A Piece by Mr Foote that we weren’t sure where it fitted and so a Sunday Treat.
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Tag: sunday whatever
Sunday Whatever: Hamlet North-North-West by Geraint Jonathan
A lack of intricacy in the way of plot is no bar to fine theatre. In Mingus Mahoon’s so-called ‘adaptation’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, however, it is. Put baldly, this is, in Mahoon’s own words, “the Hamlet of Polonius’s mind”, more specifically a Hamlet who bedevils Polonius’s dreams, a Hamlet wild-haired and swivel-eyed and clad in a straitjacket, a sayer of one word, and one word only, the word “words”, the one word he appears to mean when he says it, and he says it repeatedly. It could be said that there are a lot of words in this monodrama, and there are, lots and lots of them, but all variations on this one word “words”, the very word, or words, of course, repeated by Hamlet in his reply to Polonius’s one time query, “What do you read, my lord?” A perfectly reasonable question, one might think, given that Hamlet had, at that moment, his nose in a book. What Mingus Mahoon’s interpretation does, and that so affectedly, is to pose several key questions. Is this a Hamlet made mad by reading deep into the night? Is this a Hamlet of the homeless mind? A Hamlet not overly concerned with affairs of state? a Hamlet without his Horatio to keep him in check? a Hamlet unknown to himself but long suspected? a Hamlet not yet acquainted with the wisdom of gravediggers? a Hamlet so out of sorts he thinks himself dust, yet lingers, unable to unloose his restraints and fly free of the padded room he occupies? Clear as it is from the outset that this is Hamlet as phantasmagorially conceived in another man’s psyche, that of Polonius, it is equally clear that the Polonius who dreams this Hamlet is a Polonius most unfamiliar to his daytime companions, a Polonius not given to doling out advice, a Polonius bootless under the bedsheets, a Polonius well acquainted with the vicissitudes of being alive, a Polonius pencil-bearded and sweating by the light of a mint-green lamp.
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Sunday Whatever – They Don’t Walk Alone by M.D. Smith IV
(Editor’s Note: This fine work by M.D. appears on a Sunday because it features what we refer to–often derisively–a Talking Untalkable. We seldom go for that sort of thing unless it is done with elan or in a well done fantasy. Both are the case here. Just a sweet little reminder from the Eds. that such items, unless loaded with charm, will be met with scorn, Bull Terriers and life insurance pitches–the Eds.)
They Don’t Walk Alone
I smelled the house before I ever saw it. Spirits inside—too many for comfort. Dust so thick it clung to the tongue. Beneath it all drifted the faint electric tang of souls stretched thin by years of being ignored, like old copper wire humming with frayed insulation.
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Sunday Whatever – A True Tale of Stories Literally by Dale Wiliams Barrigar
“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”
– Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
“We are all of us alone.” – Harold Bloom
“As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK.”
– Hunter S. Thompson
“Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” – Harold Pinter
“NO EASY WAY TO BE FREE.” – The Who, “Slip Kid”
Warning to the Reader: The following essay will sometimes appear to jump and leap from thing to thing with no apparent reason. As in life, there is a reason, even if it isn’t apparent. While under the influence, the author believes this discontinuous form is a part of the modern condition. Thank you. – D.W.B.
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Sunday Whatever: The Canadian Poet and the Sicilian Prince by Michael Bloor
‘Lampedusa’ (2020), the second novel of the Canadian poet, Steven Price, is an imagined account of the last years of the Sicilian author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), as he struggled with illness and self-doubt to complete his only work of fiction, ‘The Leopard’ (1963). That book, ‘Il gattopardo’ in Italian, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s top literary award, and became an international best seller. It was made into a Hollywood film, directed by Visconti, in 1963 (re-released in 1983), starring Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Burt Lancaster. Apparently, Visconti wanted Laurence Olivier for the part, but the producers chose Lancaster.
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Sunday Whatever – Channeling Rick James by Susan DeFelice
It’s raining and fog lays a smoky screen over the distant hill dotted with houses that twinkle like fireflies at sunset. I stare out, feeling some guilt about watching Rick James videos on YouTube. I told Cheri and she went: “You know all he sang about was ‘bitches and hoes,’ right? Disgusting. And all he did was free base coke and have orgies! What’s your problem, have you sunk so low?”
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Sunday Whatever – No Mean Mercy by Geraint Jonathan
Take this down, Brother Slycup.
Beggars can be choosers. The procedure is very simple. Apply to the skin a generous layer of fatty soap, sprinkle with vinegar, wait a minute or two, and, tantara: there it is – as any mirror to hand will confirm: your face is a veritable mass of yellow pustules. Then all you need do is develop a graveyard wheeze, adopt a drool, take up trembling, swivel the ol’ eye and speak a little bedlamese. Trust me, hearts will move, stones’ll weep.
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Sunday Whatever – Him Her Them Us by Victor Kreuiter
As regular visitors will know, we sometimes receive submissions that don’t fit into the usual scheme of things but we want to publish because of the quality of the writing, or the message, or sometimes something special about the author. This is one of those. We thought this deserved a moment in the sun:
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Sunday Whatever – Roadhouse Blues an Essay by Dale Williams Barrigar
“Keep your eyes on the road, your hand upon the wheel…”
– The Doors
“This land is your land…” – Woody Guthrie
“Superman never made any money / savin’ the world from Solomon
Grundy / and sometimes I despair / the world will never see another
man like him.” – “Superman’s Song,” Crash Test Dummies, from
The Ghosts that Haunt Me
I used to leave in the middle of the night, solo, mostly.
It was the 1990s. I was in my 20s. My procedure for road trips in those days was simple.
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Sunday Whatever–M an essay by Dale Williams Barrigar
“One of the most unappreciated people in the world.”
– Joshua Logan on Marilyn Monroe
“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be
absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” – Marilyn Monroe
“Will the wind ever remember / the names it has blown in the past?”
– Jimi Hendrix, “The Wind Cries Mary”
There’s something about Marilyn that can bring tears to the eyes like no other actress can do, and that fact does not arise from any one movie she made, whether good or bad, unless it’s The Misfits, her last, in which she is truly brilliant as a performer; she flowers and blooms into a new “her” in that film, especially in a few scenes.
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literally stories 