Before going off to the Guggenheim to meet the visiting Juliet after her immersion in Matthew Barney and sweep her from the sterile Upper East Side to the lively East Village for dinner (ah, the life of a New York City blogger!), I rummaged through her archives and came across this site dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, which includes a short video clip of her reading. (I also found this moving reminiscence of James Tiptree, Jr., the first thing I’ve read that gives me any sense of why she—that’s right, she—killed her husband and herself in 1987.)
Also tiptree related: the James Tiptree, Jr. award!
LH– How happenstancial, I went into San Francisco last night for a late dinner and then off to the Castro Theater to watch Cremaster 4 and 5. –jfb
I loved Cremaster 5, but perhaps that had something to do with its setting — the Hungarian State Opera did a lot of the work for Barney in that installment in terms of creating a sense of the otherworldly. The rest I’m reserving judgement on… Did you see Ros Chast’s cartoon about the Cremaster Cycle in this week’s New Yorker? Very funny.
I haven’t seen it, but will seek it out. I read a scathing review of Barney by Hoberman in The Village Voice. I read somewhere that Barney wrote the libretto in Hungarian. I’ve heard mixed reviews on C3.
Akhmatova READING? ((squeals))
Tiptree is a gorgeous, gorgeous writer, but she is also majorly depressing. I once gave a short story collection of hers to a friend with the warning “Do not read all of these in a row.”