LT. GOV.
DARDENNE ANNOUNCES A-LIST PRODUCER TO CREATE
BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS FILM
Lt. Governor
Jay Dardenne announced plans for a major motion picture about the Battle of New
Orleans. Ken and Fred Atchity of Atchity Brothers Entertainment will produce
the feature film, Andrew Jackson—Battle For
New Orleans, based on military historian Ron Drez’s latest book, The War of 1812: Conflict And Deception. The
project is endorsed by the Battle of New Orleans Bicentennial Commission.
“We have
commemorated the Battle of New Orleans Bicentennial all week and it’s exciting
to end the week announcing a feature film to ensure the Battle’s story lives on,”
Lt. Governor Dardenne said. “This film will remind the country that America’s
success as a nation was solidified 200 years ago in Chalmette.”
Andrew
Jackson arrived in New Orleans December 1814 to discover a local force in place
with fewer than 1,000 soldiers. In two weeks he put together an army to face
the grand British force. Jackson assembled a ragtag group of soldiers including
pirates, free men of color, American Indians and visiting militia from other
states. The battle ended with a U.S. victory on Jan. 8, 1815.
“Jackson’s unpredictable
victory is made for film because everyone enjoys rooting for the underdog,” producer
Ken Atchity said. “His leadership bringing together
folks from every race, nationality and walk of life to create a force to defeat
the vastly superior British Army and solidify our position as Americans is an
important story to tell.”
The Battle
of New Orleans was an important subject in pop culture during the mid-20th
century. Films such as The Buccaneer
focusing on pirate Jean Laffite and his contribution to the Battlein 1938 and the film’s remake in 1958
starring Yul Brynner were huge successes. In addition, Johnny Horton’s 1959
song The Battle of New Orleans topped
the Billboard Hot 100 chart for six
weeks.
“It would be
great to see the Battle of New Orleans back in the pop culture spotlight,” Lt.
Governor Dardenne said. “The story is interesting enough to capture the
attention of any generation.”
The Atchity
brothers are expected to announce actors and directors for the Battle of New
Orleans film soon.
For more
information about the Battle of New Orleans Bicentennial Commission, visit BattleOfNewOrleans2015.com or the commission’s Facebook page. Use #BONO2015 on social media.
Taking the Mystery Out of Writing Mysteries: This FREE
mini-workshop demonstrates that the key to writing a good whodunnit or
crime thriller is an understanding of how the characters' distinct wants
and needs collide with each other. When done right, a good plot reveals
character, and good characters make the plot compelling. Whether
you’re writing the coziest of British-style mystery or the edgiest of
hard-boiled thriller, this informative, entertaining workshop is for
you.
Saturday, January 10th, at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. The workshop starts at 3 PM, followed by Q & A and book signing
About Phantom Limb: Psychologist and Pittsburgh Police
Department consultant Daniel Rinaldi has a new patient. Lisa Harland, a
local girl, once made a splash in the dubious side of Hollywood before
hitting rock bottom. Back home, she married one of the city's richest
and most ruthless tycoons. Upon exiting his practice, she's kidnapped by
an unknown assailant. Summoned to the Harland estate, Danny is forced,
through a bizarre sequence of events, to be the bag man on the ransom
delivery. This draws him into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with a
brilliant, lethal adversary. Phantom Limb, fourth in the acclaimed
series of Daniel Rinaldi thrillers, will keep readers guessing until the
very last page.
Those wishing to get books signed will be asked to purchase at least
one copy of the author's most recent title from Vroman's. For each
purchased copy of the newest title, customers may bring up to three
copies from home to be signed. This policy applies to all Vroman's
Bookstore events unless otherwise noted. Save your Vroman's receipt; it
will be checked when you enter the signing line.
Warrior king: A funerary mask from the shaft graves at Mycenae, circa 16th century B.C.Credit
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
“Homer has become a kind of scripture for me, an ancient book, full of urgent imperatives and ancient meanings, most of them half discerned, to be puzzled over. It is a source of wisdom.” So begins the third chapter of Adam Nicolson’s highly accessible new book, “Why Homer Matters,” in which he compares his relationship with epic poetry to a form of possession, a “colonization of the mind by an imaginative presence from the past.” The world needs more Adam Nicolsons, unabashedly passionate evangelists for the power of ancient poetry to connect us with our collective past, illuminate our personal struggles and interrogate our understanding of human history.
For centuries, the study of Greek literature has been seen as the province of career academics. But Nicolson’s amateurism (in the best, etymological, sense of the word: from the Latin amare, “to love”) and globe-trotting passion for his subject is contagious, intimating that it is impossible to comprehend Homer’s poems from an armchair or behind a desk. If you’ve never read the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey,” or your copies have been collecting dust since college, Nicolson’s book is likely to inspire you to visit or revisit their pages.
According to Nicolson, a British baron who has written books on subjects that span the making of the King James Bible, the challenges and joys of farming, nautical voyages, and long walks through France, “you don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.” Nicolson describes how he set out on a personal odyssey from the coast of Scotland to the gates of Hades in search of the origins of Greek poetry and Western consciousness. In all of this, he is most at home as a writer when describing landscapes, as in his depiction of Homeric Hades by way of the estuary at Huelva in southwestern Spain: “Flakes of white quartzite shine through the water between ribs of rock that veer from red to tangerine to ocher and rust to flame-colored, flesh-colored, sick and livid.”
As Nicolson relates, Homer, the blind bard of Chios who supposedly composed the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” may never have existed. Or, if he did, he most likely wasn’t the sole author of the epic poems for which he became famous. Instead, he may have culled, arranged and interpolated these foundational myths from within a living, oral tradition reaching back — through the Greek Dark Ages — to a primitive, preliterate era of Bronze Age wars and warriors sprawled across the Eurasian plains. “The poems,” Nicolson writes, “were composed by a man standing at the top of a human pyramid. He could not have stood there without the pyramid beneath him, and the pyramid consisted not only of the earlier poets in the tradition but of their audiences too.”
This is the central idea behind Nicolson’s book, which traces the origins of the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath — by way of the Minoan ruins of Knossos, the great library of Alexandria, and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens — to a period 1,000 or more years earlier than the one suggested by what he defines as the reigning orthodoxy. Nicolson contends that the epic poems reflect “the violence and sense of strangeness of about 1800 B.C. recollected in the tranquillity of about 1300 B.C.,” though not captured in writing until roughly 700 B.C. And so he believes that whoever wrote the poems down belonged to “a culture emerging from a dark age, looking to a future but also looking back to a past, filled with nostalgia for the years of integrity, simplicity, nobility and straightforwardness.”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
It is difficult to assess Nicolson’s theory, which is based on a conjecture that the “Iliad” describes a pre-palatial warrior culture that seems to align well with the “world of the gold-encrusted kings buried in the shaft graves at Mycenae,” now dated to the 17th and 16th centuries B.C. But as a thought exercise, it is often gripping and, at times, electrifying.
According to Nicolson, “Epic, which was invented after memory and before history, occupies a third space in the human desire to connect the present to the past: It is the attempt to extend the qualities of memory over the reach of time.” The purpose of epic “is to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now.”
The Romanian scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade called this basic human impulse — to connect our quotidian existence, through ritual and myth, with the lives and struggles of the great heroes of the past — the “eternal return.” In the telling and retelling of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” we imbue our insignificant lives with meaning, transporting ourselves to a mythical time, while bringing the heroic age into our own. Throughout the book, Nicolson describes moments when his own life has been elevated or illuminated by the epics — such as his sailing across the Celtic Sea with the “Odyssey” fastened to his compass binnacle, tied open to the story of the sirens — but also moments when harrowing experiences, including being raped at knife point in the Syrian desert, have revealed to him something powerful within the poems.
The Homeric epics are long, contradictory, repetitive, composite works, riddled with anachronisms, archaic vocabulary, metric filler and exceedingly graphic brutality. Over the millenniums, Nicolson asserts, they have been cleaned, scrubbed and sanitized by generations of translators, editors, librarians and scholars, in order to protect readers from the dangers of the atavistic world lurking just below the surface of the words. He writes that everyone from the editors at the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria to the great 18th-century poet Alexander Pope wished to civilize or tame the poems, “wanted to make Homer proper, to pasteurize him and transform him into something acceptable for a well-governed city.” Part of Nicolson’s objective is to follow the poems back to the vengeful, frighteningly violent time and culture from which they came, and to restore some of their rawness.
For Nicolson, the commonly held belief that the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” were products of the late eighth century B.C., a period of Greek resurgence and prosperity, cannot account for the heterogeneity of the poems and all they contain. He prefers the view that, instead of being the creation of a single man, let alone of a single time, “Homer reeks of long use.” Try thinking of Homer as a “plural noun,” he suggests, made up of “the frozen and preserved words of an entire culture.” Seen through this lens, the ancient poems appear as a bridge between the present and an otherwise inaccessible past, a rare window into a moment of cultural convergence around 2000 B.C., when East met West, North met South, and Greek consciousness was forged in the crucible of conflict between a savage warrior culture from the flat grasslands of Eurasia and the wealthy, sophisticated residents of cities in the eastern Mediterranean.
“Homer,” Nicolson writes, “in a miracle of transmission from one end of human civilization to the other, continues to be as alive as anything that has ever lived.” Reading “Why Homer Matters” makes one yearn for a time, almost lost to us now, when many others shared Nicolson’s enthusiasm.
WHY HOMER MATTERS
by Adam Nicolson
Illustrated. 297 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $30.
Bryan Doerries is a stage director and a translator. His first book, “The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today,” will be published next fall.
A version of this review appears in print on December 28, 2014, on page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Songs of the Sirens.
In his quest to get children all over the world interested in classical music, Warren Woodruff, Ph.D., can become the next J.K. Rowling.
The Buckhead resident had his 1998 play, “The Magic Piano,” adapted into a 2012 book, “Dr. Fuddle and the Gold Baton,” and a screenplay for a feature film that will be one of at least three movies in a franchise. The first screenplay, which he wrote, was completed in July 2013 and he is halfway through the second.
Woodruff, who works as a pianist, teacher and author with a studio in Roswell, came up with the idea of the characters in “Dr. Fuddle” when he wrote the play for a summer camp as a way to introduce children to classical music.
After meeting writing coach Mardeene Mitchell in 2009, she introduced him to Ken Atchity, Ph.D., a writing coach and producer who owns Story Merchant, a Los Angeles-based company that produced the movies “Joe Somebody,” “Life or Something Like it” and “Hysteria,” the following year at Mitchell’s Write the World in Atlanta conference.
“He pitched me his book,” Atchity said. “I told him, ‘That’s the worst pitch I’ve ever heard but the best story I’ve heard in a long time.’ He blushed deep red and we became friends immediately.”
Woodruff signed a multi-level development deal with the company for an undisclosed amount in 2010. It includes the books — novels and picture and education books — movies, merchandise and toys. Achity and Woodruff are now working with Del Mar Enterprises, a global film broker, to fund the movie project.
The book and movie are about the mystical Dr. Fuddle leading five middle-schoolers into the land of Orphea to bring back the Gold Baton from evil forces using it in malicious ways, and to restore its rightful function of bringing harmony to the universe.
Atchity said his company gets about 10,000 pitches for movies or books each year and it chooses an average of four to five, with one film produced by the company. So being selected by Atchity was huge for Woodruff.
“It was euphoria, the happiest day of my life,” he said. “This has been a vision of mine for many years. It’s because I have been a music teacher for 28 years and I have personally witnessed over and over and over the transformative power of music and what it can do for a child, giving them self-esteem and a challenge, something to work on.”
Woodruff came up with the idea of Dr. Benjamin Eraspus Fuddle, aka B.E. Fuddle, from music professors who mentored him at three colleges. Most of Dr. Fuddle’s personality comes from Ellen Hermann, a professor at Tennessee Temple University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in piano performance. She studied with a student of famous Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. The rest of Dr. Fuddle’s character comes from Earl Miller, who Woodruff studied under while getting a master’s degree in piano performance at the University of Tennessee, and Ivan Davis, who he was mentored by while getting his doctorate in musicology with a concentration in piano from the University of Miami.
Atchity said the movie will be made in Georgia or another state that offers filmmakers tax breaks, and the start date for filming has not been set yet.
“The concept itself was a wonderful uplifting story for kids to inspire kids to perfect themselves through classical music, to pursue excellence,” he said. “It was a universally appealing story that could be like ‘[The Chronicles of] Narnia’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ … Everyone loved his [first] script based on his first book. I haven’t heard one negative word from it from anyone in Hollywood. That’s unusual. You usually hear reams of negative words.”
Woodruff, an Indianapolis native who is a distant relative to former Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff, said he wrote the book and screenplay “to change the course of history.”
“The world is so full of such divisiveness and problems and chaos, and music has been able to proven to heal, transform, edify and transform the human spirit,” he said. “I compare this to the Argentinean [music] program, El Sistema, … that has lifted children out of poverty. It has over a million children in youth orchestras. They’ve seen the crime rates plummet where this has been instituted. My goal is to duplicate that through the Hollywood movie franchise to educate children all over the world and create harmony and joy. That’s what music does. It’s done it.
“The joy music has given me as opposed to my friends who work in business deals, it’s indescribable. … I was struck by that lightning at age 10. I just turned 50 and music has been such a powerful influence in my life and it shows there’s hope and it gives people something happy and meaning in their lives. The whole goal is to create social change and inspire. So many things in the world are depressing. You turn on the news and these kids see this negativity in the world. You turn it into something great and noble. Classical music is different. Not putting down other forms of music, but this music is so transforming and inspiring.”
Jerry Amernic talked to students to find out what they knew about the Holocaust.
Jerry Amernic
Special to the Tribune
Have you ever played Trivial Pursuit with a young person and let them try the History category? It’s incredible what they don’t know, and last month I found out first hand. My latest novel was turned down by a publisher because the editor didn’t believe my thesis that knowledge of the Holocaust would be abysmal one generation from now, so I produced a video.
It was during Holocaust Education Week and a few days before Remembrance Day. We went around asking university students in Toronto some questions.
I asked the first two if they knew when the Holocaust occurred. They looked at each other dumbfounded before one said “1980…” only to have her friend interject with “No it wasn’t the 1980s.” They then concluded it had taken place in the 1940s. As to how many Jews were killed, “a million” sounded about right.
I posed a different question to the next students. Had they ever heard of The Final Solution? No. How about D-Day and the beaches of Normandy? Keep in mind this was just before Remembrance Day.
One shook his head ‘no,’ while the other said something about D-Day being the last day of the war. I asked if they knew who FDR was. Nope. How about Churchill?
“Winston Churchill?” the girl said. She knew the name but had no idea who he was. The guy she was with said he had heard the name from a history class long ago and acknowledged that there was a statue of Churchill at Nathan Phillips Square, but who he was and what he did was a mystery.
The next student told me D-Day fell on Feb. 14 and that “thousands” of Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. Normandy? That was tough. Another one said he had heard of the Holocaust, but couldn’t explain it.
I tried a different approach with the next pair. I asked who the Allies were. Surely they would know this a mere three days before Remembrance Day.
“These aren’t easy questions,” one of them said, laughing. Neither of them had any idea. How about D-Day? A glimmer of recognition and one said it was June 6th, which is correct.
“Do you know what happened on D-Day?” I asked.
No.
“Do you know who was fighting who?”
No.
I tried The Final Solution on three more students. Two of them shook their heads and one said it had something to do with the Holocaust, but that was it.
“Ever heard of Joseph Mengele?” I asked.
Uh-uh.
Undeterred, I pressed on. A girl told me that the Allies were Germany and Russia before correcting herself with the realization these countries were on opposite sides. Who were the Allies? She didn’t know. I threw in the bit about D-Day and the beaches of Normandy – her friend said Normandy was in London – but neither had the faintest idea what happened that day and it got me thinking.
This was two weeks after a Canadian soldier had been gunned down while standing guard at the War Memorial in Ottawa (see pages 1 and 2), and another soldier had been run over and killed in Quebec.
Remembrance Day ceremonies would be poignant affairs this year. I wondered what a war veteran who had stormed Juno Beach on June 6, 1944 would think about the current generation knowing nothing about D-Day, never mind the Holocaust.
I tried one more student. Could she tell me who the Allies were? No. How about The Final Solution? No.
My novel, The Last Witness, is set in the year 2039 and is about a 100-year-old man who is the last living survivor of the Holocaust. But he’s living in a world that is ignorant and complacent about the last century and there are many reasons for that but number one is the fact the schools don’t teach this stuff anymore and haven’t for some time.
In Ontario today you can take one history credit in Grade 9 and never open a history book again. In my day we had Social Studies – which combined History and Geography – in the early grades, and we always had history in high school.
Not anymore.
The result is The Lost Generation when it comes to history, and that’s why those students were scratching their heads searching for a tidbit about Churchill, Normandy or the Holocaust. This profound level of ignorance was my premise that the publisher’s editor didn’t buy in a world 25 years from now. I don’t know if that editor has seen my video, but he should.
Jerry Amernic is the author of historical novels. The Last Witness is available on Amazon and the video mentioned in this article is accessible at:
Psychologist Becomes Embroiled in Murder Mystery Buy On Amazon
By Dennis Palumbo
Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95, 336 pages
Daniel Rinaldi is a psychologist with a private practice in
Pittsburgh. At a first appointment with a patient, he is stunned to see
that his new client is Lisa Harland, a former Plalyboy model
and actress. She is from the Pittsburgh area and returned after her
career faltered in Hollywood. Now she is married to a very wealthy local
tycoon, and she tells Rinaldi that she plans to kill herself by 7:00
p.m. It is up to him to persuade her to live and to get to the bottom
of why she wants to die. But as she leaves the appointment, she is
kidnapped and held for ransom, an event that soon drags Rinaldi into
peril.
Phantom Limb is the fourth mystery featuring Daniel Rinaldi,
an intrepid hero who frequently finds himself drawn into puzzling and
dangerous situations while trying to help his patients. This novel is
the best yet, with an engrossing plot and entertaining characters who
frequently stumble into trouble. The author has sprinkled the pages with
beautiful descriptions that add to the enjoyment of this action
adventure.
Have you ever played Trivial Pursuit with a young person and let them
try the History category? It’s incredible what they don’t know, and
last month I found out first hand. My latest novel was turned down by a
publisher because the editor didn’t believe my thesis that knowledge of
the Holocaust would be abysmal one generation from now, so I produced a
video.
It was during Holocaust Education Week and a few days before
Remembrance Day. We went around asking university students in Toronto
some questions.
I asked the first two if they knew when the Holocaust occurred. They
looked at each other dumbfounded before one said “1980…” only to have
her friend interject with “No it wasn’t the 1980s.” They then concluded
it had taken place in the 1940s. As to how many Jews were killed, “a
million” sounded about right.
I posed a different question to the next students. Had they ever
heard of The Final Solution? No. How about D-Day and the beaches of
Normandy? Keep in mind this was just before Remembrance Day.
One shook his head ‘no,’ while the other said something about D-Day
being the last day of the war. I asked if they knew who FDR was. Nope.
How about Churchill?
“Winston Churchill?” the girl said. She knew the name but had no idea
who he was. The guy she was with said he had heard the name from a
history class long ago and acknowledged that there was a statue of
Churchill at Nathan Phillips Square, but who he was and what he did was a
mystery.
The next student told me D-Day fell on Feb. 14 and that “thousands”
of Jews had been killed in the Holocaust. Normandy? That was tough.
Another one said he had heard of the Holocaust, but couldn’t explain it.
I tried a different approach with the next pair. I asked who the
Allies were. Surely they would know this a mere three days before
Remembrance Day.
“These aren’t easy questions,” one of them said, laughing. Neither of
them had any idea. How about D-Day? A glimmer of recognition and one
said it was June 6th, which is correct.
“Do you know what happened on D-Day?” I asked.
No.
“Do you know who was fighting who?”
No.
I tried The Final Solution on three more students. Two of them shook
their heads and one said it had something to do with the Holocaust, but
that was it.
“Ever heard of Joseph Mengele?” I asked.
Uh-uh.
Undeterred, I pressed on. A girl told me that the Allies were Germany
and Russia before correcting herself with the realization these
countries were on opposite sides. Who were the Allies? She didn’t know. I
threw in the bit about D-Day and the beaches of Normandy – her friend
said Normandy was in London – but neither had the faintest idea what
happened that day and it got me thinking.
This was two weeks after a Canadian soldier had been gunned down
while standing guard at the War Memorial in Ottawa (see pages 1 and 2),
and another soldier had been run over and killed in Quebec.
Remembrance Day ceremonies would be poignant affairs this year. I
wondered what a war veteran who had stormed Juno Beach on June 6, 1944
would think about the current generation knowing nothing about D-Day,
never mind the Holocaust.
I tried one more student. Could she tell me who the Allies were? No. How about The Final Solution? No.
My novel, The Last Witness, is set in the year 2039 and is about a
100-year-old man who is the last living survivor of the Holocaust. But
he’s living in a world that is ignorant and complacent about the last
century and there are many reasons for that but number one is the fact
the schools don’t teach this stuff anymore and haven’t for some time.
In Ontario today you can take one history credit in Grade 9 and never
open a history book again. In my day we had Social Studies – which
combined History and Geography – in the early grades, and we always had
history in high school.
Not anymore.
The result is The Lost Generation when it comes to history, and
that’s why those students were scratching their heads searching for a
tidbit about Churchill, Normandy or the Holocaust. This profound level
of ignorance was my premise that the publisher’s editor didn’t buy in a
world 25 years from now. I don’t know if that editor has seen my video,
but he should.
Jerry Amernic is the author of historical novels. The Last
Witness is available on Amazon and the video mentioned in this article
is accessible at:
