Stephen King speaks; also, reviews of 'Under the Dome,' 'Googled,' 'Pilgrims,' 'Nightlight'

"Stephen King has written of ghosts and vampires, revenants and demons and all manner of supernatural terrors.

"What does he find scarier, the extrahuman monsters or the human ones?

"'The human, always the human,' King says."

You can read the rest of my interview with Stephen King here. In a phone interview, we talked about why his terrific new novel Under the Dome took more than three decades to write, how the Bush administration inspired some of its characters, and why the current book price wars trouble him.

The book is one of King's best, as I say in my review:

"What's more terrifying than the invisible, impermeable, immovable dome that suddenly cages a chunk of Maine countryside in Stephen King's Under the Dome? 

"The town beneath it.

"Under the Dome has elements of extrahuman mystery, but the most frightening creatures in this frightening book are the human beings who find themselves trapped like ants under a heedless child's magnifying glass and, in many cases, respond with cruelties of their own."

Read the rest here.

Also on this week's books pages, you'll find reviews of Googled, Ken Auletta's lively history of the search engine that changed the world; Pilgrims: A Wobegon Romance, the lastest novel by A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor, who will appear in Tampa on Tuesday; and Nightlight, the Harvard Lampoon's spoof of a certain series of teen vampire lust novels you might have heard about.

Dan Mann of Lighthouse of Pinellas Inc. tells us what's on his Nightstand, and Notable gathers three new kids' books about real-life famous animals.

Getty Images photo

Madame Bovary goes to 'Lucia di Lammermoor'

For bookish opera fans, Lucia di Lammermoor is the one to see. Donizetti's bel canto melodrama was based, of course, on one of Sir Walter Scott's now unreadable romantic novels from the Scottish border country, The Bride of Lammermoor. But what's really interesting about the opera from a literary point of view is how often it turns up in other novels, including Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread.

The most famous and extensive reference to Lucia comes in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Chapter 15 is an account of a performance of the opera in Rouen that the adulterous Emma Bovary attends and falls into a reverie of regret about her marriage and is reunited with her lover. Flaubert's writing about Emma at the opera is marvelous:

"She gave herelf up to the lullaby of the melodies, and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery, the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the velvet caps, cloaks, swords -- all those imaginary things that floated amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world.''

Not for nothing is Madame Bovary often called the perfect novel.

Opera Tampa is staging Lucia di Lammermoor, with Elizabeth de Trejo (above) in the title role, Friday and Sunday at the newly named Straz Performing Arts Center (formerly Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center). For information, click here.

[Photo: Opera Tampa]

My Stephen King interview: a preview

Stephen King wowed a sold-out crowd last night at Van Wezel Hall in Sarasota, but before he chatted on stage about his smashingly scary new book Under the Dome, he talked to me by phone Saturday evening from his Casey Key home.

During the interview, we talked about the political and environmental inspirations for Under the Dome as well as King's feelings about the current book price wars. You can read the interview and my review of Dome on Saturday at tampabay.com or Sunday in the St. Petersburg Times. In the meantime, here's an outtake from our chat.

King was an e-book pioneer, publishing his novella Riding the Bullet online as a downloadable book in 2000. "I was on the cover of Time," he says. "I would go to the airport, and for the first and only time in my life, business guys would come up and talk to me. But they didn't talk about the story. They wanted to know about the business plan" for selling e-books.

King says he thought the earliest e-readers were "clumsy" and doubted whether the technology would catch on. "But then when Amazon came out with the Kindle, I thought, here we go," he says. "It's a wonderful gadget. I'm 62, and my eyes aren't as good as they used to be. I can make the print larger, and I love that.

"On the other hand, if you drop a book in the toilet, it dries out. Drop a Kindle in the toilet and you're done."

King says he has found that the books he downloads tend to be "disposable -- the kind of book you used to read on the airplane and leave for somebody else." If he does download a book and really enjoy it, he buys a paper copy. "I want to have them on the shelf."

As part of his current promotional tour for Under the Dome, he appeared last week on HLN's Morning Express. "It was Robin Meade, and you know, she's so pretty you don't expect her to be smart, too. But she asked me, 'Is the book going to be the vinyl record of the 21st century?' Maybe."

Getty Images photo of King, HLN publicity photo of Meade

An actor prepares: Watching 'It's a Wonderful Life' and playing George Bailey

Christopher Swan (right) is starring in This Wonderful Life, a one-man show in which he plays pretty much all the characters in It's a Wonderful Life, the holiday staple directed by Frank Capra and starring Jimmy Stewart as the savior of Bedford Falls, George Bailey. In preparing for the performance, Swan watched the movie closely, and especially Stewart's acting. Here's what he had to say about it:

"Jimmy Stewart is an icon, but to watch him work is a great lesson for an actor. His honesty and his immediacy, his energy and his focus is amazing. In the famous phone scene  he is so in the moment, so much about just talking and listening. That's when he and Mary are sharing the phone and talking to Sam, and they get closer and closer, and then finally they drop the phone and he hugs her. That scene is incredible, the look on his face, the timing. And Donna Reed is someone who gets overlooked. She is perfect in this movie.

"Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is another Capra classic. Stewart loved working with Capra and Capra loved working with him because he really captured that Everyman that Capra liked to celebrate. They used to call his movies 'Capra corn,' and he kind of wore it as a badge of honor: 'What's wrong with looking at the positive of America? What's wrong with looking at the good in people?' And Jimmy Stewart can pull that stuff off without seeming to be cloying or overly sentimental, and that's what I love about him.''

This Wonderful Life by Steve Murray and Mark Setlock is at American Stage from Wednesday through Dec. 27. Click here.

[Times photo of Christopher Swan by Scott Keeler]

A fortunate event: Lemony Snicket to return

Fans young and old of Lemony Snicket's irresistibly macabre A Series of Unfortunate Events books can rejoice (although Snicket might not advise it). Daniel Handler, who wrote the popular series of children's books under the Snicket nom de plume, will pick up that plume again.

Publishers Weekly reports that Handler, who published the first 13 Snicket novels with HarperCollins, has signed a new deal with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for five new books -- a young adult novel (illustrated by Maira Kalman) to be published in 2011, and four new Snicket books starting in 2012.

The series has sold 60 million copies. No word yet on whether the remarkably resilient Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire will return or Snicket will decide he has tortured those poor children enough and inflict misery on a new cast of characters.

Publicity photo

'Wonderland' diary: CD review

Frank Wildhorn calls himself a songwriter, as opposed to a supposedly more high-falutin’ theater composer, and what he means by that distinction is clear on the new CD of Wonderland: Alice’s New Musical Adventure, the musical with a score by him that premieres Dec. 5 at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

Wonderland is a terrific pop album, overflowing with insanely catchy hooks, toe-tapping rock and swelling choruses that you couldn’t get out of your head if you wanted to. Of the 15 songs from the show, at least half of them sound like hit singles, and they don’t need any theatrical context.

Don’t Wanna Fall in Love, One Knight, Once More I Can See, Finding Wonderland — these are just a few of the songs that would fit right into a Top 40 countdown. Of course, pop music can be manipulative, shamelessly derivative and loaded with cheap effects, like splashy key changes at every turn. Wildhorn is gleefully guilty on all counts here.

The musical has a dream cast. Janet Dacal (above), playing a contemporary Alice who is a Manhattan career woman and mother, opens the album with a frenetic rocker about being at the end of her rope, Worst Day of My Life. Dacal also has the range to handle Wildhorn’s trademark over-the-top chanteuse style in hyperemotional power ballads like Once More I Can See and Finding Wonderland. Her duets with Alice’s White Knight, the sweet-voiced Darren Ritchie, are swoony and funny.

Karen Mason, the cabaret queen of New York, is the Queen of Hearts and has a deliciously brassy big number, Off With Their Heads. As the queen’s calculating aide, Nikki Snelson plays the Mad Hatter like a bat out of hell who stops the show with a rousing rocker, The Nick of Time. There’s a bouncy salsa flavor to some of the score, and Jose Llana, playing a Latin lover Cheshire Cat, is the show’s answer to Ruben Blades in Keep on Dancin’. Eugene Fleming plays the hookah-smoking Zen master who offers Alice Advice From a Caterpillar as she enters Wonderland, a fantasy world beneath Manhattan reachable via a modern-day rabbit hole, an elevator.

Wildhorn and his longtime collaborator Jeremy Roberts produced the album at a New York studio. Unfortunately, the skimpy liner notes don’t include Jack Murphy’s lyrics, which can be quite witty, as in the boy-band anthem White Knight, led by Ritchie as “an outsourced knight so I work freelance.’’

It’s an old saw that musicals aren’t written, they’re rewritten, and that certainly seems to be true with Wonderland. Many of the songs on the CD were not in the script that was used for the first Actors Equity read through of the show last March, including some pivotal numbers, such as Alice’s defining Worst Day of My Life. The lyrics of Off With Their Heads have been completely changed. The revisions have continued during rehearsals at TBPAC.

Wonderland is full of songs that are perfect for listening to on an iPod or a car CD player. Now the big question is if Wildhorn’s marvelous pop music will work theatrically and dramatically. We’ll find out in a few weeks.

***The CD Wonderland: Alice’s New Musical Adventure is on sale for $20 at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center gift shop and at the show's Web site.

[Photo: Jeremy Roberts]

Sarasota Music Festival back in business

The Sarasota Music Festival will play again in 2010, thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Jay and Becky Kaiserman Foundation. “We are thrilled that the Sarasota Music Festival will...once again bring music students and exceptional faculty from around the world to Sarasota to study, mentor and perform classical and chamber music,” said Joseph McKenna, president and CEO of the Sarasota Orchestra.

In August, the orchestra board announced that the festival would be put on hiatus due to several years of budget deficits, a reduction in attendance of 45% since 1997 and the challenging economic environment. Now the festival is back on to run from May 30 through June 19 in 2010.

The $250,000 grant will be used to fund festival operations, enhanced marketing and revitalization of programming to attract new audiences. “Jay and Becky Kaiserman loved the Sarasota Music Festival,”  McKenna said.

The Kaisermans were Sarasota winter residents from Ohio. Jay Kaiserman died in 2003; his wife died in 2008.

The grant will also underwrite a concert by the Sarasota Orchestra in the festival, and that appears to have played a part in bringing the orchestra board and management and its musicians back to the bargaining table. The musicians' labor contract has been in limbo since negotiations for a new one halted in September. McKenna said talks will resume on Wednesday.  

Inescapable publishing event of next week: Sarah Palin's 'Going Rogue'

She might not have finished her term as governor of Alaska, but gosh darn it, she finished writing her book. Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, comes out Nov. 17.

Next Monday, Palin will sit down with Oprah Winfrey to talk about the book (4 p.m. on WFLA), which should be interesting. Palin kicks off a two-week book tour on Nov. 18 at the Barnes & Noble at Woodlands Mall in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The tour will take Palin mostly to smaller cities (no New York, L.A., etc.). In Florida, she'll be signing books at three stops on Nov. 24: at noon at Orange Park Mall Books-A-Million, 1910 Wells Road, Orange Park; at 4 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 1055 Old Camp Road, the Villages; and at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, Colonial Plaza Market Center, 2418 E Colonial Drive, Orlando.

Publisher HarperCollins ordered a first printing of 1.5 million copies of Going Rogue, which has been a pre-order bestseller on most lists for weeks. (Palin disclosed last month that she had received a $1.25 million advance for the book. Will she likely make much more? You betcha.) HarperCollins is owned, like almost everything else in mainstream media, by Rupert Murdoch, so expect to see Palin and commentators on Murdoch's Fox News TV network doing a lot of mutual back-scratching next week.

No advance copies of Going Rogue were made available to reviewers, but the Times' PolitiFact team will be taking a fact-checking look at the book after it's released.

Also on Nov. 17, progressive journal the Nation will publish a different look at Palin: Going Rouge: An American Nightmare, edited by Richard Kim and Betsy Reed. The waggish cover is a parody of Palin's own book jacket, showing her dressed in red and smiling into the distance. On her book, the background is blue skies; on Rouge's cover, it's thunderclouds and a lightning bolt. The contents are serious, though -- several dozen essays on Palin by frequent Nation contributors like Joe Conason, Naomi Klein, Katha Pollitt and Frank Rich.

Some right-wing commentators have complained the cover of Rouge could confuse buyers looking for Rogue, but the Nation's book won't be in bookstores -- it can be bought only at the publisher's Web site.

 

Arts visionaries Jim Crane and Margaret Rigg at Eckerd College

Whenever I get a phone call from Pat Baldwin, I know she'll have something interesting to tell me. Most recent example was word of a show at Eckerd College featuring works by Jim Crane and Margaret Rigg, two of the three founders of the college's visual arts program (when it was still Florida Presybterian College in 1961).

Both are now retired. Margaret Rigg will give a talk Wednesday at 3 p.m.

Cranes show is in the Armacost Library until Jan. 4 and Rigg's is in the Elliot Gallery at the Ransom Arts Center through Nov. 25.

Arthur Skinner, an Eckerd College professor, has written a lovely tribute to these teachers and artists who have influenced hundreds of students through the years. I have taken excerpts from his remarks. It's long for a blog, but I want to pay tribute to these two remarkable teachers and artists.

From Arthur Skinner:

The Visual Arts program at Eckerd College was established in 1961, three years after the founding of Florida Presbyterian College, when Dean John M. Bevan hired Robert O. Hodgell, a nationally known printmaker, painter and sculptor, as the college's first studio faculty member. In 1963 Hodgell was joined by James G. Crane (cartoonist, painter and collage artist), and in 1965, by Margaret Rigg (graphic designer, assemblage artist and calligrapher).  Crane and Rigg worked together to inspire a generation of young artists, activists and teachers. As studio programs were still relatively new to American higher education, there were few blueprints to follow. Of the art faculty only Jim Crane had ever taught in college, so he became department chair. It was Jim who invented our Visual Problem Solving and Studio Critique courses. And in a stroke of pedagogical genius it was determined that our seniors should have a personal exhibition as a capstone experience, equivalent to a thesis, and that students should have personal studio space in which to work independently.   Indeed, while Jim has won numerous awards and honors with his works in painting and collage, and published several books of cartoons besides, examples of which may be found in this exhibition, it could be said that his greatest creative work was in teaching itself. Jim Crane retired in 1993 after thirty years of service as Visual Arts Discipline Coordinator, Patriarch and Resident Visionary. He steadfastly guided us through times of both light and of darkness, and with remarkable wisdom and wonderfully insightful humor. More than anyone else Jim Crane shaped the Visual Arts program at FPC/Eckerd: its structure, its curriculum, and its essential teaching philosophy. As Jim’s cartoons still reflect so eloquently today about communication, so Peg’s show is entirely about communication.    Margaret Rigg once wrote: "In my calligraphy I want to join with others, past present and future. And if someone along the way sees one of my calligraphies and feels somehow that it is addressed directly to them even if we never meet face-to-face, we, together, establish community. It is not only an emotional contact, but a spiritual and physical one. In this way my calligraphies are like letters. They contain ideas, images, feelings that I want to say to another human being, to God, to myself." It can truly be said of Peg that she has made an art of communication.Peg is the author of three books, and has to her credit more than forty one-woman shows in the U.S., Europe, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. Her tireless efforts as an artist and teacher to promote peace, justice and an awareness of our human potential have made a tremendous and indelible impact upon all who have come in contact with her. Peg retired from teaching in 1998 after thirty-three years of dedicated service to the college.   Peg was my mentor.  She was the model of the artist-activist; it was from her that I first learned to appreciate the fact that artists have responsibilities.

 

 

 

 

  

Weekend concerts: Voices, it's all about voices

Paul Basler (left), a French horn and composition professor at the University of Florida, spent time in Kenya as a Fulbright senior lecturer in music in the 1990s, and he's premiering a piece this coming weekend that draws on that experience. Missa Kenya, a setting for male chorus, will be sung by the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay, with Basler on horn. The concert, conducted by Duncan Couch, will also include works of Vaughan Williams, Bruckner and Brahms. It's at 4 p.m. Saturday at Lake Magdalene United Methodist Church, Tampa. For details, click here.

Many people know Florida Pro Musica for its annual Advent concert of Gregorian chant at Sacred Heart Church in downtown Tampa, and the group will be chanting again next month to provide respite from holiday stress. But first it opens the season with a concert of choral music of Tudor England at 4 p.m. Sunday at Sacred Heart.

"This concert features a group of 11 singers with a great sound, and we're doing Byrd's Mass for four voices and Ave verum corpus, and a handful of madrigals,'' music director Larry Kent says. "I'm also going to play a few of Byrd's solo keyboard works on my newly restored virginal (part of the harpsichord family).'' Click here for details.

For the patriotic choral fan, the 150-voice St. Petersburg College Concert Chorus performs a Veterans Day musical salute Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Palladium Theater, St. Petersburg. Vernon Taranto Jr. conducts the free concert. Details are here.

[Photo: University of Florida]