A few items worth reading this week:
War and Baked Beans by Robert Olmstead:
Robert Olmstead,
who has distinguished himself as an accomplished novelist, takes our
breath away with this moving column about our sad and scary state of
affairs:
These days I feel my edges falling away. I am sure this is weakness.
What else could it be in this armed and dangerous land of ours? When
people learn that I teach they sometimes launch into lengthy
condemnations of young people: their music, their laziness, their
callowness. This makes my blood boil. Young people do not make war.
Young people do not decide to send off the drones. But young people will
be there to do the dirty work when the old people tell them to. Young
people will be there to shovel the manure.
Read his entire essay War and Baked Beans in the New York Times here.
Lera Auerback and Laurie Anderson:
Shortly after the debut of her groundbreaking opera The Blind, Lera Auerback sits down with Laurie Anderson for Harper's Bazar.
"Everywhere I go, I visit cemeteries or abandoned ruins—including one
in a very small village in Brazil that you can only reach by boat. You
walk in and there's this incredible cemetery, with all sorts of
flowering trees and completely disintegrating graves," she says,
gesturing like an orchestra conductor, dark curly hair flowing around
her face, her eyes gleaming. "And there's a sign at the entrance: PLEASE
DO NOT DUMP BODIES UNATTENDED. It was exceptionally beautiful, in a
gruesome way."Much about Auerbach's career, including The Blind, is just
that: beautiful, gruesome, devastating, and daring. Now 39, Auerbach,
born on the border of Siberia, composed her first opera at age 12, and
defected from the Soviet Union in 1991, when she was 17, to study at
Juilliard.Continue reading here.
Read Lera Auerbach's Best American Poetry blog posts here.
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, October 10. Here's what one reliable news source has to say about John Ashbery's chances of winning.
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— sdh