william shakespeare | House of SpeakEasy NYC

Posts From Author: william shakespeare

Inside the Lie

September 29, 2014. As an amber-violet sunset spread across a CinemaScope sky to the west of Manhattan, the House of SpeakEasy returned to City Winery for the inaugural show of its fall season. Almost three hundred guests gathered to listen, to laugh, to share, and to refill their glasses as six writers — Marcelo Gleiser, Natalie Haynes, John Guare, Gary Shteyngart, Gail Sheehy, and Andrew Solomon — took to the stage to ponder this month’s theme, Inside the Lie. This month’s guest stars? Copernicus, RFK, Oedipus, Sophia Loren’s panties, an uncommon family set-up, a Bavarian porn star… We’ll be posting videos from the show soon, but here’s a sneak preview of what went down when the curtain went up… Marcelo Gleiser: “We matter because we are very rare…” Marcelo Gleiser set the scene in 1543 with the death of Copernicus. The Prussian math genius supposedly died with his newly published masterwork, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, in his hands, horrified by the preface tacked on by Lutheran nay-sayer Andreas Osiander that essentially discredited all that followed. Copernicus’s theory — maybe the sun… doesn’t orbit the earth? — would of course turn the world upside down (pun). But reversing the cosmic order, especially one which […]

Redaction and Refraction in David Gilbert’s “& Sons”

“All told, or totaled, I would spend a week under A.N. Dyer’s roof, which is how I became a witness, the primary witness despite some feuding claims, to everything that happened.” So writes Philip Topping, the intrusive narrator of David Gilbert’s brilliant & Sons, near the start of the novel, which is due out in paperback from Random House on May 27. A.N. (Andrew) Dyer is an elderly, reclusive, New York-based writer in the vein of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. When we first see him, at the funeral of his lifelong friend — and Philip’s father — Charlie Topping, our narrator describes it as “one of those I-was-there moments”, a chance sighting of a rare bird, especially when the famous author stumbles over his eulogy. The majority of the novel’s action takes place in the week that follows the funeral. Philip, recently estranged from his wife, moves in with the Dyers (Andrew and his son Andy) just as the ageing patriarch summons his older children, Jamie and Richard, home from their voluntary exiles in Vermont and California. To make amends or for some darker purpose? Echoes of some of the great-slash-terrible Shakespearean fathers — notably Lear — abound as the plot […]

Plays with Matches: A Brief Meditation on Fire & Literature

This coming Monday, the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural special guests — Andy Borowitz, Uma Thurman, Adam Gopnik, Susan Orlean, Simon Winchester and Dar Williams — will be stepping onto the stage at City Winery to ruminate on the theme “Plays with Matches”. I don’t know what they’re going to say. But it’s a fantastically potent theme — fiery metaphors abound in world literature, and fire has played a major role in the history of literature. So, in advance of gala night, I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts and a few excerpts from my reading notes. To start with, fire is of course the metaphor of choice for all kinds of passion, noble or ig-: “Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.” Venus attempting to sway the passions of Adonis in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Humbert Humbert in the opening lines of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita Even when said passions turn out […]