Hello Corelings! Welcome to reading period, the all-too-short span before the start of finals. Whether you’re putting the final touches on your last papers, cramming for your Core exams, or looking up pictures of dogs in hopes that they may inject some semblance of motivation into your veins (we suggest huskies or shiba inus for these purposes), we hope that this installment of the Weekly Round-Up provides you with a much-needed break. Read on:
- U-Theatre, a Zen percussion troupe, is presenting a five-show run of its work Dao at the National Theater in Taipei following its world premiere on April 15 at the National Theater Taichung. Percussion, martial arts, and meditation come together to explore the teachings of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.
- Turns out this past Wednesday, May 3, marked the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli. And you know how we at Core love birthdays, belated or otherwise. Now if only we could find 548 candles…
- Voltaire was a lot more wily than we realized. Along with several instances of arrests and imprisonments–in the Bastille, no less–the writer once described the plays of Shakespeare as “disgusting” and characteristic of the “absurd and barbaric” English theater; nonetheless, the Bard’s “enormous dungheap” still contains some desirable aspects. (We have to wonder what may have caught Voltaire’s eye.)
The man himself, snickering at the audacity of English theater. Probably. Portrait of Voltaire, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, pastel on paper, 1735.
- Remember that time a grad student discovered Walt Whitman’s little-known guide to Manly Health and Training, written back in 1858 under the pseudonym Mose Velsor? There is some speculation–well, at least by Spectator contributor Ben Markovits–that it was, in fact, penned by actress Gwyneth Paltrow. We’ll let you decide.
- More birthdays: Karl Marx is 199 today. To commemorate the day, thespian Mamunur Rashid and Bangla Theatre is scheduled to present a stage reading of historian Howard Zinn’s play “Marx in Soho” at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the national academy of fine and performing arts in Bangladesh. The play imagines a scenario in which Marx appears in the world of today and, we assume, gives us a piece of his mind. But we have to ask–does Zinn imagine him as one who has been revived from death (if so, we’d like to know if his opinions on religion have changed) or one who has lived to the present day (a lot hairier, smelly, etc.)? We need answers.
Keep guard on zombie Karl Marx. By Paasikivi of Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
…All right, how are you faring? Ready to jump back into the fray? Best of luck on your papers and exams!
