Edward Albee, R.I.P

Photo by Jerry Speier.  

I briefly met the great Edward Albee years ago when I was working at Doubleday. I knew that Albee would be showing up that day to discuss with my boss a collection of his best plays, personally selected and introduced by the playwright. I came up with some absurd excuse to walk into my boss's office and in the process say hi to Albee and then make a quick exit. (Later I had  the satisfaction of proofreading the text of  Albee's elegant introduction.)  Albee's own exit at age 88 is far too soon. He was one of the giants of the American theater.

The volume published by Doubleday's Fireside Theatre book club.

High-Water Mark

Over the weekend I saw a film I can highly recommend to everyone here: David McKenzie's vastly entertaining Hell or High Water. At first it seems like another bank robbery film, a western that substitutes cars for horses, but Taylor Sheridan's script is intelligent, witty, and always couple of steps ahead of the audience. The deft performances by Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and the always welcome Jeff Bridges help make it a film where the action is always subordinated to the characters and their emotional development.  After a summer of over-plotted plodding blockbusters it's a pleasant surprise to see a stunning film that cost only 12 million dollars to make.

Tom Wolfe Takes on Darwin and Noam Chomsky!

I read Tom Wolfe's new non-fiction book, The Kingdom of Speech, over the holiday weekend. A short but immensely entertaining and provocative volume. Wolfe spends half the book eviscerating Noam Chomsky, drawing on recent research by young linguists and anthropologists to toppple the Chomskyite notions of a "Universal Grammar" and an "LAD" (Language Acquisition Device), supposedly hardwired in the brain. Along the way Wolfe demolishes Chomsky's anarchist politics, which he sees as a sentimental hangover from Chomsky's roots in the East European shtetl as well as his boyhood crush on the Spanish anarchists who briefly took over Barcelona in the late 1930s. This contoversial book is going to upset a lot of people -- neo-Darwinists, orthodox Chomskyites, and much of the cultural and scientific establishment. But most of all it is a paean to the powers of human speech, which Wolfe sees as the most powerful and defining creation of the human race. In short, a delightful and highly stimulating way to spend Labor Day weekend. To say more would ruin your own reading pleasure.

Photo by Mark Seliger.