Latest news with #Eurydice
Forbes
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Carlie Hoffman's One More World Like This World
One More World Like This World by Carlie Hoffman The trouble with reviewing One More World Like This World, poet Carlie Hoffman's third and most ambitious collection, is that what Sir Christopher Ricks calls 'reviewery' is in trouble. Hoffman has numerous accolades including the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, Poets & Writers Amy Award, and National Jewish Book Award, so her work garners the attention it should, but the American literati is strangely apt to describe even established poets' work in terms of simple themes, cultural politics, and gnomic non-sequiturs that border on Tarot. While this might be tempting in One More World's case – the book's central conceit involves the Eurydice myth – it misses what the book actually does. One More World is a sustained experiment in constructing a coherent personal register from grand forms – technical, sacrificial, mythological, memorial – and its accomplishment involves the translation of High Modernism into a lyric mode. Poet Carlie Hoffman Consider Eurydice. For one of Hoffman's reviewers, her use of 'mythology illuminates the timelessness of female oppression.' This reading reduces Euridice to the allegorical and therefore to the banal, quite the opposite of what Hoffman does. Such an ambitious critical veiling of the text, incidentally, is also part of why people are often convinced that they do not 'get' poetry. Most of us do not need poems to illuminate obvious truths, and so if that is all that poems are for, why do we need them at all? Another critic ties One More World's Eurydice persona to mystifying claims about 'our embodied state' and how poems 'let us transcend that embodiment' to 'underlying but essential truths.' Is 'embodiment' bad? Hoffman's book makes no such claims. What 'essential truths' ought to be made available? How, except perhaps in Eurydice's Hades, would I 'transcend' to the 'underlying?' I am unsure of what such statements mean other than that Eurydice must mean. Eurydice (played by soprano Iris Kells) is entranced by Jupiter in the form of a golden fly in the ... More Sadler's Wells production of Offenbach's opera 'Orpheus in the Underworld', London, 19th April 1962. (Photo by Erich Auerbach/) But must she? 'You must imagine Eurydice / happy,' Hoffman writes in 'A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ.' Like a poem, happiness is under no onus to mean something other than itself. To borrow from Archibald MacLeish, it need 'but be.' An endnote identifies this line from 'A Condo' as an allusion to Camus's 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' in which Camus tells us to imagine poor Sisyphus happy. For both writers, the hinge term is 'imagine.' Camus approaches happiness as an aesthetic production through descriptions of how 'each atom of that stone, each mineral flake […]Sisyphus. Found in the collection of Museo del Prado, Madrid. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage ...) One More World is rife with references to and poems written 'after' – among others – Celan, Buber, Lermontov, Auden, Borges, Heaney, the Old Testament, and Rose Ausländer, who Hoffman has elsewhere translated. Why does this matter? 'Human beings are difficult,' the poet, Geoffrey Hill reflects. 'We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. Ane we are mysteries to ourselves.' In 'The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice,' Hoffman compares 'the woman' – who is and is not Eurydice – to 'that Russian poet / who wished / to be buried / alive / beneath an oak tree. Unusual / desire, even for a Romantic.' The triangulation of 'the woman,' Eurydice, and 'that Russian poet' who happens to be Mikhail Lermontov is less important in terms of thematic 'timelessness' or parsing references than it is as aesthetic texture, a means for making a difficult representation of difficult selfhood possible. The Family Tree of Mikhail Lermontov Something similar might be said of One More World's Jewishness. The Los Angeles Review of Books's pairing of One More World with Marcela Sulak's The Fault is clearly on account of both authors' Jewishness, which makes LARB's simultaneous disengagement from poems like 'Myth of Icarus as a Girl, Leaving' – one of the collection's strongest – quite baffling. 'I float / in the Dead Sea,' its speaker reflects, 'and become pastoral. On Ben Yehuda Street / the siren blares.' It can be helpful to think of Hoffman's allusions functioning as pastoral elements. Lyric poems produce representations of poetic speakers and their 'worlds' hand-in-hand. 'Author's Myth,' for example, presents Moses 'Before Carmel and the suicides. After / the sea. God was a fisherman above the world. The Rabbi opened his throat / and the ocean swelled. God gave you feet and you emerged in the Synagogue.' There is no 'I' in this poem per se, but rather the preconditions for one, all the allusions and elisions of Genesis, Exodus, and the Book of Kings. The 'you' evolves from the ocean in the Rabbi's throat. Similarly, a poem's Lyric I is more or less complex – it contains greater or fewer possibilities – relative to what is 'observable' in the poem. The Dura Europos synagogue is an ancient synagogue uncovered at Dura-Europos, Syria, in 1932. The ... More last phase of construction was dated by an Aramaic inscription to 244 CE, making it one of the oldest synagogues in the world. It is unique among the many ancient synagogues that have emerged from archaeological digs as it was preserved virtually intact, and it has extensive figurative wall-paintings. These frescoes are now displayed in the National Museum of Damascus. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) 'Shall I set my lands in order?' Eliot's speaker asks at the end of 'The Waste Land.' There is a great deal of the 'observable' in the surrounding lines from 'London Bridge is Falling Down' to the Fisher King, Dante, Pervigilium Veneris, Gerard de Nerval, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and The Upanishads. What is significant is less the sources per se than their role in the production of a speaking position. 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins,' Eliot's 'I' concludes. Eliot's Modernism nearly always ends at the threshold between historical intellect and lyrical self-consciousness. Similarly, I have often thought that if fire consumed all of Ezra Pound's Cantos after Canto III, we would be left with a brilliant long lyric poem, one that produced the impression of an 'I' from atoms and flakes of the past. A lady views the exhibits at the Turner Contemporary's Journeys With The Waste Land exhibition, ... More which explores TS Eliot's modernist poem and its influence on visual arts over the past century at the Turner ContemporaryÕs Sunley Gallery in Margate. (Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images) In one sense, the arc of Hoffman's book enacts the Eurydice-as-Sisyphus narrative. The three sections, 'The Garden,' 'The Replica,' and 'Then Roses,' contain several discrete instances of restaging the same poem – 'The Twenty-First Century,' 'Author's Myth,' 'Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World' – as Sisyphean attempts. On a grander scale, the book contrasts The Garden's loss with literature's failure to produce a 'Refurbished Eden' in 'The Replica.' In One More World, places like Kearny, NJ, Brooklyn, or 'the counter of my grandparents' / luncheonette in Liberty, New York' are 'real.' Foreclosure is 'real.' Gestures toward the 'timelessness' and permanence of fictions, replicas, refurbishments, and speech are less certain. In particular, 'The Replica' stresses the contrast between the lyrical allusion-pastoralism of the 'real' world and the artificial staging of literature as purview of the literati. Hoffman's Lyric I, for example, is 'Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College,' 'Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College,' or 'Driving Through Maspeth, NY, After Teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing Class' in 'The Replica.' Carlie Hoffman reading In Kearny, NJ – at least in One More World – Borges, Camus, and Eurydice align just because. In 'The Replica,' this must become whatever 'literature' is supposed to mean and everything becomes gradually unbecoming, like 'stuffing the soft skins / of teddy bears […] as Hades takes Persephone / deeper inside the replica of girlhood.' In the book's final poem, the speaker reflects that 'The dream was so close to the surface, it banged its head on the floorboards. / I trespass forever in the unflinching past. / The apple's a for-sale sign swaying in the breeze.' After some great departure, some exile or accomplishment of a phantasm, can we return to Kearny, New Jersey, where 'the apple's a' and the surprise of 'a for sale sign' occur as 'real' sprung poetics? Whatever is gained by transcending that embodiment? 'This winter I want a house,' the speaker of Hoffman's first poem in the collection confesses, 'where women slide from the god's photographs,' quite aware of the difference between what she wants and 'the metaphor of this winter house.' She is 'playing music when the god is renounced.' In One More World, we must imagine Eurydice giving a backward glance, wanting in winter. More on Carlie Hoffman can be found at One More World Like This World is available for purchase here.
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Uma Thurman Reveals What It's Like Watching Her Kids 'Surpass' Her in the Industry
Uma Thurman is proud that her two older kids have become actors in their own right The Kill Bill star shared with Seth Meyers that she feels like they've "surpassed" her Thurman shares Maya and Levon with ex Ethan Hawke and is also mom to daughter Luna with ex Arpad BussonUma Thurman is one proud stage mom. The actress, 55, appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers on Monday, June 23, and was asked by the talk show host how it feels to watch her kids become actors in their own right. Thuman shares daughter Luna, 12, with ex Arpad Busson and daughter Maya Hawke, 26, and son Levon Hawke, 23, with ex Ethan Hawke. 'I was telling you backstage, I had a nice thing happen walking down the streets of New York. I ran into your daughter Maya in the street," Seth Meyers says. "And you have two children now who are just incredibly accomplished performers.' 'Well, I have three who are very accomplished,' Thurman clarifies. 'Two who work for it.' 'I very much apologize to the one who's not putting the work in,' Meyer jokes. 'She'll get there.' Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. The comedian went on to ask the Kill Bill star what it's like watching her two older kids — Maya and Levon — take the stage off-Broadway for the first time. 'As a mother, you know, honestly, I'm so proud of them and they're so together, and honestly, seeing your kids kind of surpass you is awesome,' Thurman says. 'I wouldn't say that they've surpassed you, but they're—,' Meyers says, getting cut off. 'No, but I just think they're amazing,' Thurman explains. 'I think they're so talented. And so you're always anxious that the circumstances all support the best outcome. The only thing that makes me nervous is I want them to have the best circumstances." Maya recently made her off-Broadway debut and is currently starring in Eurydice, while Levon starred in Ghosts at the Lincoln Center Theatre, which wrapped this past April. In October 2023, Thurman got candid about how her relationship with her daughter Maya has grown. 'What isn't a mother-daughter bond?' Thurman told PEOPLE at the time. 'Good communication. That is a big challenge, to make sure we keep communication healthy, strong and open with your family.' The Stranger Things actress also cited her memories of her mother reading to her when she was a child as a key to her development. 'Being read to is so important for kids. I've now supplemented it with audiobooks in my adult life because it made such an impact on me,' Maya told PEOPLE. Read the original article on People
Boston Globe
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
A.R.T. announces 2025/2026 season, will premiere new musical adapted from the film ‘Black Swan'
In a telephone interview, A.R.T. artistic director Diane Paulus said that 'Wonder' is driven by 'a very fresh, contemporary sound,' with 'equal parts catchy pop tunes and emotional heart' in the music and lyrics by A Great Big World, a duo consisting of singer-songwriters Ian Axel and Chad King. The book is by playwright Sarah Ruhl. Advertisement (Disclosure: Paulus directed my son Matt's opera, 'Crossing,' in 2015, and Ruhl collaborated with him on 'Eurydice,' an opera that premiered in 2021 and was based on her play of the same name.) The A.R.T.'s production of With music and lyrics by Dave Malloy (' Advertisement According to Paulus, 'Black Swan' will 'delve into the theme of perfection, the world of ballet, and the pressures on women.' She said that 'a story told through dance and movement' is 'right up A.R.T.'s alley,' adding: 'For me, theater as a form is physical. It's visceral. It's about communication, not only through text and words and music, but the body, and movement.' Starting this fall, Paulus will direct a concert tour of 'Dear Everything,' which was commissioned and developed by the A.R.T., and premiered in concert form in 2021 under the name 'WILD: A Musical Becoming,' starring Idina Menzel. The overall picture for the A.R.T., which is based at Harvard, is clouded by the university's ongoing confrontation with President Trump, who has cut billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts to Harvard. Asked how concerned she is about the potential impact on her company, Paulus replied: 'It's a very challenging time. We are navigating changing waters on a daily basis.' 'As a theater, as a company like A.R.T., we are committed to continuing to bring people together,' she added. 'Theater is a community builder. That is our greatest role, right? Humans coming together in time and space and listening to stories that are not our own.' The A.R.T.'s season will launch Sept. 2-26 with Advertisement The season will also include Sam Kissajukian's autobiographical solo show, '300 Paintings,' scheduled to be at Harvard's Farkas Hall Oct. 1-19, 2025. Paulus said '300 Paintings' explores 'how all of the arts and mental health and creativity are in relation to one another.' Don Aucoin can be reached at
Daily Mail
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Uma Thurman and her rarely seen youngest daughter Luna, 12, support her oldest Maya Hawke, 26, at opening night of Eurydice in New York
Uma Thurman was joined by her rarely seen daughter Luna at the opening night of Eurydice at the Signature Theatre in New York City on Monday. The actress, 55, an her youngest, 12, stepped out to support her oldest daughter Maya Hawke, 26, ahead of her Off-Broadway debut. Maya stars as the titular character in Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of the classic Greek myth, which will run until June 22. Walking the red carpet head of the show, Uma looked effortlessly chic in a wool coat, which she teamed with smart trousers. Smiling for photos beside her mum, Luna opted for a black top and a pair of straight leg jeans. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Maya looked stunning in a draped, satin midi dress which she teamed with a matching rust-coloured umbrella and heels. Uma's two older children, Maya and Levon - whom she shares with her ex-husband Ethan Hawke — are well known for having followed their famous parents into acting. But she has cultivated a far more private existence for her youngest daughter Luna, whom she shares with her ex, the French hedge fund manager Arpad Busson, 62. A rare exception occurred in 2023 at the New York City premiere of Wes Anderson's critically acclaimed comedy Asteroid City, which Maya had a small role in. Even though Luna isn't usually spotted at similar events, this time she was seen posing for photographers. While little is known about Luna, Uma previously opened up about why she decided to give her daughter four middle names. 'Maya came up with the best excuse, which was that I probably wouldn't get to have any more children, so I just put every name that I liked into Luna's,' she told Jimmy Fallon during a Tonight Show appearance. 'We couldn't quite agree on the name, so we call her Luna. She's lucky that way.' Uma and her financier ex Arpad Busson began their on–off relationship back in 2007, and revealed that they were engaged in June of the following year, but they called off the engagement in 2009. The split was short-lived, though, and Uma and Arpad reunited in 2010, with the engagement back on. Luna arrived in 2012, but her parents still hadn't married by 2014, when they called it off their engagement for a second time and seemingly split for good. In early 2017, Uma and Arpad became engaged in a custody battle over their youngest child, with The Pulp Fiction star ultimately receiving primary physical custody of Luna. Prior to dating Arpad, Thurman was married twice: from 1990 to 1992 to Oscar winner Gary Oldman, and then from 1998 to 2005 to Ethan Hawke after they met on the set of their 1997 sci-fi drama Gattaca. They welcomed Maya in 1998 and Levon in 2002, before separating in 2003. Prior to his relationship with Uma, Arpad's best-known partner was Elle Macpherson, whom he was together with from 1996 to 2005 and shared two sons.
Los Angeles Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Lessons From My Teachers,' playwright Sarah Ruhl finds wisdom in art, motherhood, even grief
One of the mistakes of teaching, I've learned through my years as a part-time professor, is to prepare so much that the students have no choice but to become passive recipients of knowledge that has been predigested for them. The problem is akin to that of an actor who works so assiduously on his own that by the time rehearsals arrive he only wants to perfect what he's worked out on his own. Scene partners be damned. In 'Lessons From My Teachers,' playwright Sarah Ruhl ('The Clean House, 'Eurydice') derives lessons from her years of being, in the very best sense of the phrase, a perpetual student. Even as she has become a master playwriting teacher at Yale, she finds opportunities to learn from those she's paid to instruct. One of the recurring themes of the book is that education, in its highest form, is a dynamic process. Showing up, paying courteous attention and being as willing to receive as to share information are fundamental to the collaborative nature of learning. Even in the classroom, with its necessary hierarchies and rigorously observed boundaries, teaching isn't a one-way street. Authority is enriched, not undermined, by intellectual challenge. The most thrilling moments in my years of teaching drama have come when in the dialectical heat of class discussion, a new way of understanding a scene or a character's psychology emerges from conflicting perspectives. The goal of good teaching, like that of any art, shouldn't be packaged wisdom but the excitement of thought. Being a playwright, Ruhl is perhaps more attuned to how we get smarter when we think collectively. German playwright and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann insisted that 'dramatic dialogue must only present thoughts in the process of being thought.' Eric Bentley, inspired by this anti-didactic precept, commented that what sets Ibsen apart as a playwright is that, rather than offering summaries of existing knowledge, he allows us to be present at the dawning of new consciousness in his characters. We are privy, for example, to the pressurized inner movement that leads Nora to realize at the end of 'A Doll's House' that she must leave her marriage to become her own person. The play ushered in a revolution in modern drama not simply because Nora slammed the door on her husband. What was so radical is that by the end of the play audiences understood why this then-unthinkable act was so necessary. Just as the stage is most alive when actors, authentically responding to one another in the moment, allow unexpected emotions to break through the way they do in life, we are most fully activated when responding directly to the world and not to our assumptions about what we'll find there. For Ruhl, the greatest gift a teacher can give is being present. In a homage to her playwriting mentor, Paula Vogel, Ruhl writes, 'But what strikes me most when I remember Paula's teaching is her presence as much as the content of her teachings. In this country, we are obsessed with content and curriculum, all the while devaluing presence and proximity, which are two teaching values hard to describe or quantify (or, indeed, teach). As to whether playwriting is teachable, she asks in response: 'Is devotion teachable? Is listening teachable? Is a love of art and a willingness to give your life over to art teachable? I believe that these things are teachable mostly by example, and in great silences.' Aristotle understood that human beings are an imitative animal. We learn through identification and imitation. One of my mentors, theater critic Gordon Rogoff, who taught generations of artists and critics at the Yale School of Drama, valued teaching as an exchange of sensibilities. By sharing what mattered to him most in the theater, the values and experiences that shaped him as a writer and teacher, he had faith that our own artistic foundations would become more secure. Instructional manuals and study guides aren't what's needed most. The formative longing is for role models. Everyone could use a more extensive palette of human possibility than the one supplied by the crapshoot of an immediate family. Ruhl recalls Vogel bringing a small group of her students to her Cape Cod home, with its breathtaking ocean view, and asking them to say to themselves, 'This is what playwriting can buy.' Life-changing teachers, like Vogel, expand the frontiers of the dreaming imagination. They can also broaden the ambition of your intellectual scope. From David Hirsch, another professor who shaped her education at Brown University, Ruhl learned not to be afraid of tackling vast questions in her work. 'Professor Hirsch taught me that if you ask a midsize question you will get a midsize answer,' Ruhl writes. 'And if you ask a question that is so big it can't really be answered, you can write and read into the great mystery of things, without being easily satisfied.' When I think of the teachers who shaped my intellectual life, I remember their flamboyant theatricality, uninhibited moral fervor and extravagant articulacy. Above all, I remember their devotion to their subjects, the quasi-religious commitment to whatever their scholarly or creative discipline happened to be. This passion, more than any syllabus, is what engendered my own dedication. These professors loomed as large as superheroes, yet the best weren't afraid to reveal that they were also human. The older I get, the more comfortable I become parting the curtain on my life to remind students that I once sat where they are sitting now, that I know their struggles and have likely made many of the same mistakes. The student-teacher bond is remembered long after the lecture has faded from memory. In Mexico with playwright and legendary playwriting teacher María Irene Fornés, Ruhl entered a crowded taxi that didn't seem to have room for her. But Fornés, alert to the sensitivities of her writing students, reassured her, 'Come on, sit on my lap, I'll be your seat belt.' This playful exchange made a deep impression on Ruhl, perhaps because it illuminated something fundamental about Fornés' unconventional theater aesthetic, which rejected the notion that conflict was the soul of drama in favor of a vision embracing the waywardness and unpredictability of human relations. Fornés believed that a work of art isn't an equation to be solved but an invitation for wonder, which Aristotle considered the beginning of philosophy. Knowledge can excite wonder but so too can a joking voice, a sympathetic gesture and an unforeseen act of kindness. Ruhl tracks the way life continually presents to us opportunities to become more impassioned scholars of the human comedy. From a dying student name Max Ritvo, with whom Ruhl co-authored 'Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship' that was published after his death and later adapted for the stage, she learned 'not to wait for the slow reveal, to tell people you love them now and often' and that 'students sometimes make the best teachers.' From a crotchety neighbor who yelled at her daughters, she learned that responding with a homemade peach pie can establish a more harmonious relationship with a person undergoing his own private travails. Loss is a perennial teacher. In Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story,' Jerry, at the end of a torrential monologue about a vicious dog, has an epiphany that kindness and cruelty combine to form 'a teaching emotion' and 'what is gained is loss.' Which is perhaps another way of saying what is gained is consciousness. Ruhl is a diligent student, learning not in just elite classrooms or before artistic masterworks but from the tyrannous demands of motherhood, the vicissitudes of marriage, the frustrations of modern medicine and the unhurried nature of grief. The sight of a sad-looking neighbor walking his ailing dog every morning teaches her that imagining someone's life isn't the same thing as getting to know the person. The moral is to say hello to the familiar stranger, to write that note of gratitude and to appreciate that teaching and learning are a lot closer to love than we've been led to believe. Ruhl's therapist, who is also a practicing Buddhist, relates a joke that he heard at a conference. 'What do Buddhism and psychoanalysis have in common?' The funny answer, that neither of them works, prompts Ruhl to ask, 'So, if nothing really works in the end, what is the goal?' 'Lightness,' he said. 'Lightness.'
