“The exhibit, featuring the work of award-winning photographer Lena Stein, explores a highly visible and, of late, highly debated practice in many parts of the world: women’s head-coverings. The exhibition is sponsored by the University’s Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, and will kick off the Greenberg Center’s spring semester focus on the Middle East.” The exhibit opened on February 13th at University of Hartford, if you’re in the area we urge you to go and check it out!
Want double the fun?
Wildlife is performing at Arch Street Tavern tonight, February 2nd, and The Mill on the 3rd. Go check ‘em out in Hartford and get double the fun!!
The 38th annual Festival of Trees and Traditions is happening at the Wadsworth Atheneum until December 11th! Y’all should stop by if you’re in the Hartford area, there are over one hundred tress that have been decorated by local artists. If you aren’t feeling the holiday spirit yet, you soon will be!
Junot Diaz at Hartford Public Library
Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is speaking in Hartford this weekend
DATE Friday, October 23
TIME - 6 PM
PLACE - Hartford Public Library (500 Main St)
The Brief Wondrous Life won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has received enormous amounts of critical acclaim. The book is an insightful look at masculinity, Dominican culture and history, the struggles of immigrant families, and the fundamental search for identity and place. Using a creative of mix of Spanish, “nerdish”, and magical realism, Diaz creates something that is totally unprecedented but oddly familiar in our increasingly diverse surroundings.
Let me know if you’re interested, I’ll be heading down around 5:45. Or if you want to read more Diaz, I can lend you a copy of Drown, his first published collection of short stories.
If you have never read Diaz, check out this New Yorker podcast reading of his story “How to Date a Brown Girl, Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie” from Drown.
Why Wallace Stevens (Deceased Hartford Resident) Would Dig The Mill
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879-August 2, 1955) was a resident of our beloved Hartford from 1916 until his death, and made his living as an insurance lawyer. He’s also one of the great poets in the American literary tradition. Insurance lawyer: Boring. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: Sweet.
Weird, right? An insurance lawyer and…a poet? His first volume of poetry—Harmonium—wasn’t published until 1922, when he was thirty-six. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. He woke up one day, realized he was a little bored down at the insurance firm, decided to spend his free-time writing some poems, ended up reshaping the state of American poetry, and became a stand-out figure in Modernism. I think they call that “Bringing it On” in the cheer-leading world.
So, what does Wallace Stevens’ life have to do with The Mill? Why would he dig The Mill? This sounds cliché, but most clichés start as truths—that’s why they’re used so often—so screw it: No matter what your label is—in Stevens’ case, his label was “insurance-lawyer”—there’s always space to defy the expectations that your label implies. Oh, and he was from Hartford so, like, he probably would have come by one of our shows or something.
Here’s a poem that gets at what Wallace Stevens thought poetry (or, maybe, a place like The mill) could do for someone like, say, a bored man in an insurance firm who wanted to shed the expectations of his “label”:
“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain”
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
