“I’m not sure whether the Times will by now have announced that Virginia is missing. I’m afraid there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned herself about noon last Friday,” Clive Bell wrote in a detailed 1941 letter that’s part of an archive newly opened to the public.
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Iran Blocks Its Top Poet From International Travel
“Last week, as she was about to board a flight to Paris, police seized the passport of Simin Behbahani, who is 82 and nearly blind. Behbahani was interrogated all night long and then sent home — without her passport. … Neither the police nor the Revolutionary Court has asserted any legal basis for taking her passport.”
It’s Unanimous: Texting At The Movies Is Unacceptable
“Among the hundreds of comments we received, there was one area where readers were in absolute agreement: Never, ever text at the movies. Even text addicts agreed–the light from your cell phone is obnoxiously distracting to everyone else in a large, dark theater, and you deserve a pile of popcorn in your lap when you turn it on.”
Why Don’t Women’s Plays Transfer To Broadway?
“[Theresa] Rebeck’s argument would gain credibility and traction if she questioned things like why the only show from last season’s crop to transfer from off to Broadway is Geoffrey Nauffts’ ‘Next Fall’ — about gay men. Consider, after all, that several plays written by women had very healthy runs last year but didn’t transfer….”
Theresa Rebeck On The Unfair Odds For Female Dramatists
“[W]omen playwrights live in a world where we are told it is a bad thing if women are 57 percent of the undergraduate population, because that’s too big an imbalance, but it’s an okay thing if women are only getting 17 percent or 6 percent or 9 percent of the best jobs in show business … and if we tried to rectify that it would be unfair because it would involve ‘quotas.'”
Ian McEwan’s Atonement, The Opera, Set For 2013
Michael “Berkeley will write the music, with the poet Craig Raine writing the libretto after McEwan himself decided not to. … McEwan, currently working on a screenplay based on his novella On Chesil Beach, collaborated with Berkeley on an oratorio in 1982 and on a small-scale opera, For You, in 2008.”
Setting Novel In Paris Landmark Earns Author A Lawsuit
“Arguing that certain passages in her fictional depiction of a business rocked by threats, voodoo and staff abductions are defamatory, they are taking her to court and demanding €2m (£1.8m) in damages.”
Ballet Director Gets Canadian Citizenship Onstage
“When Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal performed Thursday evening, artistic director Gradimir Pankov made his first appearance as a bona fide Canuck – in a brief citizenship ceremony onstage at Place Des Arts.”
A Filmmaker’s Quest To Unearth Ten Commandments Set
On California’s Central Coast in 1923, “1,600 craftsmen built a temple 800 feet wide and 120 feet tall flanked by four 40-ton statues of the Pharaoh Ramses II. Twenty-one giant plaster sphinxes lined a path to the temple’s gates. A tent city sprung up” — and was buried in the sand, along with the rest, when shooting of Cecil B. DeMille’s silent movie ended.
Where Complicated, Grown-Up Women Are The Stars
On Showtime, “it is the emphasis on middle-age women that has allowed the network to tap into a much-ignored talent pool. ‘We’ve found a formula that works for us. It certainly took us a long time,’ says Matthew Blank, longtime chairman and chief executive of Showtime Networks Inc.”