Word: bard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Philippines is a land of storytellers, but the saga of the modern nation remains largely unknown beyond its own shores. Han Ong would appear to be in a good position to fill the post of bard. The native Filipino immigrated to the U.S. when he was 16, achieved success there as a playwright and won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship. His first novel, Fixer Chao, was about a Filipino male prostitute in New York City who poses as a feng-shui expert to fleece the rich...
...What sustains the reader's interest is Ong's rich use of language, which at its best reflects "the pell-mell, absurd, bountiful, magical nature of the Philippines," in Ong's generous phrase. Yet if this gifted writer is to realize his potential as a novelist-bard for the Philippines, his vision needs to be tempered by a stringent course of narrative basics...
...silence. Or is it? By listening closely to the poems and plays, and by assembling scraps of historical evidence into (mostly) plausible surmises, scholar Stephen Greenblatt has produced Will in the World (Norton; 406 pages), a dazzling and subtle biography, due Sept. 20, that teases out possibilities in the bard's inner and outer life, like the much argued conjecture that in youth, Shakespeare was secretly Catholic in an England where the old faith was being suppressed. You may not always be persuaded by Greenblatt's intuitive leaps, but you'll have great fun watching him jump. --By Richard Lacayo...
...pursue the great coho salmon in Newfoundland, cross the Rockies in a special Union Pacific train and jet across the Atlantic to hunker down on the banks of England's Test River, where Bush was told a fellow named William Shakespeare fished for trout. "Ah, the Bard and me along the Test," he spoofs. "They say that you are not a man until you have been to the Great Wall and fished the Test. I've been to the Great Wall...
...adjust your screens. That dark chap crooning beside a bosomy, winged model in a Venetian palazzo in a new Victoria's Secret commercial is Bob Dylan. The counterculture bard who once sang of "Advertising signs that con you" is now a TV pitchman. Recruited for his "confidence and gravitas," according to a Victoria's Secret spokesman, Dylan plays his 1997 song Love Sick in the spot (in which, coincidentally, parts of models seem to defy gravitas). His record label called the ad "a great way to reach people with Bob's music." It's also a great way to hang...