Sunday, November 24, 2019

Story that defies belief: A Good Liar - Restoration by Michel Houellebecq and Geoffroy Lejeune — An Exchange of Views on Religion

The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popular emotions. It is the legitimation of envy, of all the deadly sins the one which a stable society based on consensus should fear the most. The monster state is a source of many evils; but it is, above all, an engine of envy. 
— Paul Johnson, born in 1928



While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? 
the-good-liar-trailer-2The old Hollywood adage of the Eighties and Nineties went that if you made a big studio blockbuster film, you could do one ‘for yourself’ straight after. Those days feel long gone, but arguably, director Bill Condon has resurrected them with his new thriller.
Mirren, McKellen shine in 'The Good Liar' 

Based on novelist Nicholas Searle's best-selling 2016 debut, “The Good Liar”   

The Good Liar - at Paddington


Helen’s played Shakespeare's Cleopatra three times and I've played King Lear three times; we’re the same sort of person," McKellen says

Meet The World’s Oldest Living Drag Queen


Even at age 89, Walter Cole dons a sequined gown and frizzy wig four nights a week to perform as Darcelle XV. And he does it at his own bar, which he opened with his first wife a few years after coming home to Portland from the Korean War. (It was his second wife that convinced him to try drag.) – American Theatre 


Is plagiarism wrong? Worry less about people stealing from you. Worry more about saying something worth stealing worth stealing 



Coldplay’s newest member: Friedrich Nietzsche on saxophone — at least according to the posters. (Little known fact: Nietzsche and the saxophone were both created around the same time




For a long time, people lived in a Catholic culture. The church bells gave their day a certain rhythm; they followed some offices and saw one another at Mass on Sunday. Even if in their inner depths they were not animated by an intense faith, they had recourse to the services of the curé in the important moments: marriage, sickness, death. I love very much the idea of the “collier’s faith” described by Honoré de Balzac: “lov[ing] the Holy Virgin as he might have loved his wife,” a filial piety, an attachment devoid of theological or philosophical reflection, a fidelity to a history and to roots more than to a mystical revelation. I put myself in this category; this simple faith was the ­cement of a civilization




More Coffee Please —Why I wear a poppy

 
Interview with Ilya Kaminsky | The Hopkins Review | Johns Hopkins University 
Do you believe you have a soul? Can you tell me where in your body it is? Well, translation is the art form that thrives on that kind of certainty/uncertainty.
Translation is necessary: without it, in English, we wouldn’t have the Bible, we wouldn’t have Homer, we wouldn’t have Dante. Or, in Russian: we wouldn’t have Shakespeare, Milton, and so forth.
It’s a necessary art.
But it is also impossible. Which is why every single year we get another Dante, or two or three Dantes, published.
It is an ongoing conversation, it is an attempt to summon the spirits via our very primitive tools, so to speak



 Interview with Guy Davenport, September 3, 1992 —  SPOKEdb