An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
Or I should say, Life in fly-over land without a car. It’s quite possible to live a decent, middle-class existence in Chicago without a car. Buses and trains are excellent, the elevated trains get you to the airport far faster … Continued
Sorry, you alien-mystery lovers. I’m not with you. Instead, I find myself drawn to writers whose imagination transcends their own boundaries of race, class, and culture. They have the power to evoke lives quite unlike their own. I’ve read … Continued
Odd these conjunctions: lifesize Chinese tomb warriors from 200 BCE striding in their stone shapes at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Then rooms full of women’s art, made from the mid-1970s to the present era, associated with one of the … Continued
A good poem can bequeath you one or two lines: such as these from Maxine Kumin’s Feeding Time: Time which blows on the kettle’s rim Waits to carry us off. (Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1992) I stand … Continued
Carol Bly, one of Minnesota’s finest essayists, published an essay with this title in her collection, Letters from the Country. It’s probably my favorite, written when she lived in a small prairie community in the 1970s. She advised us, in … Continued
Dear Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, and beloved musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Imagine Dickens’ A Christmas Carol without Tiny Tim, the Fezziwigs’ Christmas party, and Scrooge’s redemption! That’s what the cacellation of all SPCO concerts for … Continued
No offense, Senor Tuba, but you mostly don’t belong in a symphony orchestra. Like your overgrown business compatriot–the contemporary “business model”–your music is too raucous, too lumbering, too prone to go awry in favor of swagger and ump-pa-pa. Good for … Continued
One of the strangest novels I’ve ever read. Yet as the small boy wanders from one grotesque encounter to another, uprooted and friendless in war-torn, peasant Poland, it is hard not to become fascinated, even obsessed with the bizarre horrors … Continued
The process of creating an orchestra is like working a manuscript through a thousand drafts, each adjustment, adding and subtracting, listening and blending, heightening and subduing finally produces a glorious resonance of refinement and depth. It’s simply not possible to … Continued
It’s difficult to love a huge aggregate. But the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is small by orchestra standards: thirty-some versus over a hundred (I’m guessing) for the Minnesota Orchestra. Saturday night’s concert at the Ordway was for me a love … Continued