Been on holiday

We went to Istanbul, and staying in a 5-star hotel cut me from the miserable world, and so I felt a perfect Wordsworthian seclusion, Sidneyan arcadia, Coleridgian spiritual xanadu and Keatsian beauty and truth. Shaw disliked to travel, but every now and then wife Charlotte would come home with a couple of tickets to travel and he didn't say no. That way Shaw travelled from Moscow where he met Stalin to Hollywood where he met Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Greta Garbo. Likewise, I dislike travel, but every now and then, wife, knowing how to make herself lovable among sheikhas, would bring tickets for a paid holiday and I wouldn't say no. Last month 's Istanbul trip was one of those paid holidays. Shylock complained that Antonio one day called him dog. If you considered me a lucky dog I wouldn't complain






Been on holiday. Have read the celebrated Hungarian stage-director and personal friend of, among many others, Brecht, Beckett and Elia Kazan, George Tabori who says that the function of art is not to be likeable. Basing on Tabori, I can say that watching a 1950s movie, say KING SOLOMON'S MINES, ON THE WATERFRONT, THE KING AND I, is likeable whereas reading Shakespeare is unlikeable. I agree with Tabori when he concludes with a rhetorical question: Who'd spend a weekend with Hamlet?


Also been reading interviews with Elia Kazan who says that the moral of his movie SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS is to accept the cost of disaster

Also been reading Maureen O'Hara's autobiography where she quotes letters from the director John Ford to her wherein he shows himself as a great lover and superb love-letters writer beating even Casanova and Don Juan and me