John W. Kennedy

This picture is a little old, but if you just gray the beard, you'll have a pretty good portrait of this aging, usually bearded, baby-boomer, a computer programmer, actor, opera singer, and occasional writer.

Note: Ron Rosenbaum's recently published book, The Shakespeare Wars, mentions me by name. Unfortunately, the reference is inaccurate; he has confused me with someone else, who is named Richard Kennedy. The error is slated for correction in the paperback, and in later printings of the hardcover.

Among my interests are:

• Babylon 5, which brought Art with a capital A to US series television,
• 
  The New Jersey Renaissance Kingdom, where I act, novelize the action of past years, run the website, and occasionally do other stuff (The Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire is good, too, as is the one-weekend Village Renaissance Faire.),
  • In April, 2002, we did a kiddie-theatre production of Cinderella, for which I wrote some original music.
• The International Wizard of Oz Club, dedicated to the Oz books (there are somewhere between 40 and 200, depending on what you count), as well as to Hollywood's efforts,
• In the late 1990's, the Club ran a contest for a special centennial Oz book. The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar was the winner. This was my entry.
• The Orpheus Club of Newark, where I sing, occasionally arrange music, and maintain the website,
• Loglan, the logical language, which I first discovered at age 13 or so in Scientific American, and recently found again on the web,
  • Here are a few notes on Loglan.
  • And I have written some Loglan software.
• William Shakespeare, the greatest writer who ever lived,
  • despite the efforts of barking loonies to spread the unfounded rumor that he was really someone else, and
  • whose lost play Cardenio, despite the claims of yet more barking loonies, is partially preserved in Lewis Theobald's Double Falshood; or The Distrest Lovers. Because no-one else has, I have put it online.
• Jane Austen, another literary giant.
  • Recently, some asked, "Just why is Jane Austen so great?" As an illustration, I provide Amelia, or Malevolence Defeated, an excellent contemporary example of a novel that might have been written by Jane, if Jane had had no talent.
• Sir Arthur Sullivan's only grand opera, Ivanhoe.
• William Dunlap's André (1798), the first American tragedy on an American subject.

Recently, I've combined two of these interests in Le Nu reible Gramadji pe la Az, an ongoing Loglan translation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The latest installment/revision was uploaded December 15, 2000.

You can e-mail me at John.W.Kennedy@gmail.com. My wife Eleanor has her own e-mail at Eleanor.M.Kennedy@mac.com.

What's new

I have added an RSS feed, which you can subscribe to using either Firefox's Live Bookmark feature or Thunderbird's News & Blogs feature. If you aren't using Firefox and Thunderbird, get with the program!

Until then, you can use the index page.