Commentaries - May 2010

holiday trilogy

I'm proud to have helped fund this play: "The third in [Cecilia] Corrigan’s holiday trilogy, Memorial Day combines live performance with video 'news reports' and carefully culled quotations on the subject of patriotism and nationhood.

Philly the day I arrived 25 years ago

Twenty-five years ago to the day I arrived in Philadelphia, having been hired as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. As I flew in a Piedmont Airlines jet over the city, I looked below me and saw huge plumes of black smoke rising up from a neighborhood west of the west bank of the Schuylkill River. What the hell is going on? What is this city I've come to?

Stevens, China, wine

Edward Ragg is a poet, an expert on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, a resident of China, and a writer about wine. With Fongyee Walker, Edward blogs about wine at "Dragon Phoenix." His new book, "Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction," is due out from Cambridge this summer. Stevens' love of wine is naturally part of the book:

"Stevens was something of a wine lover, especially of the wines of Burgundy and one of the book’s chapters is entitled ‘Food, Wine and the Idealist ‘I” (the ‘I’ is a special case of the first person speaker in several of Stevens’ 1940s poems). The book proffers a long reading of perhaps Stevens’ most baffling gastronomic poem ‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, a text whose relationship with Burgundy and with Occupied France of 1942 is both ingenious and has previously remained tough for Stevens scholarship to decipher. Part of the book’s argument is that Stevens’ embrace of an abstract aesthetic was not confined merely to poetic or artistic concerns, but involved his everyday imagination, interests and needs, including a love of the finer things in life, with wine being no exception...."

the PennSound mothers

For Mother's Day selections from the PennSound archive and a whole lot more, follow PennSound on twitter. Click here.