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The Assumption
From “The Assumption,” a short play based on the medieval Lives of the Virgin. The hero is Mario, a college freshman struggling with his sexuality who mistakes an undiagnosed case of appendicitis for a pregnancy. In this scene, he has been confiding in Lupe, the dorm’s janitress, who reveals herself to be the Virgen de…
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Creepy Composites
This Nov. 4, 2008 will always be synonymous with all kinds of significance, but tonight I reflect on something small, soon to be submerged by the symbols. The way I saw John McCain’s concession speech received was unworthy of the occasion and the man.
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Give Me Moor!
Planned or not, we find in “a Moor” a delightful pun on “amor,” love, unfortunately unequaled by any wit in the script proper, but suggestive of a creative potential so undeveloped that its trace could easily escape the spectator’s notice or be trampled by an eye-roll as he hastens through the ninety-minute wilderness.
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Robert Fagles
Robert Fagles, the iconic 40-year Princeton professor whose historic translations of Homer and Virgil enjoyed unprecedented commercial and cultural success in the 1990s and 2000s, died on March 26th following a long struggle with cancer.
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A Letter to the Nobel Prize Winner
Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin c/o Elizabeth Hayes Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Dear Doris, The Nassau Weekly pauses its inexorable jubilations, ignited last Thursday morning with your wonderful news, to offer you our very profoundest compliments on your deeply deserved Nobel. How long we have anticipated its…
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Elegy for St. Britney Shorn
Maidens yet unyoked shall shear their hair for you when they wed, and through ages long shall reap the great morning of your tears.” – Euripides Who would not sing for Britney? She knew herself to sing! If not to sing, not always, we knew her to –sync, anon to sink! Britney Britannia, ruler of…
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On the Recovery of Ancient Literature
Sometime in an Oxford Greek class in 1895, a professor got off on a tangent about the vast repositories of long-lost ancient texts that might be lying preserved in the hot sands of Upper Egypt….The following year, Egyptian authorities converted what remained of the mineral-rich dirt to fertilizer.