Where: Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (bet. Houston and Bleecker)
NYC
When: Sunday, October 16th, 8 p.m.
Why: To be with you, toast my book and have a reading
More info: www.bowerypoetry.com
Monday, September 19, 2011
Saturday, August 20, 2011
MEMOIR WRITING WORKSHOP
Suzanne Levine and Lary Bloom will be teaching an 8 week memoir writing workshop beginning on Wednesday, September 7 from 1-3 p.m. at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT. Please call the museum for more information or to register at, 860 434-5542, ext.111. The class is limited to 14 writers.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Words Fighting for Their Lives
As a writer sympathetic to other writers' devices for choosing the right words to best express themselves, a letter to the Public Editor in the New York Times (March 20th) caught my attention.
"Franklin Roosevelt said that it took him an hour to write a one-hour speech. A thirty minute version took him two hours. His most difficult task was to create something that could be delivered in two minutes...that took the better part of a day."
p.s. Not only do we need to find the right words, they also need to be in the right order!
"Franklin Roosevelt said that it took him an hour to write a one-hour speech. A thirty minute version took him two hours. His most difficult task was to create something that could be delivered in two minutes...that took the better part of a day."
p.s. Not only do we need to find the right words, they also need to be in the right order!
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Monday, December 6, 2010
What Are We Afraid We'll Miss?
Tickets to Broadway plays are expensive and for that reason alone I expect the audience to be as in thrall as I am, keeping noise noiseless and giving rapt attention to the stage. Instead I find myself in the distinct minority.
During "Time Stands Still," a dark story about the difficulties of returning to "life as it was" after documenting the cruelties of war, cell phones rang out no less than six times during the performance forcing the actors to freeze mid-sentence or, as they once chose, to began the interrupted scene again. The man sitting next to me had his wife's cell phone in his pocket as a favor to her (no purse) and had no idea how to turn it off when it began playing her customized medley. Poor guy, he was mortified.
"Billy Elliott," a delightful musical and birthday present for my newly 13 year old grandaughter was full of youngsters who really thought the darkness was an opportunity to text away the two plus hours driving the theater ushers nuts as their lit palms clearly weren't what the actors had signed on for. Then there was the performance of "The Doll's House," where I watched ushers physically remove cells phones from the hands of two theater goers.
All this is leading me to Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni, which I saw in Lucca, Italy a month ago. An SRO crowd, many families with children, young children, and mostly Lucchese, living in Puccini's hometown. As with his Turandot the year before, in a land where the cell is a life line (I rarely saw any that were more than merely phones) not one rang, not one child whined with boredom or begged for a coke or milk duds. The audience sat in their velvet seats and gave themselves, as we did, over to an afternoon of intoxicated freedom.
My daughter, just back from Radio City Music Hall with her eight year old, called to say how great the Rockettes were, such symmetry...ah, well. She then told me how it seemed as if noone stayed seated, and there was more up and down in the audience than on stage. And she doesn't even know my rant on this subject.
So, what's up? Does anyone else feel like Science Friday comes around way too quickly?
During "Time Stands Still," a dark story about the difficulties of returning to "life as it was" after documenting the cruelties of war, cell phones rang out no less than six times during the performance forcing the actors to freeze mid-sentence or, as they once chose, to began the interrupted scene again. The man sitting next to me had his wife's cell phone in his pocket as a favor to her (no purse) and had no idea how to turn it off when it began playing her customized medley. Poor guy, he was mortified.
"Billy Elliott," a delightful musical and birthday present for my newly 13 year old grandaughter was full of youngsters who really thought the darkness was an opportunity to text away the two plus hours driving the theater ushers nuts as their lit palms clearly weren't what the actors had signed on for. Then there was the performance of "The Doll's House," where I watched ushers physically remove cells phones from the hands of two theater goers.
All this is leading me to Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni, which I saw in Lucca, Italy a month ago. An SRO crowd, many families with children, young children, and mostly Lucchese, living in Puccini's hometown. As with his Turandot the year before, in a land where the cell is a life line (I rarely saw any that were more than merely phones) not one rang, not one child whined with boredom or begged for a coke or milk duds. The audience sat in their velvet seats and gave themselves, as we did, over to an afternoon of intoxicated freedom.
My daughter, just back from Radio City Music Hall with her eight year old, called to say how great the Rockettes were, such symmetry...ah, well. She then told me how it seemed as if noone stayed seated, and there was more up and down in the audience than on stage. And she doesn't even know my rant on this subject.
So, what's up? Does anyone else feel like Science Friday comes around way too quickly?
Monday, September 6, 2010
Autumn
Think inside
a foiled Klimt, gilt
interfacing copper
with a creole-colored mix,
aster and chrysanthemum where lasers
white-light kettle ponds
to mirror each Narcissus
bent like me, a plumet
in hand
to measure depth.
a foiled Klimt, gilt
interfacing copper
with a creole-colored mix,
aster and chrysanthemum where lasers
white-light kettle ponds
to mirror each Narcissus
bent like me, a plumet
in hand
to measure depth.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
In the Moment with Wilder and Wallace
Thorton Wilder received the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Our Town in 1938. I saw it last Sunday at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York and at least once before in high school but I had little memory of it. The cast, led by Helen Hunt as the Stage Manager, was extraordinary, each character so fully realized that the little black-box theater was transformed into Grover's Corners and the audience sat agape.
There is a wrenching (literally) moment at the end of the play when the Stage Manager rips a curtain back along a rod to reveal one of the most beautiful, holy came to mind, scenes I've been witness to. Minutes before, the audience is slightly aware of a cooking smell or sense of cooking, but it was hard to figure which exactly... a nearby restaurant, gearing up for an early supper crowd? And then the revelation is before us, a visual epiphany.
Emily Webb has died but asks to return to Grover's Corners for just a day, one ordinary day. This is what is behind the dark curtain and where, for the first time, she actually sees her life in the moment, in the kitchen of her home.
Mrs. Webb is frying bacon, (for real) making coffee and scrambling eggs just as she has done every morning for her family. Sunlight fills the room, the milkman stamps snow off his boots before coming through the door with his clinking bottles, the newsboy delivers the morning paper. Emily's sudden awareness to what is real and essential is in plain sight for the first time, not in her life, but in her death. A stunning moment of collective self realization decended over the audience.
The late writer, David Foster Wallace, tells a story, "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?"
Wallace says that "we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: This is water, this is water. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
I learned today that a friend and neighbor played George Gibbs in one production where Thornton Wilder was the Stage Manager. "I just thought he was a nice old man," said Peter Walker reminiscing on his 82nd birthday.
There is a wrenching (literally) moment at the end of the play when the Stage Manager rips a curtain back along a rod to reveal one of the most beautiful, holy came to mind, scenes I've been witness to. Minutes before, the audience is slightly aware of a cooking smell or sense of cooking, but it was hard to figure which exactly... a nearby restaurant, gearing up for an early supper crowd? And then the revelation is before us, a visual epiphany.
Emily Webb has died but asks to return to Grover's Corners for just a day, one ordinary day. This is what is behind the dark curtain and where, for the first time, she actually sees her life in the moment, in the kitchen of her home.
Mrs. Webb is frying bacon, (for real) making coffee and scrambling eggs just as she has done every morning for her family. Sunlight fills the room, the milkman stamps snow off his boots before coming through the door with his clinking bottles, the newsboy delivers the morning paper. Emily's sudden awareness to what is real and essential is in plain sight for the first time, not in her life, but in her death. A stunning moment of collective self realization decended over the audience.
The late writer, David Foster Wallace, tells a story, "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys, how's the water? And the two young fish swim on for bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, What the hell is water?"
Wallace says that "we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: This is water, this is water. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out. True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
I learned today that a friend and neighbor played George Gibbs in one production where Thornton Wilder was the Stage Manager. "I just thought he was a nice old man," said Peter Walker reminiscing on his 82nd birthday.
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