Reviews and News:
NASA observes an intergalactic gamma ray burst, “one of the most violent kinds of explosions in the universe, from a source 9 billion light years away, possibly a black hole.”
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Netflix orders new Matt Groening animated series, “Disenchantment”: “The series from the creator of ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Futurama’ is described as an adult fantasy about a crumbling medieval kingdom known as Dreamland.”
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Man Booker long list announced.
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Paintings hung above eye level judged aesthetically superior to those below.
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When Beethoven met Goethe: “Beethoven revered Goethe, having composed incidental music to the 1788 drama Egmont as well as several songs set to Goethe’s verse. The two artists had already made initial contact in the spring of 1812, Beethoven writing to Goethe a letter brimming with effusive praise and Goethe responding in warm, encouraging terms. As Jan Swafford notes in his recent biography of Beethoven, the period of the early 1800s was the Goethezeit, the age of Goethe, and following the death of Immanuel Kant, Goethe and Beethoven stood alone as the two colossi of German culture. That they should not only meet, but perhaps become friends, even collaborate on an opera, as Beethoven desired, seemed inevitable. And yet, it was not to be.”
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“The Spanish Left, in conjunction with Muslim activists in southern Spain, is trying to seize control of the Cathedral of Córdoba from the Catholic Church.”
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Siegfried Sassoon’s niece, now a nun, remembers her late relationship with her uncle: “Jessica, then 21, was staying with her parents in Yorkshire when Sassoon, who was now in his early 70s and had recently become a Catholic, came for the weekend. Jessica, although an atheist from a young age, was ‘on a pilgrimage of some sort’ trying to work out the meaning of her life and what to do with it. Their meeting had a profound effect. ‘I knew he had something,’ she says. ‘Part of him seemed to connect to something much deeper. I had lots of questions and I felt he was someone with answers.’ One day, walking in the garden, Sassoon showed her a petal and said: ‘You have to believe that someone created that.’ ‘I recognised at that moment that, yes, someone had,’ she says. ‘Siegfried was right.’”
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William Desmond and the revolt against beauty.
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Essay of the Day:
Dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown died in March. In The Hudson Review, Marcia B. Siegel surveys her work and accomplishment:
“Brown continued doing process pieces, keeping the movements relatively simple so that the structures on which they were laid could be perceived. There was a series based on the idea of lineup, which she would assemble for various performances, sometimes under the overall title of Structured Pieces (1973–1976). The Accumulations got more layered: As the dancers continued building up the movement sequence, other people would pick them up and move them, or they’d be performing while lying on the grass in a park or on rafts in a lake.
“Around the same time, Brown’s irrepressible dancing impulse began to take control. Even in Locus, where all the participants did the same directional, discrete phrases, her natural fluidity asserted itself. Though the moves were unrelated, in the Mills film Brown didn’t always come to a halt between them as her partners did. It was as if she couldn’t stop moving even when the phrase came to an end.
“In 1978, with Watermotor, she gave this instinct its way. After the second or third time, she wrote, ‘I danced how I dance . . . unpredictable, personal, articulate, dense, changeful, wild assed.’ The first performance was at the Public Theater on 22 May 1978; I saw it there during its run of four shows. It looked absolutely daring to me at the time, revealing Brown’s unique ability to move with abandon and control simultaneously. You can see this in Babette Mangolte’s remarkable film, made around the time of the dance’s premiere. With every part of her body alive to the impulse, Brown juts and tilts, swings and springs into space. Although the choreography is fixed, nothing is stopped or placed. Even in Mangolte’s black-and-white document, you can feel Brown’s exhilaration, her trust in her body as she jumps, veers off center, follows a sudden thrust of her lower back into a new direction. Mangolte filmed the dance, then filmed it again in slow motion, aiming somehow to capture the disappearing images Brown created.”
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Photo: Montenegro
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Poem: H. K. Hummel, “Call and Response”
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