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‘Einstein, Margarita, and the Bomb’
On a damp Friday afternoon in November, traversing the broad, entirely empty main courtyard has the feeling of trespassing. Whitman’s Class of 1970 theater is the setting, this particular Friday afternoon, for a screening of ‘Einstein and Margarita,’ a so-called “media opera” composed by Iraida Iusupova and with libretto by Iusupova and the poet Vera…
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Legacy
I walked into the University chapel with a group of white-haired men in blue suits. I paused in front of an usher who wore a nametag with an orange and black ribbon pinned to it: Somers K. Steelman ’54. I extended my hand for a program. He looked at my unbrushed hair, sweatshirt, jeans, and…
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For Yan Pei-Ming, One Portrait Size Fits All
“As I sat on the bench in the center of the exhibition room, dwarfed by the mammoth panels of the tryptic, I considered my reaction.”
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Looking At a Childhood Afternoon, As From a Moving Car
Looking back, I can recount— although perhaps, at times, incompletely, and often, I admit, sensationally—— a brief episode between my four-year-old self and a close childhood friend: a young girl named Mary, similarly diminished in age and stature, a miniature co-star, with whom I shared an afternoon that I will always remember.
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Dogmael
I can’t say I’m anything to be anyone to be saying a thing about it, but I’s heard it enough, I have, as much as any. But it was, gah, it was over yonder ways near Bristhlewaight or Skinnamarok or what’s-the-town. What’s that town, Geoff, north the forest up there yonder? Place where they strung…
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Self portrait
Frank O’Hara writes a poem about why he’s not a painter, and in it he writes a poem called “Oranges” with no orange. So I’ll write a self portrait without myself. I’ll write instead about what I like: the opera, “Surfer Girl,”?walking right after it rains and the damp makes slight adhesion between foot and…
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Dr. David Bain, who made me pee in a cup
David Bain was a doctor, a world class physician. Just not by traditional standards. He had no degree, no formal training, no office with loud paper sheets, stethoscopes and tongue depressors and no tubs of biohazard sharps. But when he corrected the mistaken masses with a forceful “Doctor Bain, that’s Doctor Bain,” I found it…
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Letters
Characters U S Scene 1 Lights come up on a sitcom-style living/dining room/kitchen set. It is reminiscent of I Love Lucy. U, a large foam letter is sitting on the couch nursing a cup of coffee. S, another large foam letter, stumbles in looking pale and hung-over (as possible as it is for foam letters…
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Camouflage (An Excerpt)
Disappointment characterized not the first birth, but the second in the amniotic procession the twins enacted on May 16, 1978. It was the first of many staged productions for the energetic children of withered opera rose Emilia Hemmings. Emilia knew just what she was getting, no surprises for her. Only two months earlier, peering into…
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Can vei la lauzeta mover
A Translation Bernart de Ventadorn “Can vei la lauzeta mover” I When I see the lark break its wings against a sunbeam, forget itself, and fall from that sweet joy that pierces the heart, O—my own could melt, envying all those I see rejoicing. II Alas—how I hoped to know love, yet how little have…
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