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Vol. LXV, No. 49
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
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Subscribe to our newsletter |
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Vol. LXV, No. 49
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
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 (Photo by Emily Reeves)
SINGING THE SEASON: Princeton Day School’s vocal ensemble Perfect Pitch performing Friday during A Cappella night in the Princeton Public Library’s Community Room. (Photo by Emily Reeves)
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Round Two of the battle between the Institute for Advanced Study and the Princeton Battlefield Society over the Institute’s proposed faculty housing project is set for the meeting of the Regional Planning Board on Thursday, December 8. More than 150 people attended last week’s nearly four-hour hearing on the project, causing the planners to carry the discussion over to its session this week.
This year’s “deer management program” using White Buffalo, Inc. will take place thanks to a resolution passed by Township Committee at its Monday evening meeting, authorizing an application that will be sent to the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife.
At the close of a contentious meeting last week, Princeton Borough Council voted to introduce an ordinance that would establish new rail transit zoning on the lot owned by Princeton University that includes the tracks linking the Dinky commuter train to the Northeast Corridor line.
“If a I had a dime for every parent who asked, ‘how can I kids get my kids involved?’ HomeFront would be rich,” said Women’s Initiative Advisory Board member Amy Vogel recently. While adult volunteers are more than welcome at HomeFront, a Trenton-based non-profit that seeks to end homelessness in Mercer County, there really wasn’t any call for children. Many youngsters are eager to help, though, and Ms. Vogel, a mother of three, came up with a solution.
Special Improvement Districts have been successful in cities such as New Brunswick and Jersey City. But despite numerous tries, Princeton has yet to establish one of its own. The latest attempt came at the end of Borough Council’s meeting last week, when members voted 3-2 to introduce a measure that would create the “Transportation Corridor Special Improvement District” in the area extending from Nassau Street down University Place to the border with Princeton Township.
After earning Ivy League Co-Rookie of the Year honors last winter, Princeton University men’s hockey star Andrew Calof experienced a bit of a sophomore slump in the early stages of this season.
It didn’t take long for Princeton University men’s basketball freshman forward Denton Koon to make an impression on the Tiger coaching staff.
On paper, the Princeton High boys’ swimming team appears to be a surefire contender for a state championship.
Kirby Peck felt a little extra weight on his shoulders last Thursday as the Princeton High boys’ hockey team opened the season.
Over the past few seasons, the Stuart Country Day School basketball team featured a guard-oriented attack.
Readers of Raymond Carver may recognize the variation on the title story from one of his most famous collections, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Roberta Smith used a version of the same title for a discussion of “the fashionably obtuse language of the art world” four years ago (New York Times December 23, 2007).
A big, fierce, weeping, hungry man, not a strong one.
— Thomas Carlyle,
in a letter to Emerson
Carlyle was attempting to describe William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), whose bicentenary has received little notice while the celebratory drums are already beating for Dickens 2012. The shelves of the Princeton Public Library are teeming with Dickens while Thackeray is represented by two paperback copies of Vanity Fair (1848) with Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp on the cover, one battered, yellowed Penguin paperback of The History of Pendennis (1850), and a two-volume Everyman edition of The Virginians (1859); one copy of The Rose and the Ring (1855) is available in the children’s collection. As for biographical or critical works, I had to order Ann Monsarrat’s An Uneasy Victorian: Thackeray the Man (Dodd, Mead 1980) through interlibrary loan.
By now we should have had a BBC dramatization of the triumphs and travails of the author of one of the world’s great novels and the creator of one of literature’s great characters, Becky Sharp. Why don’t we know him better? Why isn’t he regularly taught and quoted? Surely his face deserves to hang in the Barnes and Noble-Starbucks cafe life pantheon next to Dickens and George Eliot, who thought him “on the whole the most powerful of living novelists.”
Craig Wright’s The Pavilion, currently playing at the Hamilton Murray Theater on the Princeton University campus, is a play about time. At their 20th high school reunion, Peter (Matt Seely) and Kari (Katherine Ortmeyer), who were voted “cutest couple” before she got pregnant and he left while she stayed in town and settled down, encounter each other for the first time since graduation.