This peppery 1970 letter from director Stanley Kubrick to James T. Aubrey, then president of the MGM , comes to us courtesy Clarence Major.
P.S. Whoops! Snopes has the scoop on this one: “The facsimile was traced back to its source, a satire website called Gloss News. It appeared in an article published on 31 May 2014 and titled “Corman Creates Catastrophe, Kubrick Cringes.” The premise of the article was that MGM was so determined to make a sequel to 2001 over Stanley Kubrick’s objections that studio executives went to extraordinary lengths to make it happen. … ‘Are we alone in wishing this film had actually been made?‘”
Join us at 7 p.m. (PST) on TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, when Another Look presents Yoko Ogawa’s 2003 The Housekeeper and the Professor, a surprising story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family. The hybrid event will take place in Stanford’s Levinthal Hall, at the Stanford Humanities Center at 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus.
Haven’t heard of her? You should. She won the American Book Award and every Japanese literary honor.
According to Nobel prizewinner Kenzaburō Ōe, “Yōko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.”
The story: a brilliant math professor has a peculiar problem: ever since a traumatic head injury in a car accident in 1975, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. His brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes. An astute young housekeeper is hired to care for him. Her 10-year-old son becomes intrigued by the mysteries of math and befriends him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son.
According to Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz, “It’s a story about love, which is quite different from a love story. It’s one of the most beautiful novels.”
Our panelists for the event:
1) Robert Pogue Harrison, director of Another Look and host for the popular radio show Entitled Opinions; he is Stanford’s Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Emeritus.
2) Indra Levy, associate professor in East Asian Languages and Cultures, is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies as well as an associate professor in Comparative Literature. She is the inaugural recipient of the Irene Hirano Inouye Memorial Award, Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies, at UCLA.
3) The third panelist is Rosaley Gai, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She was swept up in the world of Japanese-language media, anime, and video games, which eventually led to her interest in J-pop and Japanese dramas. At Stanford she is working for a doctorate in Japanese literature and media.
4) And we are adding a surprise fourth for this occasion: Lernik Asserianis the Director of Stanford Undergraduate Research Institute in Mathematics (SURIM) and a Stanford Summer Bridge Program instructor. She has a PhD in Applied Mathematics at University of Southern California (USC), and is the recipient of a number of awards at Stanford and USC. She spent two-and-a-half years as a student researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) SIRI Internship Program, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) MURF Internship Program, and JPL Year-Round Internship Program, working on various projects in Earth Sciences.
This event is sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. It is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged, but walk-ins are welcome.
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