An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1972)

An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe (1972)
Director: Kenneth Johnson
Writers: Kenneth Johnson (writer)
Edgar Allan Poe (stories)
Genre: Drama - Horror - Mystery - Thriller
David Welche: Television Adaptation


An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe (1972) is a 52-minute film which features Vincent Price, in front of a live audience, reciting four of Edgar Allan Poe's stories.


The stories included are: "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Sphinx", "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Pit and the Pendulum".

Why the Claims of Dan Brown Strike A Chord?

Eric Plumer, Ph.D., associate professor of theology/religious studies at the University, examines the evidence behind some of the amazing claims made in Dan Browns novel.


He asks us to consider what the popularity of The Da Vinci Code tells us about how the Catholic Church is viewed today in America.


The presentation was held Saturday September 26, 2009 in Brennan Hall at The University of Scranton.

Stella Rimington on Being A Spy

Imagine your partner takes up a diplomatic post in India. While you're there, playing the role of the dutiful spouse at a cocktail party, a man taps you on the shoulder and asks if you'd like a job helping him in his office.


It turns out that the shoulder-tapper is not just any man, but a spy. You accept, and within a short time are embarking on a career full of intrigue and mystery. Sounds unlikely, something from a fanciful movie plot? Well this is not some work of fiction, but rather how Stella Rimington found herself working for British Domestic Intelligence Agency, MI5.


This change of career saw her progress through the ranks of MI5 before ascending to the highest position of MI5, becoming the first female Director General of the Agency in 1992. Some say that Ian Fleming based his character M, played by Judy Dench in the James Bond films, on Rimington. She'd say that her experiences have made her a writer. Recently in Australia she talked at a Dymocks Literary Lunch about the line between fact and fiction.


Stella Rimington says she's had 4 careers. First as a Librarian/archivist, then a diplomats wife, MI5, and now as an author. In this field she has written four books, her first a memoir titled Open Secret: the Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5. She has published three spy-thriller novels Secret Asset, Illegal Action and Dead Line. She's currently working on a fourth novel.

Lunch Poems: Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003).

He has been the subject of numerous documentary films including Mario Van Peeble's Poetic License for The Sundance Channel and St. Clair Bourne's In Motion: Amiri Baraka. He has also appeared in dozens of films including, most recently, M.K. Asante, Jr's award-winning documentary The Black Candle.

The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of essays in book form radically exploring what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and critically. It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has headlined him in the media in ways rare to poets and authors. The recital of the poem “that mattered” engaged the poet warrior in a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey and with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the state’s Poet Laureate because of Somebody Blew Up America’s provocatively poetic inquiry (in a few lines of the poem) about who knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade Center bombings in 2001.

The poem’s own detonation caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York Times and to be featured on CNN--to name a few US city, state and national and international media.

Baraka lives in Newark with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement for some fifteen years.

His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.


Source: The official website of Amiri Baraka
www.amiribaraka.com

Edgar Allan Poe "The Raven"

Here is a virtual movie Edgar Allan Poe reading his great poem "The Raven"
This recording taken from a public domain audio website is qiute possibly my alltime favourite reading of this most dark lunatic frenzied poem.

Heres an excerpt of what the excellent Wikipedia says about this most famous of poems..

"The Raven" is a narrative poem by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in January 1845. It is noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the latter's slow descent into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. The raven, sitting on a bust of Pallas, seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word, "Nevermore." Throughout the poem, Poe makes allusions to folklore and various classical works.

Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically. His intention was to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explains in the follow-up essay: "The Philosophy of Composition". The poem was inspired in part by a talking raven in the novel Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty by Charles Dickens. Poe borrows the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship".

The first publication of "The Raven" on January 29, 1845, in the New York Evening Mirror made Poe widely popular in his lifetime. The poem was soon reprinted, parodied, and illustrated. Though some critics disagree about the value of the poem, it remains one of the most famous poems ever written"