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LitNotes: It's A Pun-derful Life
October 26, 2007
For some reason, all three of this week's LitNotes come from the LA Times... a tip of my hat to that paper for making my blog life easier and interesting today
Lessing is More-ish: With each new bit that I read about Doris Lessing, I grow fonder... the woman is the very model of a modern major Nobel Laureate in that she is unafraid to speak her truth: "While our part of the world are not terribly interested in reading, you go to the Third World, and they clamor for books. They see books as they used to be seen here, as an entrance to a new kind of education. I don't know if you've been to Africa, but it's, 'Please give me a book. Please send me a book. Please give me a leaf of paper.' I will talk about this in my Nobel talk: this great reverence for learning, for education, for books, seems to have left Europe and has gone somewhere else."
He's A Good Eggers: Dave Eggers has created a heartwarming work of staggering generosity in founding 826 literary centers in six cities, and that certainly makes him a deserving youngest-ever recipient of a Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities. (His $250,000 prize will go directly to those centers.) For more about one of these self-sustaining literacy centers, click here.
Leery of 'Lear': Is Shakespeare's most tragic play unwatchable? Or is it a necessary vision of apocalyptic humanity? In this essay, a college professor argues that while it "remains a hard play to enjoy... "enjoy" may the wrong word -- it's a work we endure in the hope that it will show us something about who we are... Audiences have repeatedly turned to it in turbulent ages, as in the aftermath of World War II, and again today. When our own world seems to be filled with the war, torture and gratuitous cruelty that crowded Shakespeare's imagination, we look to "Lear" to be reminded of what it is to be human."
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on October 26, 2007 | Comments (2)
