'Poetober' Provides Virtual Thrills at Stray Dog Theatre - Ladue News

'Poetober' Provides Virtual Thrills at Stray Dog Theatre - Ladue News
50 best horror TV shows | Entertainment | roanoke.com - Roanoke Times
What I Learned from Reading Wendell Berry - Patheos
10 Popular Anime You Never Knew Had Canon Light Novels | CBR - CBR - Comic Book Resources

Posted: 27 Oct 2020 12:32 PM PDT

After mounting an online production of the drama Lobby Hero this summer, Stray Dog Theatre returns with three works from the canon of celebrated, 19^th century American writer Edgar Allen Poe – just in time for a pandemic-style Halloween.

Stray Dog artistic director Gary F. Bell introduces each of the three tales of terror, all famous works by the master of horror, suspense and detective fiction. Bell directs each of the stories, with notable contributions by Stray Dog associate artistic director Justin Been, whose sound effects and musical score entice and accentuate the spooky goings-on.

The selections include Poe's most famous poem, The Raven, performed by Gerry Love; The Tell-Tale Heart, a must-read short story in high school English classes of my youth, with David Wassilak in the lead role; and Poe's whodunit masterpiece, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered by many to be the progenitor of detective fiction, with Laura Kyro as Poe's indomitable sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin.

Each has its own merits. In The Tell-Tale Heart, Wassilak masterfully depicts the murderous narrator who kills an old man with a "vulture's eye" and then buries him beneath the floorboards in the man's apartment. Wassilak's tone is cool and calculated, matching the killer's self-satisfaction in pulling off what he thinks is a seamless crime.

The young man is a little too confident, though, and when he invites police who have been summoned by a neighbor, he gets cocky and encourages the gendarmes to stay until his hallucinations catch up with him. Wassilak's voice gradually escalates in volume and anxiety under Bell's measured direction.

Gerry Love recites The Raven in a softly spoken timbre, matching the melancholy and remorse of a man who has lost his one true love and pines for her return from beyond. Bell mentions that Poe was inspired to write about a raven after seeing the one owned by his novelist friend, Charles Dickens.

Love fills the narrator with a haunting charm, underscored by the plaintive chords in Been's well-chosen sound design. It's especially gratifying listening to Love carefully and deliberately offer sundry takes on the poem's signature word, "Nevermore," with a suitably disturbing denouement.

The longest of the three presentations is the two-part version of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which Poe originally wrote for Graham's Magazine in 1841. It's considered the first modern detective story, a genre favored by Poe for its "ratiocinations" used in the deduction of a crime by the erudite Dupin. To this day, the Edgar Allen Poe (Edgar) Awards are presented annually by the Mystery Writers of America.

As one listens to Kyro calmly and charmingly depict the inquisitive Dupin, it's easy to see how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dame Agatha Christie and others might have modeled Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple on the nonplussed, ingratiating Dupin. The writing can be a bit precious and repetitive by modern standards, but there's a wonderful sense of history derived from listening to Kyro portray Poe's protagonist in elegant, intelligent terms.

Poe was a really big deal in my youth, when Hollywood made an abundance of flicks featuring the likes of Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre starring in a litany of horror films, tame by modern standards, ever so loosely based on various short stories by the star-crossed Poe, who died much too soon at age 40 in 1849.

Theater companies here and around the nation have been struggling since March to re-invent themselves in the shadow of the relentless COVID-19 pandemic. Kudos to Bell, Been, Love, Wassilak and Kyro for lending their artistic talents to this audio homage to one of Halloween's greatest inspirations, the gifted albeit tortured Edgar Allen Poe.

Play: Poetober

Company: Stray Dog Theatre

Venue: Stray Dog Theatre website, www.straydogtheatre.org

Dates: Through Oct. 31

Tickets: Free; log in through the website

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50 best horror TV shows | Entertainment | roanoke.com - Roanoke Times

Posted: 22 Oct 2020 02:00 AM PDT

We're living through what many critics and audiences alike have deemed the "Golden Age of Television." While many of these discussions focus on prestige dramas, the past few decades have been undoubtedly strong ones for horror television that can both thrill and move audiences. Now more than ever, horror is moving past its genre classification and getting featured in peak TV, like Netflix's "Stranger Things," HBO's "Lovecraft Country," and Hulu's "What We Do in the Shadows."

Of course, horror TV has been around long before streaming services and contemporary programming. For instance, Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" is often cited as one of the greatest TV series of all time. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, supernatural series "Twin Peaks" and "The X-Files" revolutionized how horror was presented on cable television. Across the world, Japanese anime series have offered plenty of animated action and spine-tingling scares.

But in a time when it feels like there are unlimited TV viewing options in the age of both streaming services and cable programming, narrowing down only 50 horror shows is a hard yet ultimately helpful task for people looking to streamline their viewing options. This is especially true as fall hits and Halloween approaches—if you've already seen a plethora of classic scary films, why not get into the spirit of spooky season by enjoying some longer, episodic horror narratives for the very first time?

To help do so, Stacker compiled IMDb data to determine the 50 best horror TV shows of all time as of Oct. 9, 2020. To be considered, the series, miniseries, or limited series had to have at least 10,000 IMDb user votes. Ties were broken by votes.

From anime series like "Attack on Titan" and "Claymore" to anthology shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "Black Mirror," the shows on this list span various countries and time periods.

Counting down from 50, here are the best TV horror series of all time.

You may also like: Best and worst Leonardo DiCaprio movies

Netflix

What I Learned from Reading Wendell Berry - Patheos

Posted: 26 Oct 2020 08:25 PM PDT

wendell-berry

For the past several years, I've been reading through Wendell Berry's Port William novels. Berry, who is a writer and farmer from Kentucky, uses the stories of life in the fictional town of Port William from 1888 through 2008 to show the importance of responsible farming, avoiding debt, and connection to people and a place. Currently comprising eight novels and forty-four short stories, the Port William novels reflect a deep understanding of human nature, relationships, and how we are shaped by the events taking place around us.

I turned to these novels after looking over my reading lists from prior years and seeing that I was reading from a narrow pool of authors and on a narrow list of topics. Reading about life in a fictional Kentucky town initially felt like a detour from theological reading, but in these books, I encountered profound truths about God, life, and community. (So far, I have read Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter, Nathan Coulter, The Memory of Old Jack, Andy Catlett, Remembering, and some of the short stories from That Distant Land.)

There are two themes from the Port William novels that particularly speak to issues that Christians face in our current culture.

Know the People Around You

Berry speaks of the people of Port William as a "membership." My favorite of Berry's characters, Burley Coulter, explains membership in the short story "The Wild Birds." He said, "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." This idea becomes clear as the reader observes the people of Port William live interconnected lives. They know each other, serve each other, and look out for each other. Whether it's the men helping Andy Catlett with his harvest after he loses an arm or Burley Coulter letting Jayber Crow live in his place by the river, the people of Port William have a strong sense of belonging to each other and to the place where they live.

The characters in Port William know each other and know each other's stories. Sometimes this takes the form of town gossip, but more often than not it exists because the people genuinely know and care about each other. They speak of each other's families, burdens, and businesses. This knowledge generates a community of mutual respect and concern as well as helping each other see potential areas where they can trip up. For example, Jayber Crow watches with horror as Troy Chatham mishandles his father-in-law's farm and life's work. Nathan and Hannah Coulter spot the deficiencies in their daughter's marriage from a distance before disaster strikes in the form of her husband's infidelity.

Berry's emphasis on knowing our neighbors and belonging to a community echoes the concerns of the New Testament writers. Christians can make a durable difference in this world by knowing the people in their community, hearing their stories, and making themselves available to help. Unfortunately, we have erected barriers that keep us away from this kind of community. We either pack our schedules so full that we have no margin to be around people or we barricade ourselves in our homes and drone away in front of the television. In addition, we possess a tendency to bring a consumer mentality to our communities instead of an investment mentality.

The New Testament doesn't leave Christians with this option. The first-century church was a family. They shared meals from house to house and gathered each day to fellowship and learn. Their love for each other told the world they were Jesus' disciples and they lived their lives in such a way that people were asking what the reason was for the hope that was within them. They learned this from Jesus who said the greatest commandment was to love God and the second was to love our neighbors as ourselves. We struggle to obey this command, though, because it is difficult to love people that you don't see often.

Listen to the Wisdom of the Ages

For several generations, Americans have acted as if they believed their forefathers were morons. We possess an uncanny ability to see their failures, and so we reject their wisdom on all manner of issues. Berry captures the foolishness of this ethos well. It is especially personified through the character of Troy Chatham in Jayber Crow. Jayber spots Troy Chatham from a distance when he is a star high school athlete and watches him into adulthood. Troy was a showoff from his earliest years and his confidence in his own abilities never fades. He inherited the land of his father-in-law, Athey Keith, when he marries Mattie, who is the apple of Jayber's eye. Mr. Keith faithfully took care of the land entrusted to him and never demanded more of the land than it was prepared to give. He knew how to listen to his land and conserve its beauty. The farm ran debt-free and was poised to provide for the family for another generation.

Troy had other plans for the Keith family farm. He saw himself not as a humble farmer, but as an agribusinessman. He ran roughshod over the land by farming it without any regard to what he was doing to the health of the soil. Beautifully wooded areas logged to pay for Troy's expanding empire. This rough treatment of the land produced little actual wealth for the family because Troy took on massive amounts of debt to finance his dreams.

In Remembering, Andy Catlett speaks at an agricultural symposium. At the time, he is known for his ideas that run contrary to those of almost every other person in the room. He spoke passionately about "the occult of science," where everyone makes decisions based on statistics and numbers, but forget the impact that their decisions have on real people. While most of the people who listened to his talk looked skeptically at the ways of the past, but he looked back and saw the people whose lives were wrecked by the foolish decisions made in rooms like the one where he was speaking.

On a related note, the Port William novels warn us about the unthinking adaptation of technology for technology's sake. Many times, we use this technology thinking it has made us more connected to other people when in reality it has had the opposite effect. We tend to stay connected to people who are distant from us while not making the time for the people who are the closest to us. It sounds like talk from a bygone era, but what if we learned to slow down and increase the margin of time we had for other people? What if our homes were not fortresses and our dinner tables knew the sound of friendship and laughter? Would followers of Jesus not make a greater impact if we learned more of how to listen, celebrate, and mourn with our friends and neighbors?

When Berry looks illustrates the foolishness of the young in rejecting the ways of their fathers, he echoes the words of King Solomon in Proverbs. Our generation increasingly speaks as if we are the brightest generation to grace the landscape of American history, yet many metrics suggest our fathers knew many things that we do not. We see the blind spots and sins of the generations behind us and assume this means they were wrong about many other issues too. Nothing could be further from the truth. Did our forefathers blow it on many fronts, especially those related to race? Yes, they erred in terrible ways. However, does this mean they were also wrong about the foolishness of debt, the value of hard work, or the importance of community? Absolutely not.

If we see the error the people who came before us that they could not see about themselves, does this not suggest those who come after us will see errors in us that we cannot see? The writers of Scripture warned about being wise in our own eyes. They saw the danger of having an elevated view of ourselves because trusting in our own wisdom will cause us to reject the wisdom of our elders. What if instead of constantly critiquing the lives of our grandparents' generation, we let them critique us? Would we find areas where we want to go in the opposite direction of their example? Of course, but if we stopped and listened to them, we would benefit from them in more ways than we can imagine.

For Further Reading:

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Posted: 21 Oct 2020 07:00 PM PDT

In the world of anime and manga, a third medium has slowly emerged: light novels. Also known as "ranobe," these books are distinguished by their manga-inspired illustrations. They tend to be mass-produced and low-priced, but they have one thing going for them: many of them have a tie-in anime.

There are plenty of times when a light novel is popular enough to inspire and receive an anime adaptation, but this isn't always the case. Sometimes, it works the other way around, with a popular anime getting light novel spin-offs. Unfortunately, light novels can still be hidden gems, overshadowed by anime and manga. Let's take a look at some popular animes that have an official light novel. And remember, because this will look at stories in different forms, spoilers abound.

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10 The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya

Also known as just Haruhi Suzumiya, after its central character, this story revolves around an eccentric high school student who wants to find aliens, time-travelers, and psychics. One day, she gets an idea from her classmate, Kyo, about starting a club dedicated to finding such entities. Little does she know that the supernatural might be a lot closer than she thinks...and not necessarily just the new club members either.

This series started as a light novel series, eventually inspiring an anime adaptation, complete with a movie: The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, which had been based on one of the novels. There are occasional differences between the two mediums: for example, Haruhi's hair is described as black in the novels, but illustrations tend to imply her hair is brown, with the anime going with the latter. The series also has a few manga spin-offs under its belt.

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9 Baccano!

This story adapts the pulp fiction genre, complete with thieves and the mafia inside America during the prohibition. But a touch of the supernatural exists within the setting. An alchemist develops an elixir of life, allowing people a chance at immortality, although there is at least one way for those who have become immortals to be destroyed.

This story started with a series of light novels, based around the year each story takes place. The series eventually inspired an anime series, complete with a few bonus episodes. Originally based on three stories from the light novels, the anime is designed to be enjoyed even without knowing the originals. At the same time, it leaves readers more familiar with the characters' backstories and more in tune with what's going on.

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8 Durarara!!

This story revolves around a dullahan (a headless Irish fairy that inspired the Headless Horseman from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) living in modern-day Japan, hiding her headlessness under a helmet with a horse that looks a little more like a motorcycle.

The light novels were popular enough to inspire a manga, an anime, complete with a second series, video games, and even a radio show on the internet. And for fans who can't get enough, the DVDs even came with their own short stories.

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7 Free!

This popular sports anime revolves around the friendships within a high school swim team. Technically speaking, while it was based on a light novel, Kōji Ōji's High Speed, the anime was actually intended as a sequel to it, rather than a direct adaptation.

In addition to the anime, which lasted three seasons with a series of shorts, there have also been a few animated films, some of which also adapt the light novels. There's also an internet radio show and a few drama CDs.

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6 The Devil Is A Part-Timer

As the title suggests, this story revolves around a powerful demon lord who plots to take over the world, using his demon minions, only to be forced through a portal to modern Japan and stuck working at a fast-food restaurant, with more and more characters entering the real world.

The series started with light novels, only to eventually spin-off with an anime and manga that set the story in an alternate universe.

5 Märchen Mädchen

With its title loosely meaning Fairy Tale Girls, this story revolves around a bookish girl named Hazuki Kagimura who likes to escape her life with stories and the local library. One day, she encounters a hooded woman that transports her to a magical world, complete with a school where witches are bound to various fairytale books. Hazuki is bound to the Cinderella story. Not that she doesn't have a few issues with how the story goes.

Starting as a series of light novels, the storyline was eventually adapted into a manga series and a short anime series.

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4 Mawaru Penguindrum

Mawaru Penguindrum tells the story of three siblings. A sick girl named Himari Takakura is saved from dying by a mysterious spirit that lives within her penguin-themed hat, but as a price, she and her two brothers need to discover a mysterious item called the Penguindrum, or Penguin Drum. They are aided by mysterious penguins along the way.

Technically, the series started as an anime series, but light novels were released alongside it, in which the middle sibling, Himari's brother Shouma, is the narrator. There's also a manga series.

3 Ah! My Goddess!

In this classic anime, which is often compared to the American sitcom Bewitched, Keiichi Morisato is a college student who gets a wish from a goddess named Belldandy. Not believing what is going on, he makes a wish that she would stay with him forever as his girlfriend, only to learn that she was telling the truth. But that's just the start of the story, as Belldandy's sisters also decide to enter the picture.

The series spawned a lot of spin-offs, like the comedic The Adventures of Mini-Goddess. As mentioned, light novels don't always come first, as was the case here. Not only did it get a light novel, which took place after the manga, but it was also written by one of the voice actresses for the anime.

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2 Konosuba

aqua kazuma shocked while drinking konosuba

In this story, the hero, a shut-in named Kazuma Sato, dies and is sent to a parallel fantasy world that seems patterned after a multiplayer game. He then develops a party with a magician, a crusader, and the goddess who sent him there in the first place.

This one actually started as a web novel, then went to light novels, with a manga and anime adaptation following. Technically speaking, some of the light novels came out after the anime premiered, meaning there's a lot for fans to enjoy.

1 Seraph Of The End

In this world, where an illness has impacted the human race so badly that vampires have practically taken over the world, an orphan boy and his friends plan to escape captivity. When their plan ends in tragedy, the one left standing plots to avenge his friends. However, one of his friends may still be alive...

Technically, the story started with a manga that ended up spinning off into light novels, with an anime adaptation following.

NEXT: All Anime Sequels Announced For Winter 2021 (So Far)

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Hello, my name is John Witiw, and you may remember me as a writer for Viral Pirate, Frontrunner Magazine, or even NTD Television, but now I'm here for CBR!

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