Latest news with #Keats
Perth Now
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Chris Pratt returning for more Garfield
Chris Pratt is returning for a Garfield sequel. The Guardians of the Galaxy star lent his voice to 2024's The Garfield Movie - which grossed over $260 million worldwide - and it has been confirmed he will be back to play the lazy lasagne-loving tabby once again. Alcon Entertainment's co-founders and co-CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson confirmed the news, and it was also revealed Chris will serve as a producer, along with John Cohen, Steven and the studio's two executives. Namit Malhotra's production company Prime Focus Studios will co-produce the film alongside Alcon Entertainment. In addition, following their work on The Garfield Movie, DNEG Animation are back onboard as animation partner. No further casting details have yet been announced, and Deadline reports producers are currently in talks with potential writers and directors. Cartoonist Jim Davis first created the loveable ginger cat for a comic in 1978, and the titular moggy was joined by owner Jon Arbuckle and his pet dog Odie. The mischievous kitty made its big-screen debut in the live-action/animated 2004 film Garfield, which got a sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, two years later. Garfield originally appeared in 41 newspapers, but its success led to it developing an estimated readership of 260 million across 2,580 newspapers and journals, and it currently holds the record as the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world. Meanwhile, Chris - who is best known for starring in the Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World film series -recently admitted he plays a "Sliding Doors version" of the same character in his "big commercial" movies. During an interview with 'Entertainment Weekly', Chris, 45, was asked about similarities between his character Peter Quill/Star-Lord in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and his role of John D. Keats in new movie The Electric State and he explained: "I kind of like to think, hopefully, that's like every character I ever play though, in this tone, something that's like a big, family friendly, raucous, adventure, sci-fi film,. "When it's a big commercial tone like this, you're going to get a Sliding Doors version of the characters that I like to play." Chris was referring to Gwyneth Paltrow's 1998 movie Sliding Doors in which she played two versions of the same character involved in different storylines after their lives diverge at a certain point. The actor went on to add of Quill and Keats: "[They both] have a journey; they find something bigger than themselves to want to fight for and are willing to sacrifice themselves for. "There's [Keats] talking to an animated character through the course of it. So I guess, even now, just in this interview, I'm realizing that there are similarities. "[Keats] kind of feels like what Peter Quill could have been if he didn't get picked up and go to space, but instead lived through a robot war and went on the run with his robot friend."
The Age
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge. Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide. One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre. Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries. Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex. Loading Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible. Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines. It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
Sydney Morning Herald
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge. Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide. One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre. Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries. Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex. Loading Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible. Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines. It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
Mint
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
This new book asks what if there were no silver lining to failure?
On 23 February 1821, a young English doctor suffering from tuberculosis breathed his last on a tiny bed in a house near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In the last six years of his brief life, this 25-year-old man, who looked more like a wispy boy, had begun to write poetry. He had even published four volumes of his work, but none had sold much or got favourable reviews. His dying wish to his friends was to have the epitaph, 'Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water," engraved on his gravestone. It was duly honoured. Also read: Looking back at the intertwined legacies of Tagore and Ray To most of his contemporaries, John Keats was just another unknown poet, destined for obscurity. No one could have guessed the love and adulation he would be receiving more than 200 years after his death. Similar fates have befallen many creative spirits before and after Keats, the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) being a classic example, who died, allegedly, in a road accident, mostly unsung and, worse, in penury. Some 70 years later, he is revered as one of the greatest Bengali poets since Rabindranath Tagore, while his works are translated widely into other languages. So were Keats and Das failures in their lifetimes? With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to admit that they were but, from the perspective of the 21st-century free market, neither of them, indeed, didn't amount to much by the time they breathed their last. To borrow from writer Amit Chaudhuri's essay The Intimacy of Failing, included in the recent volume On Failing edited by him, 'In capitalism, only success has existence; there are no alternative, negative modes of existence." From our earliest years, we are primed to think of failure as a stepping stone to success. A gazillion corporate gurus and startup bros on social media will tell you why you must fail and fail fast to achieve the nirvana of success. But what if failure doesn't necessarily have any redeeming silver lining, at least not always? Why is it so hard for us to accept failure as an absolute reality, with no promise of recovery sweetening the deal? Some of these questions surface in the handful of essays that feature in On Failing. This slim volume reproduces a series of talks delivered by writers, critics, poets and philosophers at a conference held in the Literary Activism series at Ashoka University, Sonipat, in 2020. Some of the submissions are darkly confessional, where the academic distance between the idea of failure and its intensely human experience is breached with impunity. The opening piece by Clancy Martin, titled Suicide as a Sort of Failure, is a masterclass in writing personal essay. Grimly comic, self-lacerating, yet peculiarly shorn of any self-pity, it is an analysis of suicide as the ultimate act of failure. Martin's first-person account gets to the heart of the matter: the double burden of being a failed suicide, a failure to successfully fail at living. It is a bravado performance, where writers David Foster Wallace and Édouard Levé make virtuoso appearances, a class act that sets the tone for the volume. Also read: Book review: 'Heart Lamp' asks in whom women can really put their faith Bengali poet Ranajit Das's acerbic reflections on his own 'failure" meander through the life and times of Jibanananda Das (no relation of his), but the best piece in the collection, coming right after, is American writer Lydia Davis's Learning to Sing. The second person narrator of the story (or is it a piece of memoir?) is a middle-aged woman, who has decided to learn to sing formally in the autumn of her life. She is well conversant with the grammar of music, reads the score in front of her effortlessly, but her voice keeps betraying her, stopping short of hitting the right note or sounding croaky to her own ears. She isn't planning to be a star performer at this stage in her life, but she is driven by an inner resolve to achieve a certain level of excellence. It's a tense yet tender story of an individual's deeply private struggle to attain a certain benchmark that isn't set by society. Rather, she seeks validation from her inner critic, not even from the teacher who helps her blossom. Only a writer as masterful as Davis could unspool the public images of failure and success so subtly yet surely, nudging the reader to look within and question their own assumptions. The two other pieces that make as strong an impression on the reader are poet Tiffany Atkinson's reflections on her failed IVF treatment and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap's raw and candid dissection of his career. In the former, a slip of tongue by an acquaintance at a party—'One door closes, another door shuts"— seems to encapsulate Atkinson's difficulty with her disobedient body, failing to act according to medical protocol and make her pregnant. In the latter, the reader gets a ringside view of the series of failures—from No Smoking to Bombay Velvet—that Kashyap had to wade his way through to get to where he is today. The most fascinating part of his soliloquy—for it reads like one, with its dramatic interjections—is the unpredictability of his moves, a refusal to follow the script of success, even when it lies bare before him after films like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox. For some of us, failure isn't necessarily always a tragedy. It is often a way of life. It's not a dirty word we shun, but a choice to avoid the ready and the easy way. We would much rather be misanthropes who dabble in failure, than be crowd-pleasers who only know how to cosy up to success. Also read: 'The Last Knot': A novel rooted in Kashmir's past, present and future
Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Frieze Frame' Review: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles
The debate surrounding the rightful place of the Parthenon Marbles, which were removed from the Acropolis, the site of the ancient complex of temples that overlooks Athens, by agents of Lord Elgin and delivered to London in the first years of the 19th century, is an old one—so old that its terms were framed by the poets Byron and Keats in the 1810s, soon after the Marbles' arrival in England. Keats's 1817 visit to the British Museum, where the Marbles had been recently installed, inspired his rapturous sonnet 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' ('My spirit is too weak—Mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep'). His companion at the museum, the history painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon, encouraged the British government to purchase from Elgin the portions of the Parthenon frieze that he had acquired, and it is not unreasonable to suppose Keats agreed. He returned to examine them 'again and again,' his friend Joseph Severn remembered, 'and would sit for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.' Keats's reflections on mortality were not merely for effect—his death, of tuberculosis, came four years later.
