Curious and with a grand contempt for all authority, paying attention to the man behind the curtain and bringing us all along with him for the ride, iconoclast and rebel, transgressing boundaries with wild abandon and great joy, an imp of satire, embracing all that is human and moving through all stratum of our society … Continue reading Hunter S. Thompson, on his birthday July 18
Families both chosen and otherwise, linked together in interwoven supportive networks or shadowing his characters like an invisible reptilian tail, alienation, magic, love and desire, freedom and belief, and always the struggle for control of identity and gender; themes of Tony Kushner’s theatre. Reaching deep into the bag of tricks of historical drama like … Continue reading Tony Kushner, on his birthday July 16
Mercurial, protean, a will o’ the wisp, armed with the full panoply of literary regalia like Achilles and tilting at windmills of Augustinian thematic looming dark, with the sardonic japery of a self-aware Don Quixote spinning inside jokes at a cocktail party of the puffed up and decadent professorial fools of culture; Iris Murdoch rides … Continue reading Iris Murdoch, on her birthday July 15
“A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.” Wole Soyinka A Tiger of rebellion and the unconquered heart, Wole Soyinka created a uniquely African theatre of Swiftian satire and protest which drew on influences from Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Berthold Brecht, often directly modeled on classic works of European drama but also immersed … Continue reading Wole Soyinka, on his birthday July 13
Sometimes when you hold a seashell to your ear you hear more than an echo; there is another world within, invisible and surrounding us like a gossamer mist of perfumes, bearing memories; such are the poems of Pablo Neruda. Full of insights and beauty, magic and passion, death and tragedy, earthiness and illumination, the … Continue reading Pablo Neruda, on his birthday July 12
Today I celebrate the birthday of Harold Bloom, the Great Companion, most trustworthy of literary guides and an intuitive critical essayist, who has given us empathetic and beautifully written interpretations of some of our finest literature. While principally a scholar of Shakespeare, his criticism is broad and visionary, concerned with literature as a … Continue reading Harold Bloom, on his birthday July 11
His great and immense classic In Search of Lost Time is at root a quest for meaning and identity in a world which offers diversions but few reliable signposts, and Marcel Proust himself was a figure of Parsifal or the Holy Fool, dropping handfuls of delicious poeticisms along his trail. Always a joy to read … Continue reading Marcel Proust, on his birthday July 10
Songs of darkness and the contingency and irrelevance of human life, the emptiness and cardboard-set illusion of our values and ideals as in the great film Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the idiocy and madness of the gods of our universe and the active threat and menace of their hostility; with themes of existential nihilism, the … Continue reading Thomas Ligotti, on his birthday July 9
Like many of us, Jeff Vander Meer has wandered down the Garden of Forking Paths created by the trickster wizard Borges and emerged as a multiplicity of selves, all existing in different realities but linked by the living book which autonomously edits us according to its secret Rules, been hunted by Kafka’s resurrecting Gregor Samsas … Continue reading Jeff Vander Meer, on his birthday July 7
Polymath, Surrealist, and artistic visionary, Jean Cocteau helped forge the lexicon of cinema and both wrote and lived the glorious possibilities of being human like a living Torch of Liberty. Among his classics of world literature are The Holy Terrors, The White Book, Intimate Relations, and his unforgettable films. In The Holy … Continue reading Jean Cocteau, on his birthday July 5
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 