In Farewell, My Queen, director Benoît Jacquot’s dramatization of a few days in the lives of Marie Antoinette and her servants, the pampered monarch doesn’t care if anybody eats cake. The storming of the Bastille has just begun, and besides, she has more pressing concerns, like the clandestine love affair she’s having with an adulterous duchess. Farewell, My Queen is Jacquot’s … [Read more...]
PB Poetry Festival begins somberly, ends in joy
In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. -- Bertolt Brecht A somber tone dominated the sixth edition of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, with the distinguished faculty focusing on “poems of witness” and elegies for the dead. Yet by Saturday, the busy last day of the festival, the atmosphere had turned almost … [Read more...]
‘Hell’ a darkly comic riff on the real land down under
The temptation to construct a review of Robert Olen Butler’s novel Hell entirely from quotations and excerpts is almost more than I can resist. And really, why should I resist? In Butler’s propulsively clever yet unsettling vision of the afterlife, I would be unable to avoid eternal damnation no matter what I chose: virtue or vice, piety or sacrilege, ethical rectitude or … [Read more...]