Sleeping Muse and Falling Rocket

      Marianne Faithfull gave Mick Jagger a copy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, inspiring Sympathy for the Devil. Barbara Hershey gave Martin Scorsese a copy of Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ.

John Boorman cast Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson opposite each other as Morgana and Merlin in Excalibur knowing that they despised each other, exploiting the tension.

     "I never knew a man who played  Hamlet  who didn't die broke." -- Humphrey Bogart

I'm very confused. Years ago, reading Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein I learned that LW carried a copy of Tolstoy's Hadji Murat in his pocket while serving in the first World War. I just now read that in fact the Tolstoy that he  carried was The Gospel in Brief. I don't know what to believe anymore.

After the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, their sons Michael and Robert were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol.  Abel Meeropol wrote the song Strange Fruit.

Louvre. L'œuvre. A coïncidence I enjoy.

Willy : Saul Burton the songwriter. Eighty-nine years old. He went just like that from nothing. You know what kind of songs he wrote? Shit. (sings) “Lady, lady, be my baby.” Lady rhymes with baby. Oy. No wonder he’s dead.

The electric moment when Romeo and Juliet meet. Their instant passion so intense that their flirting takes the form of a shared sonnet. ROMEO If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this: For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in pray’r. ROMEO O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do, They pray—grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. ROMEO Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. Copyright ©2005-2017 by PlayShakespeare.com. Visit http://www.playshakespeare.com/license for details.

 "I don't really listen to Radiohead. I listened to the albums and they just didn't move me in the way, say, John Prine does. His is just extraordinarily eloquent music—and he lives on that plane with  Neil Young  and Lennon."  - Roger Waters

When Robert Smithson, the sculptor of the Spiral Jetty, in the Great Salt Lake, was growing up in New Jersey, his pediatrician was the poet William Carlos Williams.

The Ninja of medieval Japan were noted for their ability to blend in, to go unnoticed, to surprise with the suddenness of their appearance, action and violence. Legend credits them with invisibility. Had they dressed all in black, as they are popularly depicted, they would hardly have disappeared among the citizens. In traditional Japanese theatre, the Kabuki, Noh and especially the Bunraku, those shifting the scene, those controlling the puppets, were rendered invisible by black clothing from head to toe. Who would be less likely to lash out, less likely to suddenly enter the story itself, than the stage hand in a costume designed specifically to remove them from view? Figures onstage that the audience has entered into an agreement not to see? A magnificent betrayal.

Why did Hope and Crosby never make a picture called The Road to Damascus?

Surely Garp's first story in The World According to Garp, "The Magic Glove," was inspired by Symbolist painter Max Klinger's series of engravings "Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove." The Magic Glove