Thursday, December 6, 2012
Jonathan Harvey, who passed away yesterday, was considered one of the most important new music composers of the past 40 years (which explains why the New York Times hasn’t yet run an o…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:36AMWednesday, December 5, 2012
UPDATE: The first obit to appear is this, from the London Times; Alex Ross writes that “Some celebrated composers fade after death, their fame dependent on personality and on networks …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 11:24AMGiven the climatic events of the past few months, theatregoers may wish to avail themselves of the reading of Karen Malpede’s Extreme Whether, a new play with music (by Arthur Rosen), …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMTuesday, December 4, 2012
There appears to be something of a revival of good old Chekhovian Realism at the moment in New York, both in its original Russian and Clifford Odetsian forms. In that spirit, I repost below …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:12PMTony Kushner says that “Heiner Müller was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and will undoubtedly be among the most indispensable of the twenty-first, the terrors of…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:39AMMonday, December 3, 2012
Mine, in the December 2012 issue of TCG’s American Theatre magazine, that is, where I review two new books about the British playwright Harold Pinter. It is not online, I am afraid (po…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:10AMOriginally published last January. I have been reading about a recent event that took place in Afghanistan — wondering why it hasn’t raised the same outrage in the U.S. as the Ab…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:23AMThursday, November 29, 2012
One of the many Greenwich Village denizens of The Recognitions is Esme, a young woman who poses as an artist’s model for Wyatt Gwyon, the central character of the novel. A heroin addic…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:46AMWednesday, November 28, 2012
The shelf containing book-length critical writing on William Gaddis’ novels is short, but growing. A more comprehensive and exhaustive bibliography of the critical literature can be fo…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:51PMAlison Croggon recently announced that she was hanging up the “Gone fishing” sign at her blog Theatre Notes after eight years. In her “Last Post,” she writes: The rea…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:32AMTuesday, November 27, 2012
One of the most often quoted excerpts from his Paris Review interview is William Gaddis’ brief dismissal of his recent contemporaries as influences on his work. “Speaking of infl…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:16AMMonday, November 26, 2012
Let’s explode one myth right at the outset — that The Recognitions and the other four novels of William Gaddis are difficult (whatever that could possibly mean these days). It is…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 02:21PMTuesday, November 20, 2012
The most gullible customer a salesman can ever encounter is another salesman. It is a very small step from believing your own outlandish exaggerations to believing those of others.
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:06PMApropos of my post late last week about the publication of William Gaddis’ letters, I point to a short essay by the novelist’s biographer Joseph Tabbi which appeared on the blog …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:57AMFriday, November 16, 2012
Now available for pre-order from amazon.com, The Letters of William Gaddis will be published on 7 March 2013 by the Dalkey Archive Press. Edited by Steven Moore and with an afterword by Sara…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:36AMThursday, November 15, 2012
At the moment, David Mamet has two plays in previews on Broadway — his contemporary classic Glengarry Glen Ross (the original 11 November opening has been pushed back to 8 December) an…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:45AMWednesday, November 14, 2012
Arthur Schopenhauer by Peter B. Lewis. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. 181 pages; 27 illustrations. Available from amazon.com. It’s a surprise to find a life of the Sage of Frankfurt, a …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:22AMTuesday, November 13, 2012
Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen and Harold Pinter’s final play Celebration are both set in restaurants — there must be something about taking meals in public that has the …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:38AMMonday, November 12, 2012
My post on Saturday regarding Walter Kirn’s parody of book reviews in yesterday’s New York Times generated an unusual amount of traffic. I am able to track what kinds of Google s…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:56AMSaturday, November 10, 2012
I must share this piece by Walter Kirn which appears in tomorrow’s New York Times book section: a review of Samson Graham-Muñoz’s second novel, The String Theory Quartet. Of the…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:31PMFriday, November 9, 2012
Enthusiasts of the work of Samuel Beckett will note the recent debut of the new Beckett Circle Web site. Described as the “official Web site of the Samuel Beckett Society,” the o…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:29AMThursday, November 8, 2012
In a new interview published at The White Review, philosopher Simon Critchley engages in an interesting discussion of tragedy and the modern world. His book on tragedy, Stay, Illusion! The H…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 01:17PMTuesday, November 6, 2012
The only moment that my daughters (and their parents) were genuinely frightened was during the start of the storm on Monday night. After the sun went down and the wind and rain rose, at abou…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:00AMMonday, October 29, 2012
(Continued from “The Bomb in the Mind.”) The Ground Zero of the World Trade Center attack shares a designation with the Ground Zero of the Hiroshima bomb — a designation wh…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 07:54AMFriday, October 26, 2012
Unlike a recent commenter on this blog, I still believe in the necessity for the purpose-built structure for theatre, the stage; I even believe in the ability of the single-set, small-cast p…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:37AMThursday, October 25, 2012
All four of my posts on the recent In the Intersection report about new American plays — all 4,100 bloody words of the thing — can now be found on a single page here (in reverse …
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 12:26PMWednesday, October 24, 2012
Playwrights finally had their say at the end of the first day of the In the Intersection conference. Charles Randolph-Wright, Amy Freed, and Karen Zacarías, all current residents at the Are…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:24PMFour years ago on this date my father died; in his memory I repost below a meditation on this written in August 2010 and which appears as the final chapter of Word Made Flesh under the title…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:21AMTuesday, October 23, 2012
At the beginning of day two — and the beginning of act two — of the In the Crossroads conference, critic and former ART artistic director Robert Brustein looked around the comfor…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 08:54AMMonday, October 22, 2012
The two contending main characters in In the Intersection — the non-profit theatre and the commercial theatre — want different things, as in any play; the conflict lies in how th…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 09:26AMSunday, October 21, 2012
To discuss what American drama has become in the years after 9/11, one must examine how American theatres are run in the years after 9/11 — it goes straight to the question of what kin…
SOURCE: Superfluities Redux at 10:24AM 
