![]() ![]() Tonight at Angel Orensanz the Metropolis Ensemble opens its second season with David Schiff's All About Love- "a panoramic meditation on love as expressed in different times and My concertgoing for the remainder of the week is taken up with Steve Reich events - the Young Artists Concert tonight, the grand concert on Saturday, Discovery Day and the Daniel Variations premiere on Sunday - and I'll have to miss other things that look distinctly promising. Didion's writing brings to mind something Schoenberg once said to Oscar Levant: "I can see through walls." ![]() It is a sustained analysis of the phrase "compassionate conservatism," and it is a chilling prophecy of things to come. (I'll save them for the country house that I will purchase when The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is chosen for Oprah's Book Club and becomes a surprise runaway bestseller, Oprah having kept secret until now her passion for Xenakis.) The surprise for me was to come across "God's Country," which Didion published in the New York Review of Books in October 2000. The book contains, as no one needs to be told, some of the finest modern prose in the English language, and I'm relieved to put into storage those ratty, chewed-up, used-bookstore paperbacks in which I've read Didion's masterpieces in the past. ![]() I dropped by 192 Books, my neighborhood bookstore, to find something to read in between endless rewritings of my book draft, and I came away with We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live, the Everyman's Library of Joan Didion's nonfiction work. ![]()
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