Reviews and News:
Are rude audiences destroying Broadway? Some actors think so and claim that alcohol is partly to blame: “Reed Birney was beginning to smolder. Every time the actor came on stage as O’Brien, the chief torturer in 1984 at the Hudson Theatre, a group of theatergoers giggled. ‘The laughter was inappropriate. I was trying not to take it personally, but it was getting on my nerves,’ Birney said of the Oct. 6 incident. And then he snapped. During a torture scene when the house lights go up on the audience, Birney stood still, raised his arm and pointed at the clump of gigglers. ‘I stared them down,’ he said. ‘But it shut them up…I didn’t get a good look at them, but they were probably millennials who were drinking. At the Hudson you can take a bucket of Champagne to your seat. We hear the glasses rolling down the aisles. Sometimes I think we’re one step away from dinner theater.’”
After regaining the heavyweight title in 1974, Muhammad Ali remarked that “I’m recognized all over the world now, but my greatness came and started in Louisville, Kentucky, one of the greatest cities in America.” “It was sometimes hard to remember what American city Ali had come from,” Paul Beston notes in City Journal, “But his tribute was a reminder that even citizens of the world start somewhere, and that the formative influence of these places usually stays with us.” This is especially true for boxers.
Matthew Hennessey remembers the “rambling shambling” Brian Doyle.
The most popular emoji? Face with tears of joy.
Will CBS’s third attempt to bring back The Twilight Zone succeed? It’s “a tricky franchise to navigate, as Serling’s original was inextricably tied to the time in which it was made. As others have pointed out, it’s unclear exactly what The Twilight Zone would look like in 2017.”
Joelle Renstrom made her students turn off their phones in class. You won’t believe what happened next: “Initially, 37 per cent of my 30 students – undergraduates at Boston University – were angry or annoyed about this experiment. While my previous policy leveraged public humiliation, it didn’t dictate what they did with their phones in class. For some, putting their phones into cases seemed akin to caging a pet, a clear denial of freedom. Yet by the end of the semester, only 14 per cent felt negatively about the pouches; 11 per cent were ‘pleasantly surprised’; 7 per cent were ‘relieved’; and 21 per cent felt ‘fine’ about them.”
Essay of the Day:
In Literary Review, Michael Alexander revisits Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen”:
“A line from the first stanza of ‘For the Fallen’, lamenting those who have ‘Fallen in the cause of the free’, was absolutely meant. Binyon was one of fifty writers who signed a letter to The Times after Germany had invaded Belgium, saying that ‘Britain could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.’ Binyon manned a Lewis machine gun in Holland Park in the hope of ‘firing on Bosche raiders’. Too old to fight, he twice spent his annual leave from the British Museum working as a Red Cross orderly, cleaning, swabbing, fetching in and preparing for surgery French soldiers wounded on the Marne. One of his tasks was to place amputated limbs in a furnace.”
Photo: La Mothe-Chandeniers
Poem: Brian Swann, “The Diagnosis”
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