Songs of absurdist protest, enactments of social satire drawn from his models Moliere and Chekov, incantations of revolutionary struggle and the upsetting of apple carts, Arthur Kopit’s theatre of confrontation directly challenges structures of power and privilege. Hilarious rather than grim, his existentialist-absurdist comedy is unforgettable and a treasure which harkens back to Aristophanes. … Continue reading Arthur Kopit, on his birthday May 10
Poet of ecology, Buddhism, travels anthropological and naturalistic, the iconic Beat Generation dharma bum and seeker of spiritual renewal, who did much to create our world in coining the term Pacific Rim Civilization, and perhaps its founder; Gary Snyder remains a pathfinder of modern identity, and of how we relate and connect with nature. … Continue reading Gary Snyder, on his birthday May 8
Narratives of Shakespearean and classical Greek drama without the togas or velvet doublets, reimagined with the methodical precision of a classical scholar working within Freudian and Biblical systems of thought, and crafted with the techniques of Postmodernism and a temperament by turns howling with incoherent rage and despair or a goofy enthusiasm running amok … Continue reading Thomas Pynchon, on his birthday May 8
With Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schultz, Stanislaw Witkiewicz is among the tripod of Polish Literature; though few of his works survive or are available in translation, he remains an essential part of our common literary heritage and a key figure of the Theatre of the Absurd and of Surrealism. His two most important plays, … Continue reading Stanislaw Witkiewicz, on his birthday May 8
If I were to choose one novel to represent the Platonic ideal of a novel, in some moods I’d choose Illywhacker. Funny, brilliant, endlessly inventive with both language and characters, written with boundless empathy and humanity and demonstrating the full lexicon and panoply of postmodern fiction techniques; which could also be said of much of … Continue reading Peter Carey, on his birthday May 7
Angela Carter invented the literary genre of reimagined liberation fairytales, using her enormous scholarship and insight as a critical theorist to give voice to silent female characters and reinvent our civilization along frameworks of equality and freedom. Today many children have known only the modern version; that girls can grow up expecting to save themselves … Continue reading Angela Carter, on her birthday May 7
In the gorgeous, luminous, richly evocative stories of Tatyana Tolstaya you will find a Chekov-like magical realism, in which imagination is adaptive and has survival value in a grim and hopeless world, her works a phantasmagoria and death transcendence. And a surreal satire which echoes that of the great Vladimir Nabokov and his hearth god … Continue reading Tatyana Tolstaya, on her birthday May 3
Her work a lifelong companion of my travels, Annie Dillard’s themes may be characterized as a reverence for nature and ones own experience, a calling to find meaning and value which is immanent in nature, to celebrate the realm of the senses as windows to the beyond. Hers is a quiet, refined voice, and … Continue reading Annie Dillard, on her birthday April 30
Of William Shakespeare one can say, how many people have reinvented their language and what it means to be human? And are still relevant more than 400 years later? For guides and companions to his works, there are two beyond compare; Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Shakespeare and the Goddess … Continue reading William Shakespeare, on his birthday April 23
A Russian mystic who railed against the formal authoritarian power and depersonalization of both organized religion and government, an aristocrat whose father had been assassinated by the communists, then driven into penniless exile, a vendetta he pursued through all his writing and the source of his magnificent critique of the failure of socialism as … Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov, on his birthday April 22
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 