The New Orleans Saints’ strategy in last month’s NFC championship game was primitive and perfectly suited: Take advantage of quarterback Brett Favre’s 40-year-old body by inflicting a caveman’s clubbing. Hundreds of pounds of muscle and anger and adrenaline hit him at high speed a total of 17 times, and Favre, perhaps playing the last game of his career, managed to withstand the punishment until the third quarter, when he severely hurt his ankle.
IN EARLY 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America's greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock). Some were well-known even if not known to be by him (Monument to a Dream, the film that plays at the St. Louis arch).
To remember J. D. Salinger is, of course, to remember The Catcher in the Rye—though not, perhaps, how some critics didn't like it in 1951. Catholic World noted its "formidably excessive use of amateur swearing and coarse language," and there seemed to be some question as to whether an alienated, hard-drinking, chain-smoking flunkie like Holden Caulfield was going to prove a good influence on the young. Other critics did say it made them "chuckle and ... even laugh aloud," and many immediately compared Holden to Huck Finn.
In early 2002, the filmmaker Grace Guggenheim--the daughter of the late Charles Guggenheim, one of America’s greatest documentarians, and the sister of the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth-decided to do something that might strike most of us as common sense. Her father had directed or produced more than a hundred documentaries. Some of these were quite famous (Nine from Little Rock).
With just over a week until trick or treat, NY mag's "Vulture" has posted its very helpful list of 7 Halloween Costumes to Avoid (paired with savvier alternatives.)
South Africa, to be precise, where I had been previously on four occasions. I promised in my last posting upon my arrival eleven days ago to write when I could. I assured you that I had wi-fi and that the places at which I was staying had wi-fi also. Well, they didn't ... quite. So I piled up my impressions and waited till I returned. Which I have now done. From the warm climes of a South African winter to the torrential rains of a cold east coast summer.
Let me own up to the proximate reasons for my visit to South Africa. They were two. The first was wine tasting. I considered myself a wine connoisseur. Alas, my palette is not refined enough to register the subtle distinctions in taste that my friends had no trouble discerning and appreciating. And my tolerance is not as large as theirs, not at all. Eight or nine trips to the decanter in one session gets me just a bit inebriated which is actually pleasant. But it is not informative. So I will have to rely on my fellow travelers (no, not that kind of fellow traveler) to recall the wines and the vintages I seemed to enjoy the most.
The second reason for my trip was to go on safari with a group of close friends. I had never thought of myself as an animal person. The last of our dogs that I really liked was our first, a Great Dane, imaginatively named Hamlet. He died young from a respiratory ailment identified for me by my late friend John Kenneth Galbraith (6'7" and very slender) as endemic to humans and animals whose breathing mechanism has to service a huge and extended system. I also like horses. I had one, a Morgan, for about a dozen years, whom I named "Prince Myshkin" in tribute to his essential sensitive soul.
Reading the deserved critical huzzahs for the current production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone has me thinking about a bee always in my bonnet. Critics swoon over the "poetry" of Wilson's language--but Shakespearean language is equally poetic, and yet I suspect his poetry reaches far fewer of us across an entire evening than Wilson's can, and the reason is language change and how hard a time we have dealing with it.
One writer beautifully captures the mood of most audiences at Shakespeare performances as "reverently unreceptive," "gratified that they have come, and gratified that they now may go." One need only take a look at the faces in the lobby as the audience files out--the gray-haired gent's polite grin, the thirty-something couple's set jaws, the adolescent girl's petulant weariness - with general interest oriented suspiciously more towards getting to the rest room and planning where to go for a bite than in discussing the play. I last noticed this at BAM's Macbeth last year, as interesting a production as it was.
Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example
by Adrian Poole
