Thanks to Vaska for the Shakespeare insult link. Thanks to Caroline for the Mailer-Vidal story. At a Manhattan soiree attended by writers with egos the sizes of small planets, one Norman Mailer, displeased with a stinking review by Gore Vidal, … Read More »
Most if not all the major religions born of the neolithic revolutions – Hinduism, the Abrahamic faiths and the myths of Classical Greece – feature a Great Flood. “One hypothesis argues for a catastrophic deluge about 5600 BC from Mediterranean into Black Sea”, says … Read More »
‘Kid, next time I say “let’s go some place like Bolivia”, let’s go some place like Bolivia ..’
A villanelle has nineteen lines and just two rhyming sounds, in this case “ain” and “art”. Frank Scott’s Villanelle for Our Time was set to music by Leonard Cohen on one of his more unusual albums, Dear Heather. Years ago I heard Cohen tell BBC Front … Read More »
Today on BBC Radio 4, told from the alternating perspectives of family members where dad is laid low by clinical depression: a moving and creative exploration in prose monologue and rhyming verse. It even ends well. One of those rarities … Read More »
… the impossible, the outrageously and stratospherically talented Artist Known as Prince has died this day. Sometimes it snows in April. I just heard someone on the radio offer that “he played guitar as well as Hendrix, wrote songs as … Read More »
Guy Lombardo was first in with this Sigman & Magidson song in 1949, but it was too good not to be followed by others: Doris Day and Bing, for instance, and much later The Specials. For life affirmative chutzpah, though, … Read More »
We all know Stalin’s Soveit Union was unrelievedly grim and sexually repressed, right? So what would you expect when Sergey Merkurov, People’s Artist of the USSR and creator of the three biggest statues ever of Uncle Joe, was asked in … Read More »
was as likely to be let down by failure to control light at point of exposure as by failure to edit afterwards.) When challenged on their refusal to master the tools of their chosen craft, they’d tell me they were … Read More »
Universe. Instead of Jai Guru Deva, she’d always heard Kangaroo Days. Which IMO is better. John was always at his best with a straight-from-the-shoulder style uniquely his – and always below par with that devotee godswallop. (In fact you get … Read More »