Prints Theatre Quotes

On a good night, people would call out to tell me that FKA Twigs was a woman, and then I would accuse them of gender fascism and say they were worse than Hitler. But it didn't always happen, and it didn't happen here. That is the beauty of live performance: great moments are lost for ever, as they should be.

Talent doesn't starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you've found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who's an intellectual also.

In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.

Absence " Then the birds stitching the dawn with their song have patterned your name. Then the green bowl of the garden filling with light is your gaze. Then the lawn lengthening and warming itself is your skin. Then a cloud disclosing itself overhead is your opening hand. Then the first seven bells from the church pine on the air. Then the sun's soft bite on my face is your mouth. Then a bee in a rose is your fingertip touching me here. Then the trees bending and meshing their leaves are what we would do. Then my steps to the river are text to a prayer printing the ground. Then the river searching its bank for your shape is desire. Then a fish nuzzling for the water's throat has a lover's ease. Then a shawl of sunlight dropped in the grass is a garment discarded. Then a sudden scatter of summer rain is your tongue. Then a butterfly paused on a trembling leaf is your breath. Then the gauzy mist relaxed on the ground is your pose. Then the fruit from the cherry tree falling on grass is your kiss, your kiss. Then the day's hours are theatres of air where I watch you entranced. Then the sun's light going down from the sky is the length of your back. Then the evening bells over the rooftops are lovers' vows. Then the river staring up, lovesick for the moon, is my long night. Then the stars between us are love urging its light.

Keynes was a voracious reader. He had what he called ‘one of the best of all gifts – the eye which can pick up the print effortlessly’. If one was to be a good reader, that is to read as easily as one breathed, practice was needed. ‘I read the newspapers because they’re mostly trash,’ he said in 1936. ‘Newspapers are good practice in learning how to skip; and, if he is not to lose his time, every serious reader must have this art.’ Travelling by train from New York to Washington in 1943, Keynes awed his fellow passengers by the speed with which he devoured newspapers and periodicals as well as discussing modern art, the desolate American landscape and the absence of birds compared with English countryside.54 ‘As a general rule,’ Keynes propounded as an undergraduate, ‘I hate books that end badly; I always want the characters to be happy.’ Thirty years later he deplored contemporary novels as ‘heavy-going’, with ‘such misunderstood, mishandled, misshapen, such muddled handling of human hopes’. Self-indulgent regrets, defeatism, railing against fate, gloom about future prospects: all these were anathema to Keynes in literature as in life. The modern classic he recommended in 1936 was Forster’s A Room with a View, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. He was, however, grateful for the ‘perfect relaxation’ provided by those ‘unpretending, workmanlike, ingenious, abundant, delightful heaven-sent entertainers’, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace and P. G. Wodehouse. ‘There is a great purity in these writers, a remarkable absence of falsity and fudge, so that they live and move, serene, Olympian and aloof, free from any pretended contact with the realities of life.’ Keynes preferred memoirs as ‘more agreeable and amusing, so much more touching, bringing so much more of the pattern of life, than … the daydreams of a nervous wreck, which is the average modern novel’. He loved good theatre, settling into his seat at the first night of a production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with a blissful sigh and the words, ‘Ah! this is the loveliest play in all the world.’55 Rather as Keynes was a grabby eater, with table-manners that offended Norton and other Bloomsbury groupers, so he could be impatient to reach the end of books. In the inter-war period publishers used to have a ‘gathering’ of eight or sixteen pages at the back of their volumes to publicize their other books-in-print. He excised these advertisements while reading a book, so that as he turned a page he could always see how far he must go before finishing. A reader, said Keynes, should approach books ‘with all his senses; he should know their touch and their smell. He should learn how to take them in his hands, rustle their pages and reach in a few seconds a first intuitive impression of what they contain. He should … have touched many thousands, at least ten times as many as he reads. He should cast an eye over books as a shepherd over sheep, and judge them with the rapid, searching glance with which a cattle-dealer eyes cattle.’ Keynes in 1927 reproached his fellow countrymen for their low expenditure in bookshops. ‘How many people spend even £10 a year on books? How many spend 1 per cent of their incomes? To buy a book ought to be felt not as an extravagance, but as a good deed, a social duty which blesses him who does it.’ He wished to muster ‘a mighty army … of Bookworms, pledged to spend £10 a year on books, and, in the higher ranks of the Brotherhood, to buy a book a week’. Keynes was a votary of good bookshops, whether their stock was new or second-hand. ‘A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment.

The most significant cultural development in the Tokugawa period was the culture of the townspeople. The creative energy of the townspeople was manifested in all areas – prose fiction, haiku poetry, kabuki theatre, woodblock printing, and ceramics.

You may recall – perhaps you’ve experienced this in the theatre – the bewilderingly oblique way Shakespeare tends to begin his plays, via marginal characters whom we struggle to place as they recount or anticipate some major narrative event in a conversation that begins in the middle, leaving us flailing (beginning Shakespeare’s plays at their beginning is not always the easiest place to start). Not so in Richard III. The opening stage direction in the first printed edition is ‘Enter Richard, Duke of Gloucester, solus’ – meaning alone – making it absolutely clear that not only does he open the play, he does so, uniquely, in soliloquy. He begins, that’s to say, by addressing the audience. From the outset, we are his creatures.

I will never tire of touring. Television feels like throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it will stick. But working live, even at this late stage in my career, I feel like you are making new fans one by one in the most unlikely places and sometimes giving people new experiences they would never have imagined they would enjoy.

Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin, was keen on evolution and heredity. He founded “Individual Differences” and discovered the uniqueness of finger-prints (1892). Galton was also an obsessive counter and measurer. He even counted yawns and coughs at lectures and theatres – trying to produce a “boredom measure”!

Amma and I both participated in Tata’s theatre experiments. We also used to travel with his dance-drama troupes. As I grew older, when both travelled, I took on more responsibilities in the house and even at the printing press because Amma loved to travel with him if she could. Amma was a good writer in Kannada. Her name has been listed in a volume on early women writers of South Kanara edited by short story writer Manorama Bhat. The volume contains a fine profile of Amma written by Rekha Bannadi, which cites examples of her literary talents. If she had a greater opportunity to nurture her own talents, undoubtedly, Amma too would have been a reputed writer in her own right.

This is one hell of a date." "Please. We haven't even gotten to that portion of the evening yet." "Just want you let you know you're setting an unattainable bar for future men. I'll never accept movie theatre dates after this." "That's because you're more of a drive-in type of girl anyway.