Before I retire to matters extra-theatrical and non-dramatic, a little unfinished business to be completed. I note the new publication of The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Play…
In Act One of Tristan und Isolde, both characters drink deep from a chalice which they believe contains poison; instead, it is a love potion. Only a superficial consideration would conclude …
Where philosophy ends, art begins. In a sense, after Schopenhauer’s “Nothing,” the word which concludes The World as Will and Representation, there is the emergence of the …
In the below excerpt from the 1984 BBC series Sea of Faith, presenter Don Cupitt discusses the role of Eastern religion in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thought and quotes from the conclusion …
With the official republication of William Gaddis‘ The Recognitions and J R next month by the Dalkey Archive Press (available now at amazon.com), all of the novelist’s books are …
dragging his hunger through the sky of my skull shell of sky and earth stooping to the prone who must soon take up their life and walk mocked by a tissue that may not serve till hunger earth…
The bitterness of Tay-Sachs disease and similar syndromes lies in its distillation of human existence. An infant with these syndromes is born quite normally and enters the world to recognize…
“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.” Bearing the humbling injunction from Arthur Schopenhauer above in mind, I recently att…
My Houston readers (and there are a few) will want to hear about Da Camera of Houston’s Gyorgy Kurtág: A Composed Program, to be performed by the new music duo Sarah Rothenberg and …
Howard Barker’s Blok/Eko, produced last summer by the Wrestling School at the Exeter Northcott Theatre and directed by the author, “is a large-scale drama about death and its sta…
Available shortly will be the initial publication of Contra Mundum Press, Stuart Kendall’s new translation of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic poem. According to the press release: The…
I’d very much like to thank those who braved the 25-degree temperature to join Margo Jefferson, Tom Sellar, Randy Gener, Andy Horwitz, and myself for the panel discussion on criticism …
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 Abu Ghraib photographs of a few years…
The final entry I’ll post in anticipation of this Sunday’s Culturebot conversation on citizen criticism at the Public Theater is the below essay from August 2009. It arose as a r…
The theatre was necessarily desexualized (Beckett) before it could be resexualized again (Barker). … The thing-in-itself is as unknowable in the theatre as it is unknowable in the phen…
Talk about your long-form criticism: Today I repost below a 2007 two-hour panel discussion on criticism (funny how these things proliferate; my own conclusion is that the number of these pan…
There’s been little media notice of the Nathan award to Jill Dolan this year, and in ordinary years this might be explicable: it’s certainly the kind of inside-baseball thing amo…
Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (German, 1797"1855). Meissen in Winter, 1854.
A sign of the times: one of the first things that film critic J. Hoberman did when he was laid off from the Village Voice earlier this week was to start a blog. Hoberman was one of those cri…
I know there are those who are wondering if Superfluities Redux will ever get back to regular business; in truth I rarely write about the state of criticism and write more about erotic trage…
Welcome antidotes to the end-of-year/beginning-of-year top-ten lists and eyes-raised-to-the-future optimism come from two recognized critics over the past few weeks. First, in his own person…
On Sunday 15 January at 1.00pm, I will be participating in a rather excellent-sounding conversation at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, “Everyone's A Critic! Explor…
One of the issues that will certainly arise at the upcoming Culturebot conversation at Under the Radar will be that of authority — specifically, where and how authority, power, and inf…
Two years ago, at the end of 2009, I posted a brief essay about the TDF/New Dramatists study of new American plays and the development process leading to them, Outrageous Fortune. I repost i…
In an early note for my play The Elf King I wrote, “Ritualistic remembrance may be the overarching form of the play” and “This play is not about hope. It is about how to li…