Meyerhold - neat, in some respects

"When I first visited Chekhov, I was surprised to see a completely bare table in his room. There were a few sheets of paper, an inkwell, and that was all. I even thought that perhaps the table was going to be laid for dinner, and, being shy, I hastily said that I had already dined. But apparently the Chekhovs had also dined; the empty table was essential for his work, as it helped him to concentrate."

...

"Read more! Read unceasingly! Read! Read with a pencil in your hand. Make extracts. Leave lists in your books of all the passages that have caught your attention. This is essential. All the books in my library contain lists like that and are annotated. For instance, I have read all of Wagner in German. Everybody knows him as a composer and a librettist, but besides that he also wrote ten volumes of the most interesting articles. I have studied them all. In those volumes you can find the lists I have made and you will immediately understand what interests me. Have no respect for the margins of books. Write all over them. A book which I have written in is ten times more valuable to me than a new one."

- Vsevolod Meyerhold, as related by A. Gladkov in Novy Mir, 1961 (8).

Research

"There are three kinds of research: that which tells us something we already knew, that which tells us something we didn't know, and that which blows the entire field out of the water. Which are you doing?"

- David d'Avray.

Benazir Bhutto

Graham Usher has been the best journalist writing in English about the crisis in Pakistan for the last 6 months (in almost every issue of Al-Ahram Weekly). Sharp analysis of the present situation in his latest dispatch.