Albee’s first job was writing continuity dialogue for a radio station. After leaving home to settle in Greenwich Village he held a variety of jobs - including three years as a Western Union messenger. The jobs supplemented a trust from his grandmother and were chosen because they were dead ends and would not interfere with his writing.
Truth versus illusion. Reality versus fantasy. These were Albee’s themes, questions which crop up again and again in modern drama and fiction. He has described his work as taking a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is, simultaneously, an investigation into a marriage and a metaphor for contemporary America, or perhaps for the whole of modern western democracy.
I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke. — Edward Albee
I’ve been reading the script because we’re going to see the production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange tomorrow, and I didn’t want to hit the theatre cold.
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Go here to listen to Albee talking about the execution, at the age of 37, of Spain’s greatest poet and playwright.
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http://www.andyfoulds.co.uk/amusement/bushv2.htm
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I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through,
Well done, and now you wish perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead-
And only Scotsmen [...]
The Other Mouths site asked the question: What should fiction do? The following is only part of one of the answers:
. . . the narratives generated and sustained by the American political system, entertainment industry, and academic trade have taught us over the last half century how not to think for ourselves. Essentially, those narratives [...]
Some words have different meanings,
and yet they’re spelt the same.
A cricket is an insect,
to play it — it’s a game.
On every hand, in every land,
it’s thoroughly agreed,
the English language to explain
is very hard indeed.
Some people say that you’re a dear,
yet dear is far from cheap.
A jumper is a thing you wear,
yet a jumper has [...]
According to this article in AFP, the entire Nation reads crime novels over the Easter period. I’m not sure that it’s true, but it sounds like fun.
Bookstore displays are full of detective novels, television and radio stations run crime serials and newspapers publish special literary supplements, all catering to Norwegians’ thirst for thrills.
Even the backs [...]
Every name is called a NOUN,
As field and fountain, street and town;
In place of noun the PRONOUN stands,
As he and she can clap their hands;
The ADJECTIVE describes a thing,
As magic wand and bridal ring;
The VERB means action, something done -
To read and write, to jump and run;
How things are done, the ADVERBS tell,
As quickly, slowly, [...]
You can use this site to check if your blog or website is available in China. I don’t know why you would want to do that, but maybe you do.
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The novelist Michael Dibdin died last Friday following a short illness, his publisher, Faber, announced today. He was 60.
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In Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi, the following lines occur:
But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets
Eight years together, as my fortune was,
Watching folk’s faces to know who will fling
The bit of half-stripped grape-bunch he desires,
And who will curse or kick him for his pains,–
Which gentleman processional and fine,
Holding a candle [...]