The dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham has died, age 90. He had one of the longest, most artistically rich, lives on record.

This piece about him, marking a lecture he gave at Stanford, evokes that richness.

An excerpt:

In 1966, Cunningham collaborated with filmmaker Stan Van Der Beek to produce Variations V, the first of its kind “dance film.” What must have excited Cunningham about this venture was how the camera could work as a creative instrument, framing and structuring the look and feel of dance in a way that differed tremendously from viewing a performance in a concert hall. Variations V is also intriguing as an early and consummate example of the collage-like effect of multimedia. The dancers perform in a dark space broken up by vertical antennae, photoelectric devices, and a plant-like object. Multiple projection screens, with moving images from film and television, displayed both the sublime (man’s walk on the moon) and the mundane (a man coming home to his house in suburbia). As the dancers advance near the antennae, or cut through beams of photoelectric light, they trip sensors that emit the electronic bleeps and blips of John Cage’s musical score. Ambient sound, an occasional piano solo, and the auditory snow that one hears between radio stations contributed to the complexity of Cage’s soundscape. Movement ranges from elaborate ensembles, with dancers rolling, spinning, and somersaulting on the floor to unusual solos (Cunningham pulls off the leaves of the plant-like object, only to replace them later; a female dancer, sporting a 1960s dress fit for a go-go club, stands on her head). The hypersensory event is completed with the projection of bright spotlights and spiral patterns on the stage that are sometimes superimposed on the dancers’ bodies.

This is from an interview with Chafetz – the New York Times reporter who wrote a now much-quoted piece on the New York Syrian Jewish community – about recent events.

[The community has a] long history of having problems along these lines… [A]ll kinds of scams [go on]… I wish I could say I was surprised… Having spent some time looking into that community I truly wasn’t actually shocked… [This is a] very tightly knit community… everybody is related to everybody else… a lot of business is done on handshakes… [The] ethos is… not disconnected from the commercial traditions of the Middle East… [I assume] there are more arrests or scandals coming… that wouldn’t shock me.

Having spent 62 years being Jewish, I do not think that rabbis are ethical or moral figures in particular… [Unethical behavior among them] never surprises me…

… says smart things about creative writing programs.

Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a history of the rise of university writing programs and workshops, is subtitled, “Should creative writing be taught?” Despite itself, the review does not encourage a positive answer. Menand tells us that “by 1975, there were fifteen creative-writing M.F.A. programs in the country. Today, there are a hundred and fifty-three.” And what do we have to show for it? McGurl says that the “system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period” shows that the writing programs have helped, but we don’t see how this can be proven: while the rise of American aerospace engineering, say, can be connected to America’s supremacy in space, we don’t know how you connect the explosion of writing classes to advancements in literary quality. The sort of cultural product that distinguishes America around the world, such as rock songs, blockbuster movies, and potboiler novels, can hardly be attributed to Bread Loaf. There is something to be said for fine literature, but America produced enough of that to suit our needs before schools started mass-producing MFAs.

Other insights from the review are equally discouraging: for example, that “university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit — the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace.” This makes writing programs sound like a make-work schemes for aesthetically-inclined redundant laborers, and stirs suspicion that many of us currently struggling as scribes have been unfortunately discouraged from more useful lives as upholsterers or surveyors. We often think so, anyway.

Menand does supply fun anecdotes about the trade (“[John Gardner’s] preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples”), and he looks back fondly on workshops, saying “I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.” Maybe writing programs, then, are the information-age equivalent of shop class. If so, tuition should be adjusted to reflect this.

John Montague,  Independent.ie:

“The urge to comprehend is so deep. … It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done. Then you try to make a shape out of it, in a poem or a story. Also, it’s a kind of judgement, you sit on yourself — the things that I’ve done that I can’t stand over and can stand over — accepting it all. You’re trying to emulate the divine vision.”

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Beryl Bainbridge, Guardian:

“I went to a psychiatrist in my thirties. I didn’t realise that you did all the talking and they just sat there, so I got embarrassed and just kept talking and making things up. After about six visits he looked very solemn and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’m emigrating to Canada.’ And I said, ‘Oh, lovely!'”