Nerd Nite 7/29/13!
This month’s talks are all about books. You love books! Our first talk comes from two speakers. The Brothers Hilts, a dynamic drawing duo from Cambridge, explain the trials and tribulations of the printing process. Our second speaker, Michael Healy, playfully questions William Shakespeare’s popularity and elaborates on what makes the old bard truly great. Meet us at the Middlesex Monday, July 29, at 8PM for two delightful talks on beloved books.
Talk 1: “You Call That Black? Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Printing Process” by The Brothers Hilts
The Brothers Hilts are: Sean (the younger one) and Ben (the other one). Together they work as a team, illustrating, creating art, and constantly comparing to see whose ideas are better. Ben went to Cooper Union; Sean went to rival Rhode Island School of Design. They are the recent winners of the Founder’s Award for best newcomers from The Society of Illustrators in New York City. The Insomniacs is the first picture book they have illustrated. Currently, they live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and are hard at work on their next book “The Runaway Circus”, which they are writing as well as illustrating. Their website is: www.brothershilts.com.
Talk 2: “Is Shakespeare as great as you’ve been lead to believe?” by Michael Healy
“He was not of an age, but for all time!” was the praise delivered by Ben Jonson, a friend of Shakespeare and a great poet in his own right, in the preface to the First Folio Edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623, seven years after the Bard’s death. In the intervening nearly four centuries, Shakespeare’s reputation has only increased by many orders of magnitude, such that many people around the world today consider him the greatest writer in any language. George Bernard Shaw referred to the deep, universal love for Shakespeare as ‘bardolatry.’
But is there a reason why the Bard is revered and his plays are performed from Cape Town to Tokyo? Why Baz Luhrmann thought Romeo and Juliet should be retold in Los Angeles? Why Akira Kurosawa was so influenced by him when he made Throne of Blood? What makes him more truly universal than other great authors? Did he have any chief influences? If so, why don’t we hear more about them? Is there any reason why we should care about what these literary critics say when art and literature are very subjective matters? Michael Healy will provide beginnings (and probably not endings) to the answers to many of these questions while charming some of you and aggravating others.
Be there and be square!
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