Take advantage of student theater! The final performance of Harold Pinter’s Moonlight is tonight at 8 o’clock in the Lerner Black Box. Go and be literary!

Harold Pinter’s Moonlight is in no way the typical drama performed by eager undergraduates and Sarah Wansely’s choice to take on this work reflects a certain courage and confidence both in her own talents and that of her cast and crew.

Pinter is famous for word play and subtext and Moonlight is no exception.  The script challenges the actors cast to grapple with big emotions and big fears without their usual emotive volume.  Here, Wansely offers an almost all too real look at familial relations, intimacy and the responsibilities they respectively entail.



Against Birdy Sahagian’s stage, designed all in blacks, whites and gray, the actors explore the blurry boundary between secrecy and intimacy that plagues almost every family’s home.  Surrounded by shades gray , the characters quite literally inhabit this nebulous state and subtly voice questions families often are too scared to ask. 

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Chomsky’s second speech, a discussion of Harold Pinter’s censorious Nobel Prize acceptance speech, failed to impress contributor Armin Rosen. He sends this evaluation of the MIT linguist’s decidedly uncritical reception.

I remember reading somewhere that Noam Chomsky was a controversial figure, but if I had to depend on my own sense perceptions for evidence, I’d have serious trouble believing it. Yes, a few people stood outside of Miller Theatre alleging that Chomsky was in fact a “radical adviser to < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />U.S. imperialism.” But, the fact that these people were Sparticists, and the fact that they provided what was virtually the evening’s only counterpoint to Chomsky’s polarizing views on American foreign policy, is evidence either that the entire educated world is in accord with Mr. Chomsky’s somewhat divisive political views, or that students at this University are, simply put, intellectually impotent.

And then there’s a horrifying third possibility, which is that some intellectually impotent faculty organizer went ahead and assumed that the entire educated world is in accord with said linguist-cum-ultraleft polemicist, and deliberately engineered this event as a means of reinforcing Chomsky’s abominable political views. A cursory glance at the program description led me to logically eliminate this possibility: the concept of the event, which was to juxtapose playwright Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech with Chomsky’s own views on American foreign policy, implied the kind of differentiation of opinion that makes for intriguing, provocative intellectual discussion. After all—if Pinter and Chomsky were in complete agreement then screening the speech in front of a sold-out Miller Theatre would be the most ludicrous possible act of redundancy. Read more…

This evening, twelve lucky EC residents— and some prisoners of Wien —were invited to supper with the chipper, quick-witted dean of Columbia College himself, the venerable Austin E. Quigley. Bwog editor Chris Szabla was there and recounts what he learned about the origins of the major system, the progression of globalization, and British playwright Harold Pinter.

The family Harrist has, to this day, been living in the Faculty-in-Residence apartment of East Campus for thirteen months. Surprisingly, they claim, the location is not nearly as noisy as their old apartment’s, perched near that veritable magnet of late-night decorum, Pinnacle. “It can even get too quiet here,” Prof. Robert Harrist told me. The arrival, however, of the firey-haired Dean Quigley and his wife, Barnard prof. Patricia Denison, ensured the evening would be an active one indeed. While the invitees were still tearing into their Kitchenette-catered feast, Quigley launched a seminar-like discussion of the College curriculum and how participants felt it could be improved.

The first item of business was the major. Quigley asked whether, in an age of dual or treble-majors and interdisciplinary emphases, the traditional major made any sense. It had been designed, he said, for those who needed sufficient depth to go into graduate school, with the presumption many graduates would become highly specialized academics. In recent years, however, with a proliferation of CC students interested in finance and other business fields, students have become more concerned with their degrees’ marketability. One recounted his experience in consultancy interviews as a philosophy major, being continually asked to justify his major choice and to demonstrate some quantitative ability. “Did you ask them to spell that?” Quigley returned in his characteristically clipped, dry jest.

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