Books

Short Fuse Review/Commentary: Steve Jobs and the Digital Acid Trip

December 19, 2011
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No doubt too much can be made out of Steve Jobs’s tripped-out youth, but also, too little. Jobs himself said: “Definitely, taking LSD is one of the most important things in my life.” He never recanted when it came to psychedelics, or disowned their influence.

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Poetry Review: Henri Cole’s “Touch” — Love Thy Neighbor, Like Thyself

December 18, 2011
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Is it true that if I love my neighbor I can, or will, like myself? This question cuts to the heart of the poems in Heni Cole’s volume “Touch,” and the answer is yes.

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Theater/Book Interview: Ben, We Hardly Know Ye — Donaldson on Jonson

December 17, 2011
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Ben Jonson is one of the great unknown geniuses of the English theater and of western literature. Ian Donaldson’s new biography of the playwright/poet successfully makes the case that he deserves to be better known.

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Book Commentary: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Jonathan Lethem’s Influences

December 16, 2011
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For all of his claims to being a subversive termite, Jonathan Lethem the puffy white elephant appears more often in this collection, trudging down a much safer, much happier road — leave the negativity to the snotty aristocrats.

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Book Review: Mahmoud Darwish — Palestinian Poet of Heritage and Exile

December 14, 2011
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Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008 at the age of sixty-seven, was best and heroically known for his complex perspective on political and spiritual borders — as both a poet and a spokesman for his Palestinian people.

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Theater Commentary: An Anything-But-Banal Love Story

December 13, 2011
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The play does not address Hannah Arendt’s rationalizations or the reasons for her dedication to Martin Heidegger, though the dramatist’s title hints that it is the banal truth of the irrationality of love.

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Book Review: Losing it — Whining Against the Dying of the Light

December 8, 2011
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Losing It” explores growing old through an assemblage of tales and lessons drawn from works of the past—the Icelandic Sagas, the classics, the Bible, the Torah—to which the author adds a plenitude of his own dicta and pensées, slinging the whole contraption together on a webbing of extrapolation and free association.

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The Annual Arts Fuse Holiday Gift Roundup — Tips From the Experts

December 5, 2011
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Wondering about what to give the arts and culture lover on your gift list? No problem — the sage writers for The Arts Fuse (with an assist from our readers) come to the rescue with thoughtful suggestions.

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Theater Interview: The Arrival of “The Snow Queen”

December 3, 2011
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Along with its puppets and spectacle, “The Snow Queen” gives the audience a chance to become part of the action. Kids of all ages are invited to put down their electronic toys and enter a fanciful — rather than frenzied — theatrical world.

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Arts Interview: Cutting Across Mathematics and the Arts — Talking With The Man Who Knows Galileo’s Muse

December 1, 2011
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We need the humanities because we need imagination that works outside the narrow channels where the sciences succeed.

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