One particular aspect of craft The Sopranos excels at is dialogue, and a notable feature is the errors.  The characters are constantly speaking in malapropisms, mangled idioms, and mispronunciations.  They mishear things or misquote each other.  Some Sopranos examples:  Tony:  “I was prostate with grief.”  Little Carmine:  “There’s no stigmata connected with going to a shrink.”  Christopher:  “Create a little dysentery in the ranks.”  Jonny:  “She's an albacore around my neck.”  Lincoln Michel  Read more at https://countercraft.substack.com/p/gabagool-and-malpropisms-dialogue 

Communities around the country are converting writers’ homes into public spaces in order to promote individual legacies, and to educate and inspire.  The historic facades of downtown Red Cloud, Nebraska, appear to have escaped a century and a half of harsh prairie weather.  That’s because the town’s 1,000 residents have borne a massive restoration project that preserves the largest collection of nationally designated historic sites attributed to any American writer.  Her name was Willa Cather, and her novels included O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning One of Ours.  Just north of Palm Beach, on the Atlantic side of Florida, the Treasure Coast is home to the city of Fort Pierce.  Among its cultural heritage sites is the last private home of the African American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, whose literary legacy—as well as her unmarked grave—was recovered by the writer Alice Walker while researching a 1975 feature for Ms. magazine.  Carson McCullers is memorialized by a pair of houses that bookend her life.  In Columbus, Georgia, the Smith-McCullers House was the writer’s childhood home and is now operated by the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University.  The other property, known as the Carson McCullers House, can be found 1,000 miles northeast, in Nyack, New York.  In 1977, one of America’s most decorated poets, W.S. Merwin, put down roots on a failed pineapple farm that had once been native Hawaiian land in Haiku, on Maui’s North Shore.  By the mid-1980s, Merwin, with the help of friends and neighbors, had constructed an eco-conscious compound: a main house built of local eucalyptus and designed with passive ventilation and off-grid solar, shrouded by lush landscaping.  The 19-acre palm preserve contains 3,000 specimen palms as well as many other trees, all planted by Merwin and his wife, Paula Dunaway Merwin.  Lucille Clifton was an African American poet; a creative writing professor; the wife of philosopher, activist, and artist Fred Clifton; and the mother of six children. A prolific literary activist, she stood out among her peers as one of the first women writers to present the Black female body as both metaphorical and literal subject, carving a new path for feminist literature framed by the Civil Rights era. Since the 1969 publication of her first collection, Good Times, her work has remained a hallmark of 20th-century American verse.  In 2019, her daughter Sidney Clifton purchased her own childhood home in the Windsor Hills neighborhood of Baltimore. Read more and see pictures at https://savingplaces.org/stories/inside-the-homes-and-hometowns-of-5-famous-writers#.YJplLrVKiUk 

Mike Nichols (born Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky; 1931–2014) was an American film and theater director, producer, actor, and comedian.  He was noted for his ability to work across a range of genres and for his aptitude for getting the best out of actors regardless of their experience.  Nichols began his career in the 1950s with the comedy improvisational troupe The Compass Players, predecessor of The Second City, in Chicago.  He then teamed up with his improv partner, Elaine May, to form the comedy duo Nichols and May.  Their live improv act was a hit on Broadway, and the first of their three albums won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.  After Nichols and May disbanded in 1961, he began directing plays, and quickly became known for his innovative productions and ability to elicit polished performances.  His Broadway directing debut was Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963, with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley.  He continued to direct plays on Broadway including, Luv (1964), and The Odd Couple (1965) for which he received Tony Awards for each of those plays.  In 2012, he won his sixth Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play with a revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Nichols directed and/or produced more than 25 Broadway plays throughout his prolific career.  In 1966, Warner Brothers invited Nichols to direct his first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  The groundbreaking film inspired some critics to declare Nichols the "new Orson Welles".  It won five Academy Awards (out of 13 nominations) and was the top-grossing film of 1966.  His next film, The Graduate (1967), starred then unknown actor Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.  It was another critical and financial success, became the highest-grossing film of the year, and received seven Academy Award nominations, winning Nichols the Academy Award for Best Director.  Among the other films Nichols directed were Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990) The Birdcage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), Closer (2004) and Charlie Wilson's War (2007).  Nichols also was known for work on television directing HBO's Wit (2001) with Emma Thompson and Angels in America (2003) starring Meryl Streep.  Along with an Academy Award, Nichols won a Grammy Award (the first for a comedian born outside the United States), four Emmy Awards, nine Tony Awards, and three BAFTA Awards. His other honors included the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010.  His films received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations, and seven wins.  He is one of the few people to have won Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards.  His film The Graduate (1967), starred Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross for which he was paid $150,000, a deal he had made four years earlier with producer Joseph E. Levine.  It became the highest-grossing film of 1967 and one of the highest-grossing films in history up to that date, with Nichols receiving 16⅔% of the profits, making him a millionaire.  It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, with Nichols winning as Best Director.  In 2007, it was ranked #17 in AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).  However, getting the film made was difficult for Nichols, who, while noted for being a successful Broadway director, was still an unknown in Hollywood. Producer Lawrence Turman, who wanted only Nichols to direct it, was continually turned down for financing. He then contacted Levine, who said he would finance the film because he had associated with Nichols on The Knack,^[23] and because he heard that Elizabeth Taylor specifically wanted Nichols to direct her and Richard Burton in Virginia Woolf.  With financing assured, Nichols suggested Buck Henry for screenwriter, although Henry's experience had also been mostly in improvised comedy, and had no writing background.  Nichols said to Henry, "I think you could do it; I think you should do it.”  Nichols also took a chance on using Dustin Hoffman, who had no film experience, for the lead, when others had suggested using known star Robert Redford. Hoffman credits Nichols for having taken a great risk in giving him, a relative unknown, the starring role:  "I don't know of another instance of a director at the height of his powers who would take a chance and cast someone like me in that part.  It took tremendous courage."  The quality of the cinematography was also influenced by Nichols, who chose Oscar winner Robert Surtees to do the photography.  Surtees, who had photographed major films since the 1920s, including Ben-Hur, said later, "It took everything I had learned over 30 years to be able to do the job.  I knew that Mike Nichols was a young director who went in for a lot of camera.  We did more things in this picture than I ever did in one film."  Nichols also chose the music by Simon and Garfunkel.  When Paul Simon was taking too long to write new songs for the film, he used existing songs, originally planning to replace them with newly written ones.  In the end only one new song was available, and Nichols used the existing previously released songs.  At one point, when Nichols heard Paul Simon's song, "Mrs. Roosevelt," he suggested to Simon that he change it to "Mrs. Robinson."  The song won a Grammy after the film was released and became America's number 1 pop song.  Nichols selected all the numerous songs for the film and chose which scenes they would be used in.  The placement and selection of songs would affect the way audiences understood the film.  Even actor William Daniels, who played Hoffman's father, remembers that after first hearing the songs, especially "The Sound of Silence," he thought, "Oh, wait a minute.  That changed the whole idea of the picture for me," suddenly realizing the film would not be a typical comedy.  Nichols' next film was a big-budget adaptation of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 (1970), followed by Carnal Knowledge (1971) starring Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Art Garfunkel and Candice Bergen.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Nichols 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2378  June 16, 2021