Word: essays
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...Anne Carson is to read by intuition. Acquaintance with her collage of sources is not a prerequisite for appreciating her poetry, although familiarity with literary form enriches the experience. “Decreation,” her first book in the last five years, is a hybrid of poetry, essay, libretto, screenplay, oratorio, and illustration...
...Learning from New Orleans I am a 62-year-old white woman responding to the pitch-perfect words of my black brother Wynton Marsalis. In his Essay "Saving America's Soul Kitchen" [Sept. 19], he wrote, "We always back away from fixing our nation's racial problems. Not fixing the city's levees before Katrina struck will now cost us untold billions. Not resolving the nation's issues of race and class has and will cost us so much more." America, listen to those words or reap the consequences. If the cries of human suffering don't move us, perhaps...
...Marsalis' essay struck a chord; in addition to his musical talents, he has amazing insight. Perhaps musicians share an understanding that easily transcends racial and class lines. Musicians seem to embrace the soul in one another, the soul of life. They appreciate something that treats race, gender and religion as being as incidental as the clothes we wear. Marsalis is right on the mark. Perhaps if enough people speak out, as he has, they might pierce the tone-deaf arrogance of the powerful. Peter Piaskoski Milwaukee...
...epidemic, raising the possibility of using troops to enforce quarantines. He also recommended that folks read John Barry's book on the 1918 pandemic that killed more than 50 million people worldwide and that serves as a reminder of the kind of threat that the world could face (see ESSAY). A reconstruction of the 1918 virus, reported in scientific journals last week, shows it to be an avian strain that mutated just enough to infect humans directly and easily...
...edgiest articles in the anthology is a 1999 essay by assistant managing editor David Skinner arguing for the importance of male chest hair. Observing that a long list of male Hollywood stars, including Kevin Bacon, Tom Cruise, and even Al Pacino, have appeared with shaven chests in recent films, Skinner writes: “The newly prominent hairless man is a sign of the convergence of gay and straight culture.” He concludes with a rhetorical question: “Where can one find reflections of manliness, if everywhere you turn, the American male seems boyish, hairless, shorn...