ArtsBeat

ArtsBeat calls it a day; content to move to new Gusto Blog

2010-10-21T16:34:40-04:00

The ArtsBeat blog, home since 2007 to our bite-sized coverage of art, theater, literature, classical music and film, has reached the end of its road. From now on, updated and improved bloggy coverage of the arts from Buffalo News critics Jeff Simon, Mary Kunz Goldman and Jeff Miers, along with arts writer Colin Dabkowski and literary blogger R.D. Pohl, can be found on the new Gusto blog. Thanks for being loyal readers of ArtsBeat, and please join us over at the Gusto blog for a new series of regular features and updates on the local arts and cultural scene. --Colin...

The Masque of V.S. Naipaul

2010-10-21T09:39:06-04:00

The 2010-2011 BABEL SERIES of lectures by and discussions with leading international authors opened Tuesday evening in Kleinhans Music Hall with a talk by the writer many readers and critics take to be one of the greatest English language novelists of the last half century. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (shorn of its honorific, that's V.S. Naipaul on the bookshelf) is the 1971 Booker Prize and 2001 Nobel Prize-winning Indo-Trinidadian author of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River (1979), The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and nearly 30 other titles that have...

Live chat with Jeff Simon begins at 3 p.m. Thursday

2010-10-20T22:47:35-04:00

Live Chat with Jeff Simon

UB hosts "Olson at the Century: A Symposium"

2010-10-15T18:39:31-04:00

"An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature," wrote Charles Olson in "Letter 27 [withheld]," of The Maximus Poems, enlarging on a theme he first introduced in Call Me Ishmael, his book-length study of Melville: "I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy." Now, as we approach the centenary of Olson's birth (on Dec. 27), scholars and critics of 20th century American poetry around the world are gathering to reassess what this...

Poet Wanda Coleman to read at Buffalo State on Thursday

2010-10-13T19:57:39-04:00

Los Angeles-based poet, fiction writer, reviewer, essayist and activist Wanda Coleman will read from and sign copies of her books at 12:15 p.m. Thursday in the Assembly Hall of Campbell Student Union on the Buffalo State College campus. The event, sponsored by Buffalo State College's School of Arts and Humanities and the English Department, is free and open to the public. Ms. Coleman, who grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1960s, is widely celebrated for the jazz and blues influences on her spoken work performance style. She is also notably the author of 16 books...

The conjectural poetics of Carl Dennis' "Callings"

2010-10-09T15:38:46-04:00

...Learn to take pleasure in the effort itself And you won't be sorry if you can't step back Far enough from your handiwork to see it whole... --Carl Dennis, from "Style" The 41 poems in Carl Dennis' new collection Callings (Penguin Poets Series) are full of hypothetical particularities, conversational voices speculating on the nature of free will, moral decision making, and whether one finds or loses one's self in one's work. At 2 p.m. Sunday, Dennis will read from and sign copies of the book at the Burchfield Penney Art Center on the Buffalo State College campus. The event is...

What's on: our weekly theater roundup

2010-10-08T16:27:26-04:00

Greetings, theater-lovers of Western New York. The current season is well underway, with many a worthwhile production running through Sunday. Next week, we'll see the openings of American Repertory Theatre of Western New York's production of "Twilight Zone Redux," Jewish Repertory Theatre of Western New York's "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" and, of course, the touring production of the massively popular Disney musical known as "Mary Poppins" at Shea's Performing Arts Center (look for a preview of that in Sunday's Spotlight section). But for now, check out these recommend shows now approaching the end of their runs: "The Pride," through...

Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa wins 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

2010-10-07T13:43:31-04:00

Peruvian novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist and literary critic Mario Vargas Llosa is the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature it was announced by Professor Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, this morning in Stockholm. In his announcement of the selection, Englund spoke for the Literature committee in hailing Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat." Vargas Llosa, born in 1936 and widely celebrated as the youngest of the generation of great Spanish language modernist and postmodernist writers associated with "El Boom"...

Sam Hoyt on cultural funding cuts

2010-10-05T19:03:35-04:00

New York State Assemblyman Sam Hoyt. Buffalo News file photo / Derek Gee. Much more to come on Erie County Executive Chris Collins' decision last week to slash funding for all but 10 local cultural groups. But I wanted to post some comments made today by Assemblyman Sam Hoyt at a press conference protesting yet more funding cuts (this time from the New York State Council on the Arts) to local arts education groups. Here's what Hoyt had to say (audio of Hoyt's comments is also posted above): As a state assembly member who represents a good portion of the...

No "Corrections": Franzen's "Freedom" recalled in the U.K.

2010-10-03T09:20:12-04:00

Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom is already the most talked about and fiercely debated book release of the year here in the United States. As of this past week, it has also become the most talked about book in the U.K., but for entirely different reasons. On Friday, two of London's leading newspapers, The Telegraph and The Guardian reported that the UK division of the book's publisher HarperCollins had mistakenly sent to press an uncorrected, draft version of the novel containing hundreds of editorial and typesetting mistakes. Over 80,000 copies of the book were produced in its first printing, of which...