Sleeping Muse and Falling Rocket

I love the Little Sparrow.  I do. But part of me feels that "Non, je ne regrette rien" is just a skip and a jump from Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness.

106 years ago today, Vincenzo Perrugia stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

I was asked last week to name, if I could, the single greatest performance by an actor I had ever seen. Without hesitation I said "Adrian Lester as Rosalind in the Cheek by Jowl As You Like It." This evening my wife and I were re-watching Cambridge Spies. We talked about the effortlessly fascinating Tom Hollander as Guy Burgess. She mentioned that she had recently seen him in The Night Manager and we realized we had seen him in many other things, including the 2005 Pride and Prejudice. It had totally slipped my mind that Hollander had played Celia opposite Lester's Rosalind.

1913. My favorite year. Women's Suffrage, the reappearance of the Mona Lisa after two years, the opening of Grand Central Terminal, Gandhi's arrest in South Africa,  the debut of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and the riots that followed,  the birth of Rosa Parks...

My daughter thinks Hollywood's next historical epic should just be called "Morgan Freeman with hair extensions."

Between shooting The Godfather and The Godfather part 2, Coppola shot The Conversation. In the middle of writing Miller’s Crossing, the Coen Brothers took a break and wrote Barton Fink. After filming the beginning of Cast Away, with a slightly overweight Tom Hanks, production stopped for a year, giving Hanks time to get down to his desert island weight. Robert Zemeckis directed What Lies Beneath during the hiatus, then finished Cast Away. In the midst of his 40 years work ing on the tomb of Julius II, Michelangelo stopped for four years and knocked off the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In 1984, Cynthia Nixon appeared in David Rabe’s Hurlyburly and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing on Broadway on the same night, starting the evening with act one of one play, then walking two blocks to the other theater for the second half of the next.

What if Godot showed up, but it turned out he had an appointment to see Lucky?

Flaubert once wrote to Turgenev:  "Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it."

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell... - Dante Gabriel Rossetti

People who read books slowly do not envy people who read books quickly. We pity them. You say you read two, three books a week and when you finish one you cann ot wait to start another. I take at least a week to read one book. Usually longer. Much longer. And when I am finished--if it was any good--I just need to be alone for a few days.  Selah. I know you love reading. I love it too. But we define it differently.

I accidentally deleted my blog. Rebuilding it has made me feel like Thomas Carlyle rewriting the first volume of his history of the French Revolution by hand after the manuscript was burnt by John Stuart Mill's servant. That's exactly what it was like. Exactly.

Autumn 96. The customer asked if we had a copy of Sam Shepard's Cruising Paradise. "We do. Would you like me to hold a copy for you?" "Yes please." "What is your last name?" "Shepard." "And your first?" "Sam" "I think I'm looking at your picture." "Yeah. Picking up a copy for a friend."