The Next Movie-to-Broadway Adaptation Is ... Big Fish

Remember Tim Burton's whimsical 2003 film Big Fish, starring Billy Crudup, Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney? According to the film's screenwriter John August, the movie's been optioned as a Broadway musical. "This isn’t one of those announcements where some people had lunch and said, 'Hey, maybe let’s try to do a show.' It’s written. Two acts. Amazing songs. We’ve read it and sung it forty times for lots of different people," wrote August on his blog Wednesday. "Studious readers of the blog and my Twitter feed may have noticed I’ve been in New York City a lot. This is why." Big Fish received Oscar nominations for Best Score and Best Original Music, but garnered mixed reviews from critics. And Big Fish isn't the only recent film adaptation. It's so hot right now! Carrie, The Goonies, and Dave (remember Dave?) are also on their way. [Movieline]

[via Vulture]

LOVED LOVED LOVED LOVED the movie--can't wait till the adaptation arrives on Broadway!

Selected Poems and Translations of Ezra Pound edited by Richard Sieburth – review

From Guardian Books:

Nicholas Lezard welcomes a new Ezra Pound selection 

A tricky one, the question of Pound; and yet also easy. The quandary resides entirely in his vile antisemitism and his treasonous Italian wartime broadcasts, and the bearing they have on his poetry, itself studded with lines that make contemporary eyes widen with astonished disgust. And when he made a retraction much later in life – 'that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism' – it was only in conversation, and that 'suburban' hardly lets him off the hook. 

Then again, as Michael Wood once put it: 'it is impossible to take an absolute moral stand against a poet as good as Pound without deciding either not to read him at all or to read him only in terms of a moral judgment previously arrived at – no one who cares about literature, or in the long run about morality, can feel happy about these options.'

Charles Olson was, in Christopher Ricks's words, 'sickened and enraged' by Pound's prejudice, but that didn't stop him from visiting him regularly at the mental asylum he was placed in. 'Olson saved my life,' said Pound later. 

For the fact is that Pound is important, and, when good, very good indeed. He more or less single-handedly invented 20th-century poetry, or modernism, or the kind of literature that is ambitious, intellectually and musically stirring, and often haunting. The opposite, in short, of the rumty-tumty-tum school of Betjemanesque doggerel which people tend to prefer in this country. 

Of course Pound made poetic mistakes (although these are not as grave as his political mistakes); he hoped the Cantos would 'hold the world together', and indeed in my hot youth I used to think that the works contained, in essence, all world history and literature; but they don't, and I suspect that very few people indeed outside academia have read every single one. 

But they contain many, many lines of great beauty, and the 130-page selection in this handsome, splendid volume gives us a perfectly good idea of what they're like (although I looked for some of the more contentious lines and couldn't find them). They're also annotated, so the references and quotations from foreign languages which baffled readers when they came out, and completely flummox the contemporary brain, need be an impediment no longer. (Pound said they didn't matter anyway, and you could skip them until you came back to a bit you could understand.) 

But there is more to Pound than the Cantos. There are the early works, reprinted in full here, which can sound very pre-modern indeed with their thees and thous, although with hints of what was to come both poetically and less palatably. 

Then, as he progresses, the voice, which had always been assured, settles down to both great clarity and beauty. There are lines here which, once read, lodge in the head forever. This, surely, is what poetry should be all about. 'The tree has entered my hands, / The sap has ascended my arms, / The tree has grown in my breast – / Downward, / The branches grow out of me, like arms.' Or 'The gilded phaloi of the crocuses / are thrusting at the spring air'; Or, famously, the poem 'In a Station of a Metro', in its entirety: 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough', which I didn't even have to look up. He could also be funny – see his parody of 'Summer is icumen in', or 'The Lake Isle' (where he longs for a tobacco shop, or 'any profession / save this damn'd profession of writing') . . . 

Then there are the translations, both assured and audacious (not literal, but literality is not their point), and the sustained rage of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: 'All things are a flowing, / Sage Heracleitus says, / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days.' 

This is now the definitive selection, which also generously includes the introductions written by TS Eliot in 1928 and John Berryman in 1949. Anyone who cares about poetry, never mind just Pound, should have it. Although the notes could have been easier to use, and there is no index of first lines."

No one benefits from a good selected like Pound--hell, no one requires it as much as Pound does.

Hope for Khodorkovsky, and for Russia?

From NYRblog:

The paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta observed on June 3 that the pleas of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev offer Medvedev “an opportunity to put an end to the absurd saga that has been doing so much harm to the image of Russia…He cannot help knowing that every new verdict and every new denied request thoroughly undermine his own efforts to do away with so-called legal nihilism. He has to sort out this mess and move on.”

But is Medvedev in a position to do so? What happens to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will not only reveal the true depth of Medvedev’s democratic intentions, which have rightly been questioned by Russian liberals. It will above all be a measure of the president’s independence from Putin. Khodorkovsky threatened Putin’s power in 2003 by funding oppositional political parties and Putin is believed to be the main force keeping him behind bars. If Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are granted early release, it would mean that Medvedev is no longer Putin’s puppet, as many assume, but a leader in his own right. Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted that “Medvedev’s successful evolution into a bona fide politician and leader depends on a single decision [in the Yukos case].” This is probably no exaggeration.

Alexey Navalny

From The New Yorker

This profile of a Russian activist--a kind of Julian Assange, but given the level of corruption, a more banal (but no less helpful) one--makes me miss Anna: she was better.

BUT the last paragraph makes up for almost everything:

Neither Navalny’s home nor his office seems especially well protected, and when Navalny files a suit he frequently uses his home address. As I rode the metro back from his apartment, I wondered about the risks he was taking. When we first met, at a sushi restaurant near his office, he spoke about what he sees as the cowardice of liberal Russian businessmen—his natural constituency—who are too scared to stand up to government corruption. “I don’t understand this position,” he said. “First of all, it’s boring. Second of all, forgive me if this sounds pompous, but it’s better to die standing up than live on your knees.” He was similarly dismissive of the people who think that he or anyone else is fighting a well-oiled, repressive machine. “I disagree, because the people who work in business at a high enough level can tell you that there’s no machine at all,” he says. “It’s all a fiction. That is, they can destroy a single person, like Magnitsky or me or Khodorkovsky. But, if they try to do anything systemically against a huge number of people, there’s no machine. It’s a ragtag group of crooks unified under the portrait of Putin. There’s no super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.” When things happened to opponents of the system, he said, it was because they showed up individually. “But if tomorrow ten businessmen spoke up directly and openly we’d live in a different country,” he said. “Starting tomorrow.”