― Kurt Vonnegut
The Director's Role: You are the obstetrician. You are not the parent of this child we call the play. You are present at its birth for clinical reasons, like a doctor or midwife. Your job most of the time is simply to do no harm. "When something does go wrong, however, your awareness that something is awry--and your clinical intervention to correct it--can determine whether the child will thrive or suffer, live or die.
-Frank Hauser, Notes on Directing
L.A. Times book critic David L. Ulin went to see "Gatz" last weekend -- that's a live stage version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Ulin's review is forthcoming in the L.A. Times, but he gives us a preview of his thoughts -- and then we talked about what makes an adaptation successful
To think of shadows is a serious thing Rebus reborn
The cranky detective is back with a spring in his step
• Melancholy ; Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it. At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own. [Dream like a river that never runs dry; If some frail tubercular lady circus rider were to be driven in circles around and around the arena for months and months “Up in the Gallery” — Franz KafkaChristopher Fowler on Ian Rankin’s Standing In Another Man’s Grave: “Rankin gives us bare and melancholy locations, ruminations on mortality and an inner darkness born of his hero spending time in too many autopsy rooms, but Rebus remains crime fiction’s most consistent character, even though his television incarnation conjures a slightly different figure.”
an ancient monastic practice, whereby Irish monks would set themselves adrift in a boat with no sail or rudder, that God might choose where they would end up. You might, not wholly without cause, ask yourself what class of an eejit would travel any distance without some reliable means of setting a heading.
• · A MILLION-dollar property owned by a Chifley man jailed for drug and firearm offences failed to sell when it went under the hammerThe lap of luxury in Chifley
• · · Who Am I?;Cheyrl Strayed’s highly acclaimed, WILD, heads to the big screen with Nick Hornby attached for the script.
• · · · His Master’s Voice: Czesław Miłosz and his dialogue with British, Irish and American poetry. ; The Book Haven goes to Lagrasse, home of “Banquet des Livres”
• · · · · Visiting old friends in London – very old friends ; I was 16. I was hunched over in a sloshy waterbed, a green blanket tangled around my legs. This is how I began reading Записки из подполья, or Notes from Underground. I’m not sure what I had read before that…
• · · · · · In the backwoods towns of Round Mountain, time circles like a winding mountain road. Friends disappear and show up again, older if not wiser. Small incidents—a night of drinking, a robbery, a strange visitor—loom larger as the decades pass Due to unforeseen circumstances”/”leaves on the line ; Dick Cheney does have a heart. The first one nearly killed him a few times—he’s had five heart attacks. Dick Cheney's heart to get its own memoir
Literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks at reality, then you can change it.”
― James Baldwin