a touch less lonely
Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Standing the Test of Time
Time was when Cahners Publishing was the king of trade publications, owning such titles as Publishers Weekly and Variety. No more. The company has been piecemealed to death into a shadow of its former self
• The Cahners have left the building [If you were to believe the advertising agencies, sometimes it was egg-shaped, sometimes a cigar called Hamlet, while John Lennon assured us it was a warm gun. It is the thing we desire most, but it can’t be bought. We’re talking, of course, about that elusive concept known as happiness Happiness is no laughing matter ; It seems that the heart wants what the heart wants -- and it can figure it out fairly quickly Falling in Love in Three Minutes or Less ]
• · Single-child families are increasingly common - so why do parents who refuse to have that second baby arouse such hostility? The one and only ; What happened when the Girls Who Had It All became mothers? A new book explores why this generation feels so insane Mommy Madness ; If "50 is the new 30", as they say, with luck we may try for 80 becoming the new 60 Age of the silver surfers
• · · A writer friend once described the brief history of an advertising campaign she worked on that never got off the ground — and thank God, because it sounded so draconian it could have sprung from the loins of Joseph Goebbels himself Does counterculture = consumer culture? ; Some people get high on crack. Other people hyperventilate over vintage Deron Douglas covers Drinker with a Writing Problem ; What thrills us depends on our personal hopes, fears, loves and desires A Robot That Measures Cold Rivers
• · · · The Crikey Army Books that have been pulped for legal reasons ; In the end, it came down to two great offers from two great publishers We Have Our Publisher!
• · · · · Anthony Sher discusses adapting Primo Levi's If This Is a Man for the stage. Sher tentatively distilled If This Is a Man into a first draft without checking on the rights. He then discovered that the Primo Levi estate had decided never to allow anyone to film or stage the book: I respected them for their stance, because the blood does run cold to think of what Hollywood at its worst would make of that book ‘Iron Curtain ... Auschwitz? It's just lunacy ; Bruce Elder reviews a book by Don Chipp entitled Keep the Bastards Honest. The book opens with vintage Chipp berating all Australian politicians for their gutlessness and lack of moral fibre in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Chipp makes good, pragmatic points about the nature of politics. He reflects on the sheer awfulness of a politician’s life and realises that when it comes to truth in the life in modern politics, his boast to keep the basdards honest has very obviously failed. He is one of the rarest species on Earth. A popular politician
• · · · · · Ach, we all remember Red Dean Reed who was an American and the biggest rock star in the history of the Soviet Union. He was so famous his icons were sold alongside those of Josef Stalin. Reggie Nadelson first saw him in 1986 on a TV chat show. A rock star behind the Iron Curtain my friends knew. But few people in the West had ever heard of him. Six weeks later Reed was found dead in a lake in East Berlin. Was he murdered by the CIA? The KGB? A jealous husband? The Russians gave him a Lenin Prize. He was their American. Comrade Rockstar is not just the story of Dean Reed's progress from Hollywood starlet to Cold War Cowboy, but an account of the search that took Reggie Nadelson from Denver to Berlin, and from Hawaii to Moscow. As she travelled, the Berlin Wall was breached and Dean Reed became an increasingly alluring figure, his life an unrepeatable tale from the Cold War. Nadelson captures the seedy, often hilarious subculture of Soviet rock ’n’ roll. He was the embodiment of the whole Eastern Europe’s dream about Amerika ; Dean's death was not a shock for me. I think he committed suicide because that's what a hero must do. When a human really wants to become something, he does. It demands enormous strength. He died having absolutely ruined himself. Dean, in his way, became what he wanted. He did something. He was truly a tale from the cold war From the land of the drowned...