The season is in full swing and that means lectures, plays, concerts and the like. This week was packed with activity, all of it stimulating and enjoyable.
SARASOTA INSTITUTE OF LIFELONG LEARNING (SILL)
It’s time for my once a year plug for this marvelous organization. For 40 years SILL has been presenting notable speakers on global issues and introducing or re-introducing audiences to music performers, creators and producers. The two series, Music Mondays and Global Affairs, are each given in multiple locations and this past Monday morning, 800 people turned out at Church of the Palms for skilled interviewer June LaBell in conversation with the famous opera baritone, Sherrill Milnes, and his wife, Maria Zouves. Now retired from performing, Milnes and his wife run a program to coach and nurture rising young singers. On Wednesday, we joined an equally large crowd to hear Michael Pillsbury, a former defense policy advisor, on intelligence operations between the U.S. and China. Given that I’m currently watching season 2 of The Americans, I found his stories of failed and successful intelligence efforts and agents especially fascinating.
FILM OF THE WEEK
The Danish Girl. The opening scenes of Copenhagen’s port area and the rural landscapes are just gorgeous—appropriately lovely cinematography for a film about two artists, Einar and Gerda Wegener. I think the film could have been more tightly edited, but it is certainly worth seeing and most notable for the stellar performances by its two leads, Eddie Redmayne as Einar, later Lili Elbe, and Alicia Vikander as Gerda. Set in the 1920’s, it relates the story of a transgendered individual at a time when such a condition was generally unknown and unnamed; you were insane or just plain deluded. Lili Elbe was a pioneer as this film makes clear, and it’s an interesting companion piece to a 21st century account, Becoming Nicole, which I commented on in an earlier blog.
AUTHOR TALK
I have not attended that many author talks, but I thought Trompe L’oeil by Nancy Reisman was so beautifully written and such an intricately structured novel that I had to go hear her. In college I got to hear author John Knowles on stage. I was very disappointed. He was shy and retiring in demeanor and so inarticulate I couldn’t imagine how he could have written the much-touted and much discussed, (particularly in high school English classes) novel, A Separate Peace. I immediately revised my expectation that good writers must be good public speakers.
But Reisman did not disappoint. Featured at Sarasota 1, our local independent bookstore, she read selected passages from the novel, offered some additional insights into how the work came about and noted that she was interested in the importance of place as well as family dynamics. Because the work features descriptions of several Renaissance paintings, I asked if she herself painted. She does not, but her mother is a visual artist and so she grew up surrounded by art. A professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt, Reisman does most of her writing in the summer. For devoted fans, like me, that means a longer wait until her next book.
Reisman photo: www.parnassusbooks.net
