Things lately, unelaborated

Osvaldo Golijov's"Ayre" with Dawn Upshaw is just stunning. Upshaw played a track at her interview at Harvard last week, and I just had to hear more.

During the summer I didn't read a thing, beyond newspapers and magazines. There was one exception: Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain". Mercilessly painful and equally beautiful in roughly 20 pages, it moved me like nothing I can remember.

"Grizzly Man" was awesome. Treadwell was at home in the ferocious wild and yet he remained absolutely naive, bending nature to his shape rather than keeping a distance and attempting to understand it on its own terms. He never did understand it, and, more importantly, he never understood his own soul, never dealt with his own demons. One man interviewed in the film says that, in being eaten by a bear, Treadwell got what he deserved. I think he got what he wanted.