“My Dear Managers, Are we at war then? If you still want peace, here is my ultimatum….If you do not meet these conditions, tonight you will present Faust in a cursed house. A word to the wise is sufficient. O.G.” Who is the O.G.? (No, not Ice-T.) It’s the mysterious Opera Ghost in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. You have undoubtedly run across this tale at some point. With over a dozen movie versions and one of the most successful Broadway spectacles of all time, it is safe to say … [Read more...] about Frankenstein Meets Faust
Great Books
Thomas Paine’s Twitter Account
Tom Paine would have loved the Internet. He would have been a master of the vicious comment on other people’s Tweets. His Facebook rants would have circulated widely. He was born too soon. Then again, because he was born in an age where you had to write essays longer than a blog post, he is still worth reading. Consider Common Sense. First, a digression: When I was 9 and 10 years old (4th and 5th grade), I was fascinated by the Revolutionary War. I loved reading about it. I have a … [Read more...] about Thomas Paine’s Twitter Account
Reading Gravestones in Spoon River
Imagine you are dead and have the chance to explain yourself to the living. You can have up to roughly two dozen lines of free verse to say it. This will be your epitaph, the final word on your life. What would you say? Spoon River Anthology is a collection of a couple hundred such epitaphs. Crafted by Edgar Lee Masters in the early 20th Century, it captures the life of a small town in the Midwest by allowing the dead to speak one last time. It’s a fictional town; well mostly—the book was … [Read more...] about Reading Gravestones in Spoon River
Return of the Furies
Now when the sudden blows come down,let no one sound the call that once brought help,‘Justice, hear me—Furies throned in power!’Oh I can hear the father nowOr the mother sob with painAt the pain’s onset…hopeless now,The house of Justice falls. That is the Furies raging at the end of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, the trilogy tracing the fall of the house of Agamemnon and the rise of Athens. (Robert Fagles’ masterful translation.) In a recent post, I ruminated that one of the problems with … [Read more...] about Return of the Furies
Gatsby, Huck, and the American Dream
“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” You can hear the sigh of despair in Nick’s voice at the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. But, why the despair? The West, after all, is the Land of Promise. It is a rather important part of the American Story. Go West, Young Man! Trivia time: what is the origin of … [Read more...] about Gatsby, Huck, and the American Dream
Blessed Assurance
In the mid-1960s, a small volume showed up in the world and since then 2.5 billion copies have been published. Think about that: 2.5 billion. For perspective, consider Harry Potter: including all seven volumes and the companion books, there have been 500 million copies sold. So, this 1960s work is a Big Deal. The book, or more properly booklet: The Four Spiritual Laws by Bill Bright. Now that kind of distribution has not surprisingly generated a rash of slim volumes which hope to become The … [Read more...] about Blessed Assurance