Song of a Reformed Headhunter

The snoozefoxie, a hedgehog-like creature, comes out of a six-year-old boy's nose to spark a love connection between him and another boy. The picture book is written in Dutch, by Oliver Robert. I found an English translation by S. Boone and J. Lagast on Google Books . According to The Advocate , where I read the story, the picture book has become a favorite with Belgian educators, and now 50, 000 elementary students ages 6 to 9 read about Josh and Jasper's gay crush each year.  The same issue also covers the coming tenth anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. On Wednesday, October 7, 1998, the young man was found tied to a fence on the Wyoming prairie, barely alive, his skull fractured and his brain stem crushed. He died in a hospital five days later. He was 21. The state of Wyoming still has not passed the hate crime legislation put together in the wake of Shepard's death; neither has the U.S. government passed the federal version of that bill. Obama has promised to ...

Yesterday, I sat in the Triskelion Arts Studio, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to watch a work choreographed by a colleague, Jessica Gaynor . The work was an excerpt from a full-length dance to be premiered in the same space in November 13-15. Titled "Enlarged to Show Texture," the dance meditated on the ways individuality arises from communal routines. The soundtrack stitched together original music (by Brian Harnetty) and recordings from the Berea Appalachian Sound Archives, forming a patchwork of soundscapes. After seeing the excerpt, I am keen to see the entire piece. The excerpt began with a quartet of dancers sitting round on chairs, and tapping a foot. Soon, three of them moved to a far corner, leaving the odd one out doing her thing. This formation, and then breaking, of pattern informed the rest of the piece. By the canny use of different combinations--pairs, trios, quartets and quintets--the work achieved variety but also maintained its coherence. The movements and gest...

With a group of colleagues, I am reading The Iliad , translated by Richmond Lattimore. Not having made any close comparisons, I think the Fagles translation is more direct and muscular, whereas the Lattimore is more fluid. Lattimore also uses a longer verse line than Fagles does. Lattimore opens with these lines: Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. "Hurled" in line three is a main verb, but I read it first as a participle modifying Achaians; that confusion does not seem productive, and I wonder if the ambiguity is in Homer. Lines 4 and 5 do not reproduce Homer's chiasmic "spoils for ...

from Michael Gorra's review (TLS Sep 2008) of Amit Chaudhuri's Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, literature and culture : Too often "the Eastern and Western elements in fusion have a designated static quality that they do not in their own contexts". So Chaudhuri speaks on behalf of dialectic, not fusion; on behalf of quarrel and assimilation, and not the kind of multi-culti celebration that often winds up confirming our "unexamined beliefs about identity and where we come from". * In another essay on Rushdie--"Huge Baggy Monster", first published in the TLS in 1999--he takes up the question of the imitative fallacy, the sense that a large sprawling country requires large sprawling novels . . . *** from Gordon Bowker's review (TLS Sep 2008) of The Creator as Critic: And other writings by E. M. Forster , and The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929-1960 : . . . his interest in he evolving personality inspired by reading Walter Pater and Samuel ...

Albuquerque 7 after Richard Diebenkorn There is a figure in a landscape with no figure, if only because we look for him behind the elm, above the snow line, or along the marshy creek, or on the white sand polished by sapphire seas, if only because we look at it, and see the spur steering the mountain’s floating hulk a whaler’s helm, and see the fleeting torso of a marbled Greek in the cloud hurling the discus sun into our eyes, and wide in its deliberate curvature, the river bend its bow till the ends clap, palm to shining palm, despite the thunderstorm, despite the cracked and bleak stumps, clap in blue applause manifest destiny. And you, love, turning fifty as around a corner, watching the vanishing point of every painted realm, you’re thinking of your fading father, as we speak of early hardships, breakthroughs, late discoveries. Paint, like its painter, must fade, but between the fir, cached in the middle of an unattended calm, there is a lake that looks nothing like a lake— no boa...

It has been too long since I attended a concert, and last night's outing to hear the NY Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall was pleasure regained.  According to the playbill, Yefim Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, in 1958, and immigrated to Israel with his family when he was 15. He made his international debut two years later, at the age of 17, with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Since then he has been appearing regularly with North American orchestras.  Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 has a special connection with the NYP. The composer unveiled the work in 1909, playing the solo part himself, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony, which merged with the NYP. The playbill claims that Rachmaninoff only got round to practicing his part during the Atlantic crossing, when he rigged up a mute piano keyboard for that purpose.  I came to Rachmaninoff through Scott Hicks's 1996 film "Shine," a biopic about the Australi...

1. At first he went to Cairo for the lads, whom he saw from his hotel window passing through the market stalls like unacknowledged gods. Then he found himself passing for a local, winning the confidence of the black-toothed elders, uttering an automatic prayer when the minaret floated its call. He knew he could never be a Muslim, but he loved the religion’s seriousness, the gravity in the brown eyes of his lover who stepped out of a starry robe to climb under his covers. 2. He liked sun-tanning on Christopher Street pier where other sun-tanners slept on the grass like so many fish. He liked the idea they were happy out of their element. The grass blades bristled, the ants with their busy jaws scavenged what the summer gas had poisoned. But the sun-tanners were not dead yet, they were dreaming of limbs and lungs, and the unaccustomed sun of mammal sex. 3. He washed carefully, glad to be out of the cold that was reducing his gang at the pier. He almost gave himself up to the Shelter but ...