Platypus of Truth

These are pictures from Providence Classical School's production of G.K. Chesterton's Magic: A Fantastic Comedy .   I can't recommend this play enough for troupes with an interest in putting on small-scale but lively and professional theater (Torrey Theater... hint, hint...).  The pictures run in descending order: the Duke solo, Patricia and Morris Caerleon, the Duke and the Conjuror, the Conjuror solo, Particia solo, the Rev. Cyril Smith solo, and Smith with the Demons.  Missing are Dr. Grimthorpe and Hastings the butler.  Inspirations for the look and feel of the performance include: The Illusionist , The Prestige , and Downton Abbey . *all photos are used with permission courtesy of Louis Long and are copyright Louis Long 2012

Hearing recordings of Tennyson read his own poetry or Eliot read his is a bit of a disappointment.  The great artist and the great poems aren't matched with a great performance.  There are some reasons for this.  Tennyson and Eliot were both taught to read poetry for public performance in a style that grates on contemporary U.S. ears.  More than that, though, writing great poetry and performing it are two different skills.  We assume that they go together.  That is our mistake. There are times and places, however, where the need for those two skills to go together is much stronger than it is here and now.  We commonly use a written form of poetry (free-style in Rap and scat in Jazz being notable exceptions) that emphasizes the carefully prepared and polished speech that is to be read, most often silently, by the reader at the time and place of the reader's choosing.  However, there is another way of composing poetry, what A.B. Lord calls "compos...

I was reading Matt Anderson's excellent book a week back and I came to the chapter he devotes to Death.  Anderson draws the reader's attention to the fact that the dead have been systematically excluded from United States' communities (he cites St. Louis in particular) since the mid-1800s.  He also points out the secularization of cemeteries that began in the United States in that period as well.  Reading the chapter, I felt an odd moment of disconnect.  What Anderson seems to have meant as an appeal to common experience didn't appeal to me as common at all.  Let me explain. I grew up in rural southern New England.  I grew up surrounded by the dead.  Everywhere I went, to church, to school, to the grocery store, to a friend's house, I passed by cemeteries.  Sometimes the church associated with the graveyard still survived, other times only the tombstones remained.  Either way, the dead were always with us: thick as leaves in Vallombrossa ....

I recently discovered that among his many other accomplishments G.K. Chesterton also wrote plays.  As a man all too willing to take up his pen at the slightest provocation, this shouldn't be surprising.  Evidently, Chesterton's friend, George Bernard Shaw, got tired of G.K.C. skewering all his plays and forbade the critic to criticize until he had tried his own hand at writing for the stage.  The outcome of that challenge was Magic: A Fantastic Comedy . Magic is a story where the characters stand for different sorts of people that could be found in the early 20th century.  We have an old and a new Atheist, a Progressive, a Liberal clergyman, a fan of the Celtic Twilight, and a Spiritualist.  The plot centers around the claim of a young Irish woman (a fan of the Celtic Twilight) that she has spoken with a fairy on her nightly walks in the garden.  Each character's worldview requires a different response to this claim and this conflict as well as the ques...

Tolkien's Unfinished Tales are just that: unfinished.  They represent efforts down to the end of his life to harmonize and further explore the sub-created world of Middle Earth.  A perfectionist by habit (or by Hobbit), Tolkien was drawn to minor inconsistencies or details of place and person that could be filled in.  He describes this tendency in his semi-autobiographical, semi-allegorical Leaf by Niggle as being an artist who could paint leaves better than trees.  According to Shippey, Carpenter, and others, it was this penchant for niggling that kept Tolkien from finishing The Silmarillion and a great many other minor works in his lifetime; he kept trying to get all the details right.  With a world as vast and sweeping as Middle Earth, "getting all the details right" was an impossible task for one man. If the task was impossible for one man, however, why not two?  Christopher Tolkien's great achievement has been to be that second man, and to place ...

And as the disciple of Utnapishtim stood before the seat of Utnapishtim he asked him to speak more of the sons of Arius and their great prophet and Utnapishtim answered him saying: "Have you heard what is said of that man?  Has the tale come down to you?  While walking in the paradise of the kings of Anshan did he not meet the image of himself?  Did you hear that he turned and bowed to it?  There is in this a kind of truth, for did he not instruct all the sons of Arius, and do they not do the same?  Oh ask yourself my student: is it not the mark of these men that even in paradise all they can bow to is their selves?" Thus Spoke Utnapishtim