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Thursday, August 28, 2008
That handkerchief again
Posted by John Stoehr on Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 3:34 PM
The College of Charleston overlaps Measure for Measure this weekend with of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).
The show opens tonight.
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s comic look at what would happen if Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet were actually conceived as comedies. A present day Ph.D. candidate is mysteriously transported into the worlds of these plays and finds herself helplessly and hilariously effecting the outcome.
Aug. 28-30, 8 p.m., Sun., Aug. 31, 3 p.m., Sept. 4-6, 8 p.m., Sun., Sept. 7, 3 p.m. and Sept. 8-9, 8 p.m. $15/general, $10/students and seniors, (843) 953-5604. Chapel Theatre, 172 Calhoun St., (Downtown).
Magazine Review: Dispatches in America
Posted by John Stoehr on Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 9:11 AM
In the run-up to the presidential elections, a new quarterly helps us understand who we think we are
REVIEWED BY JOHN STOEHR
The decade’s latest journalistic scandal involves a tiny community newspaper on the outskirts of Houston. The Montgomery County Bulletin was exposed nearly two weeks ago by a comprehensive article in Slate that showed the paper plagiarized hundreds of sources from around the world. The publisher has since sacked the writer, Mark Williams, and shuttered operations for good.
Though the Bulletin’s ethical lapses are hardly as scandalous or deleterious as Jayson Blair’s fabrications or Judith Miller’s gullibility, the hack publication does raise questions about the media that we in the media don’t often like to think about, or admit — that we obscure truth about as often as we reveal it.
In an insightful and curmudgeonly essay called “Mind Blindness and the Decline of Hitchhiking,” travel writer Paul Theroux asks us to reconsider our normal mode of information dispersal — that is, the get-it-first mentality.
“What we get — what we are still getting — is foreground, not background,” he writes of the media’s Iraq War coverage.
Theroux essay appears in a new quarterly that hopes to provide more background about the world and less foreground.
BOOK REVIEW: Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love
Posted by John Stoehr on Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 8:23 AM
Food plays a starring role in Russian émigré’s new short story collection
REVIEWED BY ALISON SHER
Lara Vapnyar writes about what she knows. She emigrated from Russia to Brooklyn in 1994. Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love is her third book about Russian immigrants living in New York City.
Vapnyar writes with depth and a poignant understanding of the Russian-American psyche — and in Broccoli, a deep affection for Eastern European food. In six chapters, the story collection takes you into their lives and slowly reveals the bittersweet reality of their quests for love in a new homeland.
BOOK REVIEW: Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care
Posted by John Stoehr on Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 8:18 AM
Controversy becomes conventional in Kathleen Parker's Save the Males
REVIEWED BY DYLAN HALES
Are men an endangered species?
In her new book, Save The Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care, Kathleen Parker attempts to make the case that manliness is under assault by a loosely organized movement of “vagina worshipers” and other representatives of our boorish “hookup culture.”
Talking about sexual politics in America today is no easy task. To get anywhere, one must ignore politically-correct mandates and circumvent orthodoxies, particularly when they fly in the face of common sense.
Parker has no problem doing this. The chapter on women in the military is a good example, as she makes a solid, common sense case that women do not belong in combat, particularly on the modern battlefield, where asymmetrical warfare is the norm. Parker also does a good job exploring the complexities of sperm donation, child support payments, and no-fault divorce laws.
New stuff
Posted by John Stoehr on Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 8:11 AM
We're adding more content to the website these days.
Over the summer, we started offering books reviews, about two to three per week. As we enter the arts season, we'll offer weekly reviews, features, and interviews of theater, dance, and visual art that are web-only.
THEATER REVIEW | Measure for Measure
Shakespeare’s version of Knocked Up: Boy gets girl pregnant, gets in trouble
By Kevin Murphy
The moral themes in Measure for Measure are strikingly relevant. Will Isabella abandon her sexual beliefs to improve her situation? Will Angelo’s power corrupt him and turn him into a hypocrite? Will the authorities responsible for destroying the houses in the suburbs listen to the desperate pleas of the owners?
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