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A New Portrait of Shakespeare

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The old bladder-faced portrait plastered on every Shakespeare anthology ever published is soon to be replaced. But I think the Bard’s actual image is a modern-day version of Elizabethan navel-gazing, despite the musings of the august Stanley Wells. Maybe publishers should do a collage of portraits?

Will Crutchfield – Opera Conductor

Ah-ha! Will Crutchfield argues his point during a debate in Ms. Hunley’s class period. The class was also used for research, note-filing, and practice before tournaments.

I found this photograph in the Warwick High School yearbook of 1975. A friend of mine way back then in Newport News, VA, was Will Crutchfield, who grew up to be a famous opera conductor — that is, after a stint with the New York Times as the youngest opera critic in that paper’s history. Will’s an amazing person who has to his credit the discovery of a lost and unknown Donizetti opera, Elisabeth, the manuscript of which he found in a basement of London’s Royal Opera House. Sometimes in life one meets someone who’s destined to break away from the herd; of all the people I’ve met, Will took the lead.

What follows is a video clip of Will rehearsing “Ecco ridente in cielo” from Rossini’s Barber of Seville at the Polish National Opera of Warsaw. The tenor is Blagoj Nacoski.

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Places in “To Build a Fire”

Nine men and one woman standing on top of a mining dump, Sulphur Creek, Yukon Territory, ca. 1898

Two RCMP Officers posing in front of the RCMP Post at Sixty Mile.

Dyea Waterfront March 1898

Jack London

Jack London, prolific author of “To Build a Fire”

In this story of Man vs. Nature, there are essentially three characters: the man, the dog, and nature, which is portrayed as the antagonist in the story. However, nature doesn’t act deliberately; it is simply a passive force against which the man and the dog struggle for survival.

“To Build a Fire” is often cited as an example of American Naturalism and is frequently taught along with Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.”

The most famous version of the story is London’s revised manuscript of 1908. In the original story of 1902, the protagonist survives.