Today is World Book Day …

… well, it is if you’re in the UK or Ireland. From the World Book Day website:

World Book Day was designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and is marked in over 100 countries around the globe. The origins of the day we now celebrate in the UK and Ireland come from Catalonia, where roses and books were given as gifts to loved ones on St. George’s Day – a tradition started over 90 years ago.

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World Book Day is a partnership of publishers, booksellers and interested parties who work together to promote books and reading for the personal enrichment and enjoyment of all.

A main aim of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is to encourage children to explore the pleasures of books and reading by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own.

Would be nice if we had such an event here in the U.S. but with anti-intellectualism the new religion, don’t expect to see anything like it in the foreseeable future. An article by Trip Gabriel in today’s edition of the New York Times is titled, Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?, with the sub-header: “Many teachers see demands to cut their pay, benefits and say in how schools are run as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value.” From the story:

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

Make no mistake about it: this isn’t about pensions and benefits, it’s about a rising tide of anti-intellectual fervor in the United States and it’s as complex a socio-economic puzzle as you’re likely to come across, factoring in the disrespect for artistic copyright generated by the easy access of the internet to intellectual property over the last decade, and a growing respect for simplistic logic of the type spun by the likes of Sarah Palin that gave birth to the Tea Party movement, a political answer to the two-party system born from fear because there has been a lot of rapid change going on in the world the last few years and fear, well, it scares the hell out of the masses and leads to a mistrust of thinking people and those who read books. Consider from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when the protagonist Winston comes across a banned book:

“The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden.”

Quixote XXVII

“And Pooh respects Owl, because you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday” ~~ A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

Tuesday was a bad day. On a personal level, it was a bad day because the severe arthritic pain in the connective tissue around the heel of my right foot, which began on Sunday, dissipated on Monday, then returned with a vengeance on Tuesday, had me living in a world of hurt that took my pain medications hours — we’re talking nearly nine hours — to effectively communicate with the torment in my heel and foot.

On a whole other level, Tuesday was a bad day for the ongoing existential struggle between Republican lawmakers and unions and Democrats in the American Midwest, representing a surreal attempt to further erode and undermine the very existence of the middle-class. From the NYT (Spreading Anti-Union Agenda):

Republican talk of balancing budgets is cover for the real purpose of gutting the political force of middle-class state workers, who are steady supporters of Democrats and pose a threat to a growing conservative agenda.

And then, of course, there was madman Colonel Gadhafi’s warning in Libya of conducting “house-to-house” purges by military police until the uprising is put down. And it will be days before we get a final assessment of the death count from the earthquake that struck Christchurch, New Zealand on Monday.

After Lela went to bed shortly after eleven tonight, I settled in and read ten pages of Dante’s Purgatorio (which I’m reading for research) and another chapter of Don Quixote (which I’m reading for pleasure). In Chapter XXVII of Quixote, a sonnet appears, sung “not in the verses of uncouth shepherds but of polished gentlefolk.” The last two lines of the sonnet, for its obvious relevance, literally made me jerk upright on the sofa, where my injured foot is resting on an overturned plastic laundry basket, and reach for my highlighter pen:

Once more grim chaos will engulf our world

And all of us to anarchy be hurled

“Go Irish” and the “Championship” Revival

“When I play him (Jason Miller), my subtext is that this is a doomed man,” actor Bob Hughes told the Bucks County (PA) Courier Times in September 2009. “”He had his reasons why he needed to ease the pain of his life and I’m certainly not going to judge his use of narcotics or his use of alcohol.”

Bob is referring to his tireless work presenting my play (co-written with Tom Flannery), Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, anywhere he can find a venue that will support the one-man show, beginning with the 2007 premiere at the Northeast Theater in Scranton, Miller’s hometown.

Miller, who dropped dead of a heart attack in one of his favorite haunts, Farley’s Pub, in downtown Scranton on May 13, 2001, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony award for his 1972 play That Championship Season, as well as a New York Drama Critics Award, and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in his film debut as Father Damien Karras in the 1973 film, The Exorcist. My play, which has been presented as part of the Live Arts Festival and the Philly Fringe Festival, concerns the fate of Miller’s soul in the afterlife, where he must account for his wasted talent … in writing in a notebook.

Bob Hughes grew up with Miller in Scranton and knew him until the day the gifted writer, actor, and director died.

“This is a fairytale (for me),” Hughes told the Courier Times. “Your best friend goes to the brink of success, nosedives off the Hollywood sign, and then you get a chance to re-enact his life on stage — how many actors get a chance to play their best friend from high school?”

Last year, around the time that our eviction problems began looming, Bob called me incessantly to tell me that he had heard rumors that a Broadway revival of Miller’s Championship Season was in the offing; he was hoping that a new production of the play might spur more interest in Go Irish. Later, he called and left a message telling me that the rumors were true, that a production was planned for the Spring of 2011.

I haven’t talked to Bob in the last six months; but yesterday, while thumbing through the Arts section of the New York Times — the print edition, which runs six bucks here on the west coast — I noticed that the revival of Championship is indeed underway and in previews. The venue for the new production? The Jacobs Theatre.