Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: October 9, 2009

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Herta Müller

The win­ner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 is .… Herta Müller. I con­fess. I do not know her work, had not heard of her prior to yes­ter­day, but so far, the reviews indi­cate she is well worth know­ing. The Swedish Academy said of her: “with the con­cen­tra­tion of poetry and the frank­ness of prose, depicts the land­scape of the dispossessed.”

Born in Romania in 1953, in the German-​​​​speaking town of Niţchidorf, Herta’s fam­ily was a part of the German minor­ity, and they car­ried some heavy bag­gage for her. Her father served in the Waffen SS, and her mother sur­vived five years of slave labor in the Soviet Union, from 1944  –  1949. Her fam­ily lived under the dic­ta­to­r­ial rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu, which is the sub­ject of much of her writ­ing. She and her hus­band, the writer Richard Wagner, left Romania for Germany in 1987.…

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Posted on: October 6, 2009

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Bomb in a Birdcage. 2009

Alison Sudol has a new album out, and it’s a bit of a depar­ture from her first. It’s more up-​​​​tempo, but retains her trade­mark vocals, her sweet­ness, intel­li­gence and vul­ner­a­bil­ity. For some, it may be some­what too sweet, too pixie-​​​​like. But a few lis­tens reduces that effect and gives space to a fine singer/​​songwriter  —  one who has been greatly influ­enced by Lewis Caroll and C.S. Lewis, among writ­ers, and Johny Cash, Bob Dylan and The Talking Heads, among musi­cians. She has also toured with Rufus Wainright and Brandi Carlile, who must have influ­enced the young singer as well.

Beautiful pix­ies need a place to express them­selves, too, and Alison makes her case for that in her sopho­more effort, and espe­cially in her video, Blow Away. She says in her notes:

This album is ded­i­cated to the thun­der­ous king, the muse, the mad sci­en­tist … the beacon.

…

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