cultural updates

07 Mar 2025 - Alex

reading. Nobody, Alice Oswald. Strand Book Store

Alice Oswald insisted that she is not a nature poet, that if anything she is a tongue-in-cheek anti-nature poet. She prefers a classical bent, with a previous book splicing together the deaths in the Iliad and a recent book examining Nobody from the Odyssey. Despite this affinity for the ancients, Oswald said at an event reading excerpts from Nobody that she sees poetry not as eternal but as language that lives and dies. “Don’t worry if you don’t catch every bit of it,” she told us. The sonnet is, after all, “a kind of muffled verse form.” Though she did not mean to, she associated herself in my mind with images woven out of nature. A river waits for “feelings of minkness.” She seeks “the exact blackbird at the center of winter.” In listening to a polemic against deciduousness I consider for the first time the questions raised by the impossible thinness of a leaf, the grammar of a capricious tree changing its mind. Nothing recirculates through the mind like an image as recursive as “a needle passing through the eye of a needle.”

concert. “Lunar New Year Gala,” cond. Tianyi Lu. New York Philharmonic

As in any live performance, but particularly in a classical one, the audience is enrolled in the music as materials for acoustic absorption and reflection. I perched in a chair at the edge of the concert hall mezzanine, one in a column of forward-facing seats. I admired the delicacy, the precision, the absolute command of touch that this caliber of musician demonstrates at even a casual performance. An astounding bright warmth emanated into the hall from the arpeggios of a trumpet solo. The French horns expressed a tender staccato—a pizzicato, even—in the Carmen selections. The violin soloist astounded, but I admired even the degree of skill involved in silently picking up and setting down a tambourine. And, thinking of the connection between composer and performer, I all but trembled at the tension involved in writing a piece to prescribe sounds that can only be produced through certain motions, as if the composer were remotely manipulating the performer through their distant demand.

Between each piece, musicians added and removed themselves from the stage as if they were being set aside and recalled from storage. August pointed out the red-clad audience members scattered throughout the seats below. I scribbled in my pocket notebook about how one must live as vividly as one possibly can, through all available forms of human expression, and with deepest care to do so not in an escapist, palliative, stimulation-seeking sense, but instead to deepen and sensitize.

screening. The Color of Pomegranates, dir. Sergei Parajanov. Metrograph

The images manifest strange and protean, propagules of a nation’s subconscious. A poet’s life is best recounted in the abstract. Suspended instruments resonate untouched. A Cupid statue turns, wound on unseen strings. A strip of lace is drawn down past the the eyes, down across the face. A dyestained hand rises up to cover an olive-skinned protagonist’s view. A group of women in a desert participate in a senseless passing and turning of objects amid a procession of rapid black horses. Primal colors form dyads: white paired with black, red paired with white. The relationships between them articulate dialectics of being and annihilation, of inertia and action, of empty void and awful life. When a gun appears its presence here is shocking and vulgar. It discharges and I flinch in my seat. The image that recurs is of a conch clutched over the bearer’s naked left breast.