My 3yo son recently developed a love for monsters.

He was headed in the Godzilla-movie-monster and Halloween-monster direction (based on the toys he was seeing in the stores), but I succeeded in diverting him in a more ancient-world direction with DK Classics: The Odyssey and Ludmila Zeman’s Gilgamesh Trilogy.

Jury’s still out on DK’s Odyssey — which we’ve been skipping around in, rather than reading from beginning to end — but my son loves the Gilgamesh story and all its Mesopotamian monsters.

These are whitewashed and bowdlerized, but the illustrations are gorgeous and all the main characters and events of the epic are introduced. I started to read the boy Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the original Gilgamesh (which I love), but quickly realized that some of the story was way too adult for him. I was happy to find a version written for children. I think Ludmila Zeman changed more than she had to, but the result is a set of stories compelling to a 3yo boy and his father, both.

Highly recommended, but not unreservedly so.

I’ve been looking for PDF scans of old children’s picture books. I found a great collection at the Library of Congress. It’s not hard to tell why some of these fell out of circulation, like this page from Denslow’s Mother Goose:

I continue to find wonderful (and much less stuffy than you might expect) Bible resources online, e.g.,

www.TheBrickTestament.com

The Twitter: ^*

Psalm 137 is beautiful and disturbing. The most-often-quoted opening lines. The least-often-quoted last lines.

The Psalm:

1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4. How shall we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land?
5. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7. Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

The music video with, well, abridged lyrics:

* The “tweet”?

My friend David Miller tells me a plane leaving La Guardia just went into the Hudson. “I watched it, mostly submerged, float by the windows of the office gym. … you know the Auden poem Musee de Beaux Arts?”

Here’s what he’s referring to:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

And here’s the painting Auden is referring to.

"Criminals are never very amusing. It’s because they’re failures. Those who make real money aren’t counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem."

– Orson Welles (1915–1985), Mr. Arkadin (1955)

Clinton’s play has gotten some impressive reactions. Here’s one:

Am I Black Enough, Yet? Written by Clinton Johnston Directed by George Grant Produced by Charter Theater with the Hamner Theatre Reviewed by Debbie Minter Jackson This creative script tackles sensitive, poignant, hilarious even bizarre issues involving race and race relations. A cast of five lightening quick actors pop into a variety of roles, improv style, and rip roar through scenes that will induce chuckles, bursts of laughter, stunned silence, or even painful acknowledgment of the fractured life scenes depicted on stage. Written in George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum type of humor and style, a kind of Wolfe-lite, Am I Black Enough, Yet? has just enough bite to make a point without puncturing, posturing, or preaching.

[Read the rest »]

I recently quoted from an old movie review by my playwright friend, Clinton Johnston — CJ to some of us. The first time I mentioned that review was in October 2004, at which time I described CJ as "the soon-to-be-published playwright." Well, the play that was then soon to be be published is now headed for the stage, specificially Washington, DC’s (OK, Arlington, VA’s) Charter Theatre :

Am I Black Enough Yet? by Clinton Johnston directed by George Grant featuring Paige Hernandez, Brittney Sweeney, David Lamont Wilson, Edward Daniels, and Matthew Eisenberg “Can you feel it? Can you see it? When do you wanna be it and when break free of it? And after all, what is it? Where does it start … and where does it end?” No matter who you are or where you’re from, for one night at Charter Theatre, you get to be African American. Playwright Clinton Johnston takes you on a touching, thoughtful, and hysterically funny tour of the state of Blackness in America. Don’t miss it. at Theatre on the Run [directions] April 11 – May 3, 2008. Thurs – Sat nights at 8:00 p.m. Sat. and Sun. matinees at 3:00 p.m. $25 on Fri and Sat. nights $20 all other performances Special $10 Previews: April 9 and 10 at 8:00 p.m.

Maybe everyone already knows this story, but I just learned it.

In 1573, Italian painter Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a Last Supper for the convent of San Giovanni e Paolo to replace an earlier work by Titian destroyed in the fire of 1571.

Here is the painting he turned in, one of the largest canvases of the 16th century:

Notice that Christ and His Apostles seem to be dining in Venice, surrounded by marble columns and stone archways. Notice also that there are many more people in attendance than the one Redeemer and his dozen disciples: we have dogs, midgets, black African servants, and a score of drunken revelers. I don’t know the period well enough to spot the other offending presence in the painting: German soldiers.

On July 18, 1573, Veronese was called before the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition. Asked if he guessed why he had been summoned, he replied that he believed it was because he ought to have painted the Magdalene instead of a dog. Indeed. Neither were the Inquisitors happy with the site of "buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs, and the like fooleries" at the Lord’s last meal.

They demanded that Veronese change the painting.

Instead he renamed it "Banquet in the House of Levi."

I wonder how much Monty Python had this story in mind when they wrote "The Penultimate Supper":