April 16

How could a list of the "10 worst villains in children's books" leave out Count Olaf of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events? He schemed his way through 13 books! (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/7545765/Be-afraid-the-10-worst-villains-in-childrens-books-of-all-time.html

It is never too late to start publishing. Longtime screenwriter Millard Kaufman (the wonderful Bad Day at Black Rock, among other films) saw his first novel into print at 90, and the second, Misdaventure, just published posthumously, gets a rave review here:

http://therumpus.net/2010/04/misadventure/

Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya sits down with Chad Post of Three Percent for a lively interview:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2652

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

Tim Kendall at War Poetry argues that Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) has been seriously undervalued:

http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2010/04/charlotte-mew-cenotaph.html

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

The blog What's On Stage presents a very useful round-up of recent theater books:

http://www.whatsonstage.com/features/theatre/london/E8831271349215/Worth+a+Read%3A+Theatre+Books+Round-up+-+Apr+2010.html

Elif Batuman discusses screenplays by famous intellectuals that were never produced. Was absolutely none of Jean-Paul Sartre's Freud screenplay used in John Huston's film? -- Perhaps not, although it would be possible to make a comparison: Sartre later published his whole 8-hour-or-longer scenario (and it was translated into English).

http://www.salon.com/books/writing/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/04/14/mcsweeneys_intellectual_screenplays

The English National Opera is recruiting film directors. Terry Gilliam is going to direct Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust next year, and Mike Figgis, Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. I enjoy these forays; I liked Robert Altman's Chicago Lyric Opera production of William Bolcom's McTeague, for example.

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2010/04/terry-gilliam-to-make-opera-debut-in.html

You ever wonder why you just stop hearing about some people? Often only when they are recalled to you later; since there are too many careers to keep track of, fade-outs are often not noticed. I had completely forgotten about actor Wes Bentley (American Beauty) until I read recently of his decade-long battle with heroin addiction. Ditto the late Mahler conductor Wyn Morris, whose Times (U.K.) obituary doesn't beat around the bush about how his career hit the skids; the opening line is "It was generally agreed that Wyn Morris was his own worst enemy." I can't imagine a New York Times obit starting that way. Those forthright Brits!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7098917.ece

The Daily Mirror unearths an amusing 1910 Los Angeles Times article about a vagabond whose language was unidentifiable: "Linguist and interpreters have been called to talk with him but each one has failed." His greeting word was "kush," which would lead me to suspect that he might have been Basque (in which "hello" is "kaixo," pronounced "kai-show"), but the article goes on to say that he is believed to have come from Russia. The linguistic candidates from that country would have been legion, many of the languages would not have been Indo-European, and many would have had few if any speakers in early 20th century California.

This guide to saying hello in various languages doesn't contain anything closer to "kush" than the Basque, but omits most minor languages of Russia:

http://www.wikihow.com/Say-Hello-in-Different-Languages

Among notables born on this date are novelists Kingsley Amis and Anatole France, poet Tristan Tzara, playwright John Millington Synge, travel writer Robert Dean Frisbie, aviator Wilbur Wright, silent film genius Charlie Chaplin, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, composer Henry Mancini, pop singer Dusty Springfield, choreographer Merce Cunningham, painter Ford Madox Brown, illustrator Garth Williams, and actors Alfonso Bedoya, Peter Ustinov, Ellen Barkin, and Shu Qi.

Despite my love for The Beatles, the sound of the Sixties that I remember is my parent's music, which was more along the Henry Mancini/Burt Bacharach line -- and it took me years to realize how great those two composers were, because of the common prejudice against "mere" pop. They were not mere anything; they were as good as the earlier composers of the Great American Songbook, to which they both added. Dusty Springfield singing Bacharach's "The Look of Love" takes me back like almost nothing else can: