At the Dramatists’ Playground in Greensboro last weekend, we created a play called Camelot Club where Arthur is an African-American ball-boy who beats the tennis pro, inheriting his job; Morgan LeFay, whose family founded the club, works her dark magic through her Twitter followers (and her old money); Guinevere’s a nouveau riches naïf who wants to learn to, um, swing; and Lancelot is a visiting tennis player longing to return to the pro circuit after recovering from an injury. He says he just wants to be wherever the best tennis is being played and hence is drawn to Arthur’s court–but the truth, as Morgan quickly surmises, is that he needs a sponsor, someone with money… Continue Reading →
Archive | Writing
Re-gifting
As an occasional journalist, I love covering topics I know nothing about–although editors understandably want to pigeonhole writers so they have a go-to guy for music, another for sports, a third for coal-mining, or whatever. Part of it is that I place a high value on getting to learn new stuff, which is why my job path has been an eccentric line rather than a rise and rise. Part of it is that the people I imagine to be my audience, my “common readers,” need to have a proxy who’s sufficiently naive that he can ask stupid questions or, if it comes to that, point out that the emperor’s not wearing any clothes. Having recently completed an assignment to write an article on the problems of giftedness and gifted education, while I’m happy to say I learned a lot, I still feel dissatisfied and have been thinking about loose threads. Continue Reading →
The Tree of Life
To enjoy a tale of Eternity in the context of time, you have to let go of your attachment to narrative. Much of the heavily advertised new movie The Tree of Life struck me as a fun romp through a new age of computer graphics, something like the abstract expressionism of Fantasia on steroids.
Paul Dukas' music for this story from Fantasia was based on Goethe's 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling. This is NOT abstract expressionism.
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Sentenced to death
I’m trying a new litmus test for deciding whether to take up and read, as God suggested to Saint Augustine, and given that God does not speak to me with any real precision beyond the occasional eructation: I examine the first and last sentence of a volume, be it fiction or nonfiction. If I find a piquant snappiness, an intrigue, a rhythm I could learn to live with, then I give the book a longer look. Continue Reading →
Sorry, Duchess
I woke in the middle of the night wondering whether Robert Browning could have been thinking of the 16th-century composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566?-1613) when he penned his famous and much-anthologized dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess”. Continue Reading →