VTS 01 1 The Republic of Georgia The CAUCASUS Arts Connection Janet R...

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Testament by COLM TOIBIN, Dir Carey Perloff ACT San Francisco

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Originally staged at the Dublin Theater Festival in 20111- and retitled for Broadway in 2013 as "The Testament of Mary" -- Testament is " a lyrical and deeply human work ".  I most liked "The Master"(based on Henry James'life), Mothers and Sons, Brooklyn, and his reflections on Barcelona.  Toibin as a writer  has an uncanny ability to enter the character of his "mothers", especially  His father died when he was very young, and his mother raised him and his brother.   Testament recounts" i n riveting detail a defiant mother's story of her son, who has been taken from her by men she regards as fanatics ."  Having read the book, one keeps turning the pages, as the imagining of her thoughts and feelings are revealed, as the whole narrative of the Crucifixion unfolds. One can hardly put the book down; it is best read in one sitting. "The Assumption of the Virgin" (1518.  Titian.   High Altar of the Basilica de Sa...
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Visit to Peter Koch's press W.S. Merwin "Small Elegies" .Ismail Kadare, Joseph Brodsky

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    An invitation to visit Peter Koch in his wonderful studio printing office in Berkeley.  I came home with a broadside by W.S. Merwin, "Good Night" from SMALL ELEGIES, 2011.   Peter Koch also published Joseph Brodsky's WATERMARK, a special edition made with Robert Morgan's photo images,  organized by  his wife, Susan  in Venice. Watermark is available from Farrar, Strauss, Giroux.  I told Peter about the Memorial Room for Brodsky in St, Petersburg in the Anna Akhmatova Museum . I also reviewed a special edition for Rainmaker Editions, 2004 of Ismail Kadare's short story, with photo montages made by Peter Koch from postcards of his assistant, Marina, whose father had published them in Athens, in another era. I recall  the seminar I taught on Ismail Kadare  for the EU's Peace Education Reform program in summer 2005 and the compelling narratives of my students.    s
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Reading: An Englishwoman in California. Jane Austen's Niece !

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Having discovered, to my  great surprise,  this book and author upon my first visit to the California Book Society on Sutter Street, a year ago,  and having met the editor of the edition, Zoe Klippert, I subsequently purchased the Letters of Catherine Hubback 1871-76 which were housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford University, where Zoe was taking a summer course. The lecturer, a librarian brought to her attention that there was a portfolio of letters by a descendant of Jane Austen's family who had gone to America that was unpublished..  She subsequently transcribed the script and the Bodlein library published the letters in 2010  . With the arrival of my co editor of the RAS (Royal Asiatic Society) Journal in Shanghai, in 2010, Fiona Lindsay Shen, who is a "Scotswoman", to the LA area in August, I picked up the book again, and this time, read it with more relish.  Thinking of her and her sons, in California, after their years in Shanghai, I enjoyed ...
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