Kevin McIlvoy, At the Gate of All Wonder
Rain, which is more cruel by far than thunder, does not sound as unkind. Thunder is the mean master's mean servant. Thunder is the warning you doubt, though you cannot afford the doubt.
Kevin McIlvoy, At the Gate of All Wonder Musee des Beaux Arts W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Power makes a difference. So does trust. We're inclined to trust the people we've handed power to, the ones we long to believe care about us.
A Delicate Rage, Carol Keeley, in Tin House Volume 20, Number 2, Issue #78 Winter Reading I went to the party feeling the usual amalgam of hope and despair social events almost always create. This was a gathering of writers. And the weather was okay. And the news was terrible. And because we all to a pencil agreed on both these things, it turned out to be a really nice party.
Photo of one of the window displays at soon-to-close Lord & Taylor, NYC Interviewer: In conversation you sometimes are angrier and more provocative than you seem in your plays.
Wasserstein: My plays are my art and not just self-revelation. Creating a well-made play means you have to round the edges so they fit into the form. Also, the plays are deliberately comedic. Humor masks a lot of anger, and it's a means of breaking up others' pretenses and of not being pretentious yourself. Wendy Wasserstein, The Art of Theater No. 13, interviewed by Laurie Winer, 1997, in Women At Work Vol. II: Interviews from the Paris Review Photo taken on the west side of Fifth Avenue somewhere in the 20s I think it was (it was awfully cold that night) |
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