Joseph Smigelski

To celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, we're featuring some of our favorite archival pieces about his life and work. This one was first published in April 2010. Happy Birthday, Bill!

The other day, I received a letter from a friend who wrote, "Unfortunately, I find him almost impossible to understand.... Is there...

I used to be the kind of guy who tried to be conciliatory and find a "middle ground" between science and religion. (I even wrote an article about it twenty years ago.) I used to go along with scientists like the late Stephen Jay Gould, a man I...

The Arab world is a deep mystery to many Americans. Many of us see only women in burkas and strange-looking men in robes and beards. On June 10, a new movie is being released that goes a small but significant way toward shining a light into the darkness of the...

Many people may want to shy away from seeing this film, but that is exactly why they should see it. What the world needs now, besides love sweet love, is empathy. Too many of us are so caught up in our own needs and desires that we sometimes cannot even...

When beginning a discussion of the new film The Music Never Stopped, one might be apt to say -- and with good reason -- that it is about a recovering mental patient and his love for the Grateful Dead. The story is based on a real life case study done...

At the very beginning of the new film Outside the Law (French title, Hors la Loi), we see a humble peasant working the soil of a modest farm in rural Algeria. The land is little better than desert, but it is the beloved ancestral home of a small family: a...

Henry Phillips possesses a sharp wit that is both endearing and crude, a somewhat cynical wit he has honed by performing for too many years in front of too many bored drunks in too many one-horse towns. He suffers the self-imposed misfortune of being an intelligent man who has chosen...

Kandahar Break, a new independent film written and directed by David Whitney, offers a love story as old as Romeo and Juliet at the core of a more contemporary thriller, every scene of which is packed with suspense. We are at first confronted with the stark landscape of Afghanistan: forbidding,...

In Edgar Allan Poe's terrific short story William Wilson, the title character tells us that the name he is using is a pseudonym because he hates his true appellation: "[It] has been already too much an object for the scorn -- for the horror -- for the detestation...

I hope a lot of people see Helen because it is an important film and quite a cinematic experience. I thought Ingmar Bergman films were heavy, but even they did not prepare me for this. I had no idea what I was getting into. Ashley Judd's performance as the title...

I was a teenager in the 1960s, so of course I was a consummate Beatlemaniac. Through the ensuing years, a few other musical artists appeared whom I have consistently held in very high regard -- Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello -- though none ever quite reached the pinnacle of...

Ten of the twelve books I am assigning in my various community college English courses this fall are available through Amazon Kindle. The exceptions are Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes and Life, Sex and Ideas by A.C. Grayling, but I expect to see them in e-book...

Film director and screenwriter Akira Kurosawa once said, "It is the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination." All creative artists reach back in time, often to childhood experiences, for inspiration. We can see this in works as diverse as the short stories of fantasy writer...

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is a fictional biography of one of the seminal punk rockers of the 1970s, Ian Dury. This film is very working-class British, which accounts for a great deal of its rascally charm. It is also loud, frenetic, and phantasmagorical, but that's a good...

A special showing of Steven Sebring's movie Patti Smith: Dream of Life will take place at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, on Sunday, June 27th, in the East Building Concourse Auditorium. The director will be making a personal appearance.

Dream of Life, a...

Robert Kennedy once said, "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not."

Another such dreamer is the fabulous fantasy writer, Ray Bradbury. I just finished his 1957 novel Dandelion Wine. What possible relevance,...

No, I am not talking about the James Frey who wrote A Million Little Pieces, the controversial piece of creative "nonfiction" that initially made a splash with Oprah but then fell into ignominy. The man I want to praise today is James N. Frey, probably the best writing...

The answer is that she can't think. I have just given a writing assignment in my college class. My charges are to compose a response essay to something we have read. Inevitably, one of them -- I'll call her Tiffany -- asks a dumb question. I know we teachers are...

At a press party at last month's Tribeca Film Festival, I had the chance to speak with Geoffrey Alan Rhodes and Steven Eastwood, co-directors of a bizarre quasi-documentary called Buried Land. The movie is about three ancient pyramids, even older than those in Egypt, that some...

All of the classes I teach at the two community colleges where I am employed are writing classes. I am often saddled with the dreaded Freshman Composition course, the infamous English 101 that all of you college grads had to take whether you liked it or not. You probably didn't;...