Zeta-Jones Raises Glass to Dylan Thomas

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POET’S PRIZE


At the Algonquin Hotel yesterday, Welsh-born actress Catherine Zeta-Jones offered greetings by video on what would have been Dylan Thomas’s 90th birthday.


Ms. Zeta-Jones is the international ambassador for the $100,000 Dylan Thomas Literary Prize, which will be awarded biennially, starting October 27, 2006, during Dylan Thomas Festival Week. The winner will receive a yearlong creative writing residency at the University of Wales, Swansea, and at the University of Texas, Austin.


Writers from the English-speaking world who have published a book or had a play produced – and who need not be Welsh – are eligible. When one guest asked if journalists were eligible for the prize, composer and comedian Ray Jessel rejoined, “Most journalism today is fiction.”


Candidates must also be between the ages of 18 and 30. One person noted that Thomas wrote poetry in his youth. At age 18, Thomas’s poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” was published in a London journal.


Another attendee remarked that 18 marked drinking age. “I was drinking and writing at 12,” Mr. Jessel said.


The prize will be judged by a jury that includes the editor of the British newspaper the Independent, Simon Kelner; novelists Ben Marcus and Paul Watkins, and professor Kurt Heinzelman of the University of Texas. It will be funded by the Welsh Assembly Government and the Swansea City Council, among others,


Also seen at the event were poetry impresario Bob Holman and Welshborn Michael Bogdanov, who is at work on “Lonestar Love,” which will play at the Houseman Theater starting November 21.


Sculptor David Slivka stopped by as well. He knew Thomas and shared his birthday – Mr. Slivka himself turned 90 yesterday.


***


MORGENBESSER AND MONOTHEISM


Sidney Morgenbesser’s wide-ranging capacity for friendship was in evidence on Sunday by the number of people who came out to his memorial at Columbia’s Low Library.


At the memorial, Hebrew University philosopher Avishai Margalit told an amusing anecdote about visiting the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with Morgenbesser and his student.


Morgenbesser regretted his indifference to the site, but later returned alone. He noticed a man putting a customary note in a crevice in the wall, hoping for a divine answer. Morgenbesser confessed to have read the missive, and related its contents as follows: “My wife has diabetes. My son is separated from his wife. My phone number in New York City is so-and-so, and in Florida is such-and-such.”


Among those seen were: philosopher Saul Kripke; literary critic Morris Dickstein; legal scholar Louis Henkin; philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, who is researching identity; a new addition to the Columbia philosophy department, Christopher Peacocke; Andrew Delbanco, who recently helped to inaugurate the Heimert Colloquium in American History and Literature; historian Eric Foner, whom Morgenbesser taught in an undergraduate course in 1959-60; Thomas Nagel; sociologist Herbert Gans; a philosophy professor emerita from Barnard, Mary Mothersill; a biographer of Nicholas Murray Butler, Michael Rosenthal; and a religion professor at Columbia, Wayne Proudfoot.


***


FREE SPEECH


First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams and attorney Kenneth Bialkin, an investor in this paper, debated the presidential election this week at a parlor meeting hosted by the Join Action Committee for Political Affairs.


When the audience applauded for Mr. Bialkin, Mr. Abrams quipped to audience laughter, “In this room, the First Amendment doesn’t allow any applause for him.”


***


HIGHBROW & LOW


The editor of the New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, is speaking December 7 at the Learning Annex on “Get Paid to Read Books! Make $$$ Doing Something You Love.”


The listing goes on to boast that his work has appeared in more than a dozen publications including the New York Review of Books – a publication surely not often cited in Learning Annex bulletins.


***


THEORETICAL TALK


Bulgarian-born French literary theorist Julia Kristeva, a visiting professor at the New School University, spoke at the CUNY Graduate Center last week.


An audience member asked if she envisaged computer “hypertext” links at the time she developed the concept of “intertextuality,” which refers to the interdependence of texts.


Ms. Kristeva replied that a mother ought not hover over a child. The audience laughed when she added, “The child has the right to do whatever he wants.”


***


UNCIVIL UNION


The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, the Nation’s Eric Alterman, CNN’s Margaret Carlson, and the anchor of “PrimeTime Live,” Chris Cuomo, analyzed the upcoming presidential election at a Creative Coalition panel held Monday evening at the HBO Theater.


The discussion mentioned some Web sites including www.kerryhatersforkerry.com, which offers reasons for supporting Senator Kerry even if one doesn’t particularly like him.


Mr. Alterman said one case made by the Web site was that, “You’re not marrying the guy.”


***


DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES


Terrence M. Cole of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks gave a lecture at the Explorers Club about the tragic 1881-84 expedition to the arctic led by Lieutenant A.W. Greely.


The audience chuckled when Mr. Cole said his talk was titled “Mutiny, Murder and Cannibalism,” while Greely innocuously called the expedition “Three Years of Arctic Service.”


***


LITERARY LAUGHS


The cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Robert Mankoff, signed copies of “The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker” after speaking at the Small Press Center on Tuesday. One audience member asked him, “Do you use any international artists?” He replied, “Does Cleveland count?”


Mr. Mankoff showed various cartoons, including one from 1933 where King Kong strolls into a newsroom with a paper in hand. The giant gorilla approaches a reporter seated at a desk, and angrily demands, “Are you the motion picture reviewer of this paper?”


In another cartoon, a dog on a beach watches a man in the water nearby flailing his hands. “Lassie, Get Help!” he shouts. The next panel shows Lassie reclining on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office.


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