Doctorow’s Epiphany
E. L. Doctorow is 72 today.
The above is a phrase from The Midrash Jazz Quartet in Doctorow’s novel City of God.
Tonight’s site music is “Black Diamond.”
William T. Noon, S.J., Chapter 4 of Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957:
A related epiphanic question, second only in interest to the question of the nature of epiphany, is how Joyce came by the term. The religious implications would have been obvious to Joyce: no Irish Catholic child could fail to hear of and to understand the name of the liturgical feast celebrated on January 6. But why does Joyce appropriate the term for his literary theory? Oliver St. John Gogarty (the prototype of the Buck Mulligan of Ulysses)… has this to say: “Probably Father Darlington had taught him, as an aside in his Latin class — for Joyce knew no Greek — that ‘Epiphany’ meant ‘a shining forth.'”
From Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining:
Danny Torrance: Is there something bad here?
Dick Hallorann: Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, you can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who “shine” can see. Just like they can see things that haven’t happened yet. Well, sometimes they can see things that happened a long time ago. I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ’em was good.
From a website on author Willard Motley:
“Willard Motley’s last published novel is entitled, Let Noon Be Fair, and was actually published post-humously in 1966. The story line takes place in Motley’s adopted country of Mexico, in the fictional fishing village of Las Casas, which was based on Puerta [sic] Vallarta.”
See also “Shining Forth” and yesterday’s entry “Culinary Theology.”
From an essay by Teller of Penn and Teller, that I just happened to read today:
It’s funny how right Stanislavsky is about acting. He tells you to read the script again and again, to act it out again and again, not to think too hard, but to wait until this or that moment starts to get illuminated. Gradually, he says, the bright parts of the script will expand until the whole thing is lit up. That’s a little hard to do in a short rehearsal period, but since the role was written with me in mind and since everybody was working so hard to help, the process was speeded up.
Next day we did a pre-shoot of an “exterior” where Mr. Boots gets stuck Up a tree and Greg unwillingly climbs up to rescue him. I was very glad they put thick mats under the tree, as Greg went plummeting on one of his first climbs. We did it until everybody laughed, then stopped. Gail, the director, then told me that Fred Greenlee, the man who had dreamed up the Mr. Boots character (literally, while sleeping) had offered to work with me one on one on scenes I was having trouble with.
For three stupendously fun hours, Fred and I went over each piece of Mr. Boots’ “business”. His original idea was that Boots took the cat concept less literally than I had thought. Mr. Boots should SEE himself in his mind’s eye as trotting around on all fours all the time, but in fact often be upright (think of the horses in “Equus”) moving like a cat-man. Fred is thin, so he had in mind all sorts of graceful stuff that didn’t suit me, but the idea — that Mr. Boots actually walks along the streets of San Francisco much of the time in his cat mind-set — was an eye-opener. I started to think, Let’s make Mr. Boots all about being luxuriously comfortable at all times. So we draped me over steps, refrigerators, couches, and I came up with a funny cat-trot that enabled me to do quick crosses when I needed to. By the end of our session, there were big Stanislavsky pools of light all over the script.
Comment by HomerTheBrave — Monday, January 6, 2003 @ 2:20 am
Oh, and an index of all the entries
Comment by HomerTheBrave — Monday, January 6, 2003 @ 2:22 am