Word: salzman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Given this feverish interest in China, it was inevitable that Occidental travelers would add their own speculations about the People's Republic. Two years ago, Mark Salzman wrote Iron and Silk, a recollection of his years as an English teacher in Changsha. Next spring he will produce a novel, tentatively titled Journey to the West, that mixes Chinese myth and actuality. And next month will bring The Great Black Dragon Fire, by veteran journalist Harrison Salisbury. The fire was not fiction; it occurred in 1987, and it burned a Manchurian forest "so large that, like China's Great Wall...
...already revived Gershwin's lost Strike Up the Band, served as the proving ground for Anthony Davis' powerful first opera X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X) and unearthed Queenie Pie, the Duke Ellington "street opera" planned for a Broadway run early next year. Festival Directors Eric Salzman and Marjorie Samoff have become the foremost presenters of new and unusual music theater works in the country...
This season, which ended last week, was typically eclectic. Among the offerings were a musical setting of Mordecai Richler's brash comic novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Composer Salzman's Stauf, an anagrammatical updating of the Faust legend co-written by Michael Sahl. The highlights, though, were The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a moving minimalist meditation by British Composer Michael Nyman based on a case history in Neurologist Oliver Sacks' best seller, and Harry Partch's 1959 Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a quirky blending of Euripides and Elvis Presley, scored for an unorthodox...
...What Salzman's Chinese acquaintances lacked in cheek coloring they made up in generosity and frankness. A family of poor fishermen he befriended insisted that he accept a gift of their boat (he dissuaded them with difficulty). When he brought out his cello to play for the family, they rushed across the room "to touch the divine object -- the red velvet lining inside the cello case." An aging athlete, posing for a snapshot, inquired gravely if it is true that in America, where "everything is modernized," there are ways of adding hair to photographs? "If you could do that...
...much a treatise on modern Chinese mores as a series of telling vignettes. When a clerical worker at the college committed suicide, her funeral could not be held or her family consoled until, four days later, local Communist Party officials announced that "her problems were personal and not political." Salzman killed a rat in his classroom, and his students merrily escorted him and his quarry to the local Rat Collection Office, where he was entitled to a 5 cents bounty. A young man teaching Salzman calligraphy was surprised when the American confided that his highest ambitions were to be well...