Massachusetts Review
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Read More“Forest bathing.” You’ve heard of it. It’s been in the news, a few paragraphs in the Times, a feature on NPR. It’s what we used to call “going for a walk in the woods,” and research suggests that the practice has some health benefits. Whether from the way trees cool and oxygenate the air or from some . . .
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III Adding to the Archive In the Alexandrov Museum, they’re getting ready for the evening’s festivities. A young woman from here who married a top chef from France and lives in Paris was passing through town yesterday evening, and she promised to help with filing the documents. She speaks French perfectly, laughing . . .
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II Betrayal of the Homeland The occasion that brings us to Alexandrov is a small event with symbolic importance. I’m accompanying a writer friend who has brought documents for the archives of the Museum of the 101st Kilometer. During the ‘80s, Jil Silberstein—who is also a poet, a lover of Russian literature, and . . .
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I A Living Culture When you move from one place to another in Russia, you travel through time as well as space. As distance from the capital increases, you soon find you’ve moved several years, or even several decades, backwards. Or so I told myself as I left Moscow—that turgid, tentacled metropolis, . . .
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Izet Sarajlić (photo from the Fondazione Erri De Luca) I begin the year as a reader of poets. In the second book of the Illiad one reads for more than two hundred and fifty lines the precise listing of those present in the Greek army. This section is called the catalogue of ships, for Homer . . .
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Cain, bronze sculpture by Lois Anvidalfarei I use a simple screen to judge whether a political program—and the behavior which follows—is progressive. Two sides of one coin: for a political program to be progressive requires people to behave progressively. For me, the Urugrayan ex-President Pepe Mujica and the mayors of Barcellona and . . .
Read MoreLook, I was surprised by it, too. Indeed, my reaction on seeing the Guardian’s live update at 7:00 on Thursday morning was to post on Facebook: “Dylan?! WTF?!” Soon my friends, as they woke up and logged on, were posting their own responses, ranging from “The times they are a-changin’” to “There must . . .
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When Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes presented The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, an unsuspecting Belle Époque audience was shocked. The premiere of Sacre is the stuff of legend, with audiences hissing and screaming obscenities, and the dancers stunned and unable to hear Igor Stravinsky’s music, . . .
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