The Arts Fuse Newsletter, May 14
Coming Attractions, reviews of Netflix's "Trial 4," Pietro Auletta’s opera "L’Orazio," Phyllis Ewen's "Inundation,” "Decoding Shostakovich," and Devo is still asking, "Are We Not Men?"
From The Editor's Desk:
We look to the future with pleasure/ we need no fossil fuel/ get power within/ grow strong on less. from “Tomorrow’s Song,” Turtle Island
On May 8, Gary Snyder turned 95. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti dubbed him the “Thoreau of the Beat Generation,” an honorific the poet, often with irritation, has distanced himself from. Still, Snyder served as an undeniable influence on the Beat generation and its followers. He was one of the inspirations for the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, and helped initiate the San Francisco Renaissance by organizing poetry readings with his close friend Allen Ginsberg, among others, thus helping to establish the Beats as a social and cultural force.
Few of the essays in the new Library of America volume Gary Snyder: Essential Prose deal with the Beats. Snyder has been an important contributor to environmental philosophy and politics, and the pieces here delineate modern society’s alienated relationship to the natural world. His chief concern has been positing ways in which we can protect nature from the savagery of civilization. For Snyder, this is a dynamic process: curtailing our anthropogenic focus on ego and subjectivity serves as a way to strengthen human community as well as reinforce our inseparability with nature.
Along with backing up Snyder’s rep as the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology,” the prose here supplies self-deprecating humor — he is uncomfortable playing the role of guru. That said, Snyder’s writing lacks the eccentric riffing of Thoreau, who at times can be surprising, to the point of head-scratching. As Kim Stanley Robinson suggests in his introduction to the LoA volume, Snyder’s Zen steadiness poses a healthy alternative to the self-destructive (and self-indulgent) behavior of the Beats. His prose follows suit, though some splendid, fantastical passages come along. Here’s a section from one of my favorite essays, 1978’s “Poetry, Community & Climax”: “Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, perception, sensation, and memory for the whole society. When all that compost of feeling and thinking comes back to us then, it comes not as a flower, but — to complete the metaphor — as a mushroom: the fruiting body of the buried threads of mycelia that run widely through the soil, and are intricately married to root hairs of the trees.” I love it — artists as the nurturing toadstools of the world.
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Archive: From the Editor's Desk 2025
Coming Attractions through May 26 — What Will Light Your Fire
Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor
Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.
Classical Music Commentary: Making Sense of the BSO's "Decoding Shostakovich"
By Aaron Keebaugh
Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was both a rebel and a conformist, a fascinating hybrid of courage and cowardice.
Television Review: The Docuseries “Trial 4” — Boston Crime and Questionable Punishment
By David Daniel
Trial 4, along with other currently streaming crime docuseries, examines the systemic biases, misuse of official force, and internal corruption that impede and subvert justice, undermine convictions, undercut integrity, and erode public trust.
Opera Album Review: It Takes a Village to Revive a Once-Beloved Eighteenth-Century Opera
By Ralph P. Locke
Pietro Auletta’s L’Orazio (1737), with substitute arias by other composers, gets a first-rate performance from the renowned Valle d’Itria Festival.
Visual Arts Review: “Phyllis Ewen: Inundation” — Speaking to the Unraveling of the Environment
By Lauren Kaufmann
Phyllis Ewen ponders humanity’s perilous relationship with the earth, expressing her concerns through her artwork.
Concert Review: Devo’s De-Evolution — Still Surprisingly Fresh
By Paul Robicheau
The arty, satirical rockers from Akron, Ohio, remain a singular entity — Devo has been as inspirational as it has been influential.
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Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
