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☆ Stephen Sondheim Doesn’t Want to Be Your Savior - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-25 | by ( Ben Brantley | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It should be noted that, when he was alive, Mr. Sondheim was aware of and amused by rampant tendencies to deify him. Consider this sardonic ditty from a show called “Sondheim on Sondheim,” a 2010 Broadway revue commemorating his 80th birthday. He wrote the song in response to a 1994 headline in New York magazine that asked, “Is Stephen Sondheim God?” His musical answer: “You have to have something to believe in. There’s a half-voiced fear among musical acolytes, understandable in a time in which theater itself is newly under siege, that on some level Stephen Sondheim represents the end of the line for a once-flourishing art form. Yet none, with the qualified exception of Mr. Miranda, seem likely to engender the kind of enduring, passionate cult that Mr. Sondheim has inspired.

Persons: Shakespeare, Auden’s, Yeats, Mr, Sondheim, ”, “, Stephen Sondheim God, I, Stephen Sondheim, Lin, Manuel Miranda, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Michael R, Jackson, Jeanine Tesori, Miranda, Sondheim’s Locations: ”, New York, There’s

☆ Sigrid Nunez’s Art of Noticing
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-30 | by ( Wyatt Mason | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Growing up on Staten Island, Nunez was an outsider to the literary world. Her father immigrated to the United States illegally at some point — facts on his life are scant, according to Nunez — working in a hospital kitchen and Chinese restaurants. Home difficulties aside, Nunez was an avid reader and a strong student, which earned her the scholarship to Barnard. Auden and Susan Sontag (who later hired Nunez as a typist, a period memorialized in Nunez’s one memoir, “Sempre Susan”). Silvers was notorious for yelling at his staff or barely noticing them, for expecting them to stay until all hours, as he would.

Persons: Nunez, Nunez —, ”, Barnard, Virginia Woolf, Nunez’s, “, Hardwick, — Hardwick, Robert Silvers, Barbara, Jason Epstein —, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Edmund Wilson, Saul Bellow, W.H, Auden, Susan Sontag, Susan ”, — Martin Scorsese, ” Nunez, Silvers, Barbara Epstein Organizations: Army, Putnam, The New York, New York City, New York Locations: Staten, United States, Lowell, New York

☆ What Sinead O’Connor Meant to Ireland - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-28 | by ( Susan Mckay | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I was singing, fired up by the thrilling energy of “Mandinka,” when I became aware of flashing blue lights. On Wednesday, Ms. O’Connor’s body was found in a London apartment. Auden wrote of Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Cruel Ireland hurt Ms. O’Connor into song. She was furious that in a country that had supposedly fought for and won its freedom, women and children were so silenced and disempowered. She understood and had experienced pain, neglect and injustice and sang for those who also knew these things.

Persons: Sinead O’Connor’s, Auden, Yeats, “, Ms, O’Connor Locations: Republic, London, Ireland

☆ Stravinsky’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’: An Opera That Surprises
▼ + stars: | 2022-09-24 | by ( Emma Schneider | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

In 1913 “The Rite” took inspiration from Russian folk music. Less than four decades later, the music of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” looked to the classical and baroque canon instead. Stravinsky began writing the opera in 1947, when he stumbled upon a series of 18th-century William Hogarth prints at the Art Institute of Chicago. The artworks, titled “A Rake’s Progress,” depict a young man whose inherited wealth leads him to debauchery and ruin. Wanting to compose an opera in English ever since his arrival in the States in 1939, he finally found his subject.

☆ The Ayahuasca Diaries
▼ + stars: | 2022-06-26 | by ( Mattathias Schwartz | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +37 min

But please understand: I didn't drink ayahuasca so I could write an article about it. I wrote an article about it so I could drink ayahuasca. I was desperate to drink ayahuasca — I had been for several months, in fact — and the formality of an assignment would help me out at home. Instead, a friend of a friend linked me up with an ayahuasca sangha, a Buddhist word for a spiritual community. I thought of my old friend, Scott, who, many years before, had declined an opportunity to drink ayahuasca.

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