Made it out of bed last night at 1:45 am to see a moon that looked suspiciously like the Apple logo with a bite taken out of the upper left hand side.  Product placement?  Or first solstice eclipse since 1638?

Earlier in the night, after our carol-singing party had disbanded around 9 pm, we saw an even better lunar vision: the full moon blazing, surrounded by a perfectly circular ring of clouds.  The larger circle was about 5 times as big as the moon itself.  No clouds inside the circle, but a wispy gray circle that seemed to hold the high clouds in the rest of the sky at bay.

Strange and beautiful things.

Here’s a pretty amazing riff by Russell Brand about Trinculo’s backstory.  More about Taymor’s Tempest soon.

English 110-ers —

Here’s tomorrow’s line up:

The Aroma Espresso Bar at 145 Greene St at 7 for the pre-game.

The Angelika Film Center at18 West Houston at 7:45 for the main event.

Papers are due by email (mentzs@stjohns.edu) by 5 pm.  Please give me a mailing address so that I can send these back to you with comments and grades early next week.

Looking forward to Tempestuous travels as we wend our ways to Soho…

It’s tem-festuous weather here in DC, with a nip of winter in the wind.  An excellent day for an academic event & some meditation on storms.

My talk yokes together a new production of The Tempest in San Francisco, an ancient epic about the nature of the universe, a poem written in French in 1955, and some final attention to fathers and daughters.

I’m looking forward to it. 

A nice Thanksgiving story about three teenagers rescued in the South Pacific after being given up for lost after 50 days.  Twenty coconuts, rainwater, fish, and an unfortunate seagull kept them going as they drifted 800 miles away from the Tokelau Islands, a very remote part of New Zealand.

A great review, with some nice details about the show.  Very interesting compression of 1.1 (into just its stage direction, “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard”) and reorienting the Prospero-Miranda relationship. 

Another nice post from Liz Woledge at bloggingshakespare.com

Jeffrey Cohen at George Washington U in DC, who’ll be hosting a wonderful event known as the TemFest on December 3 to which everyone should certainly come, has some very stimulating thoughts on teaching King Lear and the heartbreaking final scene of the Kozinstev film.

Makes me think that one of my usual pedagogical responses to Kozinstev’s great film, emphasizing the politics of suffering and collective action, esp in the hovel scene but also in that tableau with Cordelia’s body, may be another way of avoiding the “nothing” at the play’s heart.  Those trapdoors keep opening…

Here’s a link to pictures from another new Tempest, this one by Act II Playhouse in Amber, PA.  Opens tomorrow!