January 29

Duncan Sheik's and Kyle Jarrow's new musical Whisper House, premiering in San Diego, sounds precisely to my taste. A historical ghost story set in a lighthouse? I'm there (or would be, if I lived in San Diego):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/01/theater-review-whisper-house-at-san-diegos-old-globe.html

Elsewhere in the Southern California musical theater scene, the Long Beach Opera -- which sounds like a truly enterprising company along the lines of the great Chicago Opera Theater -- has revived Robert Kurka's The Good Soldier Schweik, based on the classic Czech novel by Jaroslav Hasek:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/01/long-beach-opera-stages-good-soldier-schweik.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Beach_Opera

Would you believe that there is a new film of The Donner Party with Crispin Glover in the lead? This makes all kinds of sense to me. In my Donner dreams, Crispin always appears:

http://www.slackerwood.com/node/905

Levi Asher of the blog Literary Kicks doesn't think the New York Times is serious about its proposed paywall:

http://www.litkicks.com/ThrowingDownWithNewYorkTimes

RIP: J.D. Salinger. What can one say? The Catcher in the Rye holds up beautifully, and will always boast one of the greatest uses of first-person narration in world fiction. Who was it that said that Dickens's characters were "realer" than many real people you meet? Holden Caulfield is like that. The Salinger saga got murky as time went on, of course -- did he lose his inspiration? was he just impossibly eccentric? It will be interesting to see if any of the writing he had reportedly been working on privately for decades comes to light; I wouldn't count on it (he probably left provisions concerning this in his will), but you never can tell.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html

Among notables born on this date are Russian playwright and story writer Anton Chekhov, Founding Father Thomas Paine, President William McKinley, composers Frederick Delius, Havergal Brian, Daniel Auber, and Luigi Nono, Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, painters Barnett Newman, Colin Middleon (Ireland), and Julio Peris Brell (Spain), poet Muna Lee, playwright and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, novelists Edward Abbey, Vicente Blasco Ibanez, and Romain Rolland, broadcaster Oprah Winfrey, critic Germaine Greer, and actors W.C. Fields, Victor Mature, John Forsythe, Tom Selleck, Terry Kinney, Edward Burns, and Heather Graham. There is a first-rate website devoted to the work of Julio Peris Brell (1866-1944), with a wonderful image gallery and even an apt guitar soundtrack. The text is all in Spanish, but is not difficult to make out.

http://personales.epsg.upv.es/viibfa/perisbrell/index.html