I wish you would touch me
I wish you’d leave me the hell alone
And oh, how I wish this crutch
Didn’t leave such an imprint in my bone
All these half-assed wishes
Stretched across the stars
Lead to angry men in cocktail bars.
Ren
TT: Almanac
Ten things an older man must never say to a younger woman:
1) I’m dying!
2) I can’t hear what you’re saying!
3) How many fingers are you holding up?
4) Listen to my heart.
5) Take my pulse.
6) What’s your name?
7) Is it cold in here?
8) Is it hot in here?
9) Are you in here?
10) What wings are those beating at the window?
Not that a man should stress his youth in a dishonest way
But that he should not unduly emphasize his age.
Kenneth Koch, “The Art of Love”
TT: I’ve been thinking about this poem today
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance:
TT: Tempest on a hilltop
It’s Friday, and I’m back from the road and ready to post my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I reviewed two out-of-town shows today, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival‘s production of The Tempest and Barrington Stage Company‘s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies:
When playing Shakespeare out of doors, nothing is so dangerous as a beautiful view. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is currently performing “The Tempest” in a tent pitched on the well-kept lawn of the Boscobel Restoration, an 1808 mansion on a high wooded bluff that overlooks the Hudson River. Even after you’ve spent a pleasant hour picnicking on the grass, the spectacle of the water below and the mountains beyond remains irresistibly seductive. Terrence O’Brien, founder and artistic director of the festival and director of this production, has wisely chosen not to fight the view but blend with it, and the result is a winsome “Tempest” that seems as much a part of its natural surroundings as the silver moon in the night sky overhead….
I’ve long wondered whether “Follies” might be a small show trapped inside a giant body, in which case it could profit from a bare-bones rethinking along the lines of Stafford Arima’s Paper Mill Playhouse revival of “Ragtime.” Instead, Julianne Boyd, Barrington Stage Company’s artistic director, has stuck as close to the look and feel of the original production of “Follies” as her limited resources will allow, and she’s done an impressive job of making the most of the tools at hand, thanks in part to an outstanding cast (whose roster of showgirls includes Donna McKechnie and Marni Nixon!). If the results fail to tell us anything new about “Follies,” they nonetheless succeed in bringing a flawed yet eloquent show to pulsing, passionate life.
No link. To read the whole thing, buy this morning’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal.
TT: Almanac
“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand
TT: Almanac
“He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.”
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
TT: Almanac
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
OGIC: Joss Whedon, McCarthyite?
I was inspired to post the fortune cookie below after dining last night with friends whose non-Catholic daughter is about to start Catholic school and isn’t quite sure what to expect. This reminded me of how passionately Mary McCarthy writes of the superior historical education she received at her convent school. That education was effective, she found, in direct proportion to its high-pitched subjectivity: the conviction with which the nuns cast historical actors as heroes and villains and the inculcation of a powerful rooting interest in the students. The cookie below is part of the chapter of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood that describes this education, “C’est le Premier Pas Qui Co