The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

Read more of Patricia Cohen’s New York Times article here.

There is an upcoming summer course on Faulkner taught by Claudia Traudt. Click on the title for more information and registration.

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and The Unvanquished
The Sound and the Fury is one of Faulkner’s best-known works-and perhaps his greatest. It is a superb place to begin-or to revisit-Faulkner. The erstwhile-aristocratic Compson family and the family of bedrock Dilsey which serves and sustains them are intertwined with love and hate, need, gift, dependency-as commandingly as life. Its telling, largely conveyed via the siblings Benjy, Quentin, and Jason’s personae, is complex, elusive, and ultimately revelatory. The Unvanquished, in intriguing contrast, is a very fluid read and further vivifies Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi denizens-Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, Benbows.

In Winter 2010 she taught a Graham School course called Global Snapshot: Circa 1885; this course sketched a global portrait of an age, examining its impact on literature, history, and the arts.

See below for a preview of her upcoming Spring and Summer courses, which are open for registration.

The Proust Questionnaire – Rebecca Saunders

What is your most treasured possession?
My education

When and where were you happiest?
Alone on a train, arriving somewhere I’d never been before

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being in a shopping mall

Where would you most like to live?
Between Chicago and Paris

On what occasion do you lie?
Answering questionnaires

What do you most dislike about your appearance?
The way it follows me everywhere

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Ferocious wisdom

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
Dramatically indecorous wisdom

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Tolerance

What is your favorite virtue?
Comitas

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Moderation

What are your favorite things to eat and drink?
Red wine. Chocolate. Repeat.

Who are your heroes (or heroines) of fiction?
Cassandra

Who are your heroes in real life?
Balthazar Garzón
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
Where the hell are my …
[glasses, keys, gloves, notes etc.]

What is your favorite color?
Burnt sienna

What is your greatest fear?
Stability

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Electronic unresponsiveness

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Indifference

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Miss Edna St. Vincent Miao

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
My species

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Having surrounded myself with extraordinary friends

If you were not yourself, who or what would you be?
Nikolaj Znaider’s violin

Here is a preview of Rebecca Saunders’ upcoming Spring and Summer courses. Click on the title for more information and registration.

The Politics of Memory
This class will examine fictional, non-fictional, and film texts from several sites of contested memory, including South Africa, Chile, Armenia, Rwanda, and Sri Lanka. From the perspective of these contexts, we will consider the relation of individual to collective memory, the political uses of remembrance, and the relation of memory to history. We will explore what “official memory” includes and excludes, and how it is challenged, as well as the specific nature of traumatic memory.

What is Modernity?
This course is an opportunity to think critically about a word that is used to mean many things: modernity. Through a variety of readings in literature and philosophy, we will examine varying theories of modernity, the literary and artistic movements associated with modernism, and conceptions of alternative modernities constructed by those thought to be “other” to modernity. We will consider modernity as a time period, a complex of institutions, a structure of social relations, an experience or attitude, an epistemology, a particular conception of subjectivity, a value judgment, and an instrument of Euro-American hegemony.

The document, experts say, reveals just how much Descartes tailored his writings to answer his contemporary critics. Frequently suspected of heresy, Descartes sent copies of his arguments to well-known theologians to gauge their opinions and answer their objections within his text.

Read more on the discovery here.

As you take your seat at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, where the Bridge Project production of “The Tempest” opened Thursday night, you can spy Stephen Dillane, the lanky British actor who plays Prospero, sitting quietly among the musicians already assembled on the stage.

Multimedia

Slide Show

With spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose, his hair a spiky, unkempt tangle, he thumbs through a sheaf of yellow pages on a stand before him, immersed in study. When Prospero rises to signal the start of the show, putting on his magic cloak and a belt of fraying feathers, it is with a palpable sense of resignation — a book-bound professor called reluctantly away from his task.

Click here to read more of this review by Charles Isherwood from the New York Times.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, A Musical Play, we see Jane Austen as she revisits her rejected first novel, First Impressions, and overcomes all obstacles to transform it into her masterpiece, Pride & Prejudice. Click here to read more about the musical.

Four songs from the musical may be heard here.

Chamber Opera Chicago has scheduled three performances in Chicago:
Saturday, February 27, 7:30 pm
Saturday, March 6, 7:30 pm
Sunday, March 7, 3 pm

Performance Location:
Athenaeum Theatre
2936 N. Southport, Chicago, IL
Tickets are available from Ticketmaster.

Press release: About the musical synopsis (pdf)

More information from the production at Rochester’s Eastman Theatre in 2008 and a video clip.

Graham School instructor Steven Schroeder’s new book, A Dim Sum of the Day Before, is out now from Ink Brush Press. (Here is a link to his blog post.)

He has a poetry workshop for the Northwest Cultural Council, 500 North Hicks, Suite 120, Palatine, on 13 February, from 9 am – 12 pm. Contact Kathy Umlauf for more information at nwcc@northwestculturalcouncil.org.

He is scheduled to read at Molly Malone’s Irish Pub, 7652 Madison Street, Forest Park, IL, on 8 February. This is a long-running reading series that includes an open mic, so folks can bring their own poetry as well. Open mic sign-up begins at 7:00 pm, open mic (5 minutes per reader) at 7:30, featured reader at 9:00. Information at 708-366-8073.

In one episode, Rocky and Bullwinkle are propelled to the moon when their oven explodes while the pair are following Bullwinkle’s grandmother’s recipe for mooseberry fudge cake. Fun for kids for obvious reasons, but adults certainly got a chuckle when the moose griped about still having to make payments on the oven.

Bullwinkle also mentions having graduated from MIT — the Moose Institute of Toe-Dancing, that is. Furthermore, Mr. Peabody the dog, a Harvard graduate, lives in a Manhattan penthouse, practices yoga and has an adopted son, because as he puts it: “Every dog should have a boy.” Peabody chooses an orphan because he “always roots for the underboy.” It’s these little jokes that set the show apart from typical children’s programming of its time.

Today those jokes may not have us rolling on the floor laughing (or ROTFL, as the kids say), but they were the 1960s equivalent of Stewie’s reaction to being rejected by “American Idol” on “Family Guy.”

The 50th anniversary of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” also means that spy duo Boris & Natasha, Mr. Peabody & Sherman and the Fractured Fairytales are celebrating birthdays as well.

Click here to read the complete article.

Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends: Join Bullwinkle the moose, a lovable but often confused hero and his devoted friend and companion, Rocket J. Squirrel, as the two heroes face off with their perennial foes.

Remember: all three episodes of Emma are available for online viewing through Tuesday, March 9, 2010.

Northanger Abbey (Encore Presentation) was shown on PBS February 14 and Persuasion (Encore Presentation) will be shown on February 21.

He was the celebrated author of War and Peace, but the last years of Leo Tolstoy’s life were all war and no peace. The savage rivalry for his attention and legacy between his redoubtable wife and his craftiest disciple that overshadowed his final days has now been turned into a showcase for tasty acting by performers who really know how to sink their teeth into roles.

Click here to continue reading Kenneth Turan’s review of the film.

The Last Station trailer may be viewed here.

The March 5 Graham School First Friday lecture at the Cultural Center is on “Tolstoy in Love: The Meta-Plot of Anna Karenina,” by Katia Mitova, Basic Program Instructor, for those of you who are interested in Tolstoy. Click here for more information and (free) registration.

Spring 2010
TITLE: Machiavelli’s The Prince
DATES: April 30-May 2, 2010
Members of A Red Orchid Theater will perform Machiavelli’s comedy The Mandrake.

Autumn 2010
TITLE: Love & Persuasion in Plato
DATES: Oct 22-24, 2010
The Weekend Study Retreat will focus on the Plato dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus.

Spring 2011
TITLE: The Song of Songs
DATES: April 29-May 1, 2011
This Weekend Study Retreat will focus on the biblical Song of Songs, one of the shortest books in the Bible, consisting of only 117 verses.

Autumn 2011
TITLE: Sense and Sensibility and the Culture of Sympathy
DATES: Oct 28-30, 2011
The topic was chosen to coincide with the 200th anniversary of publication.