Annakut

Walking around in Chicago last 3 weeks has been quite unreal. 
I have met a lot of new people been to lot of new streets.. its been 
an adventure, this is something I found recently that rings so true 
for me right now....

THE POPULATION


One of the feelings which returns so often:
I mean the way that winter afternoons

call back those childhood sulks at the window.
That incessant need to sketch in the people

behind the lichened shingle of facing houses.
Now, when evening gathers, the walls conceal

no lion tamers lounging with the lions,
no divers plunging inside an aquarium.

Just a catch in the stomach like falling:
sweet emptiness . . . which others must also feel.

Even hours after, mothers and children
crossing the bright street by the supermarket

cut such vivid profiles. And they have a fierceness:
like ravenous hummingbirds who couldn't care

about the thorns they thrust through to devour
the little beads of honey in the flower.

Or like themselves . . . Lucent apartments shelve
into the hills, the whole volume of sky

falls on the spaces between, and passing strangers
move with the urgency that darkness

lends them: their skins much brighter against the expanse
of towers, suburbs, and fields they pull behind.


Peter Campion
Other People
The University of Chicago Press

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, quality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up. --Martin Luther King Jr

Othello at Georgia Shakespeare Festival
By William Shakespeare
Adapted by Brandon J. Dirden
Directed by Vincent Murphy
October 12 - November 5
Jealousy, racism and betrayal clash with force and might as Georgia Shakespeare presents this passionate tragedy. When Othello's love for Desdemona is consumed by the firestorm of Iago's ruthless jealousy, Othello falls from hero to victim.

Turkish Writer Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

LONDON, Oct. 12 — The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, whose exquisitely constructed, wistful prose explores the agonized dance between Muslims and the West and between past and present, on Thursday won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

Job The Hip Hopera Play Premieres at New York Musical Theater Fest

Monica Ali and Aleksandar Hemon Book Reading at New Yorker Festival

Monica Ali was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England. Her début novel, “Brick Lane,” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second book, “Alentejo Blue,” a collection of interlinking stories, came out in June; part of it originally appeared in the January 23rd issue of The New Yorker. Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo. He was stranded in the United States during the siege in 1992 and began writing in English three years later. He has published the story collection “The Question of Bruno” and the novel “Nowhere Man,” and has received a MacArthur Fellowship. In his most recent piece for the magazine, in the June 12th issue, he wrote about life in Yugoslavia during wartime.

Barry Lyndon (Part of New Yorker Festival)

Themes and influence

Barry Lyndon departs from its source novel in several ways: In Thackeray’s original, events are related in the first person by Barry himself. A comic tone pervades the work, as Barry proves both a raconteur and an unreliable narrator.

Kubrick’s film, by contrast, presents the story objectively. Though the film contains voice-over (by actor Michael Hordern), the comments expressed are not Barry's, but those of an omniscient, although not entirely impartial, narrator. This change in perspective also alters the tone of the story: Thackeray tells a jaunty, humorous tale, but Kubrick's telling is essentially tragic, with many subtle humorous jaunts toward 18th century society (such as how Barry tries to find the correct behavior to become a gentleman, and when he does so pays a huge price).

Kubrick also changed the plot: The novel does not include a final duel, and by adding this episode, Kubrick establishes dueling as the film’s central motif. (The movie begins with a duel where Barry’s father is shot dead, and duels recur throughout the film.)

Departed (not a festival)

Two men from opposite sides of the law are undercover within the Boston State Police department and the Irish mafia, but violence and bloodshed boil when discoveries are made, and the moles are dispatched to find out their enemy's identities..