The Envelope Please... 2005 Cultural Elite (A Good Thing!) Includes Barnard Graduates Laurie Anderson, Mary Gordon, Lynne Sharon Schwartz
New York magazine is defining and celebrating what it calls the "cultural elite" in its year-end 2005 issue -- "those who create the images and language and music that drive our culture forward" -- and three notable Barnard graduates, artist-musician Laurie Anderson and writers Mary Gordon and Lynne Sharon Schwartz, are among the honorees.
The magazine asserts that .... "Culture is the city's most important asset. To be a member of its elite is an honor."
Mary Gordon at Great Writers at Barnard, November 2005, and her novel, Pearl |
The issue honors Anderson '69, Gordon '71 and Schwartz '59 for current work cited among the best of the year. "Here are the actors and architects and bands and directors and writers and gallerists and painters and producers who've shone brightest in the city's artistic firmament in 2005 ... and who may show the culture the way in the future," the magazine wrote.
Anderson was praised in the classical music and dance category as this year's "Best Science-Art Crossover" for The End of the Moon , her performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music based on her year as NASA's first artist-in-residence in 2003.
Gordon and Schwartz were honored for their literary fiction for 2005 -- Gordon for Pearl and Schwartz for The Writing on the Wall . Both authors gathered with other Barnard literary alumnae on Nov. 6 for Great Writers at Barnard, a day of conversations about writing and books.
New York praised Anderson's performance of her latest "extravaganza," The End of the Moon at BAM: "Nothing this post-punk counterculture sibyl has dreamed up has been more whimsically lyrical, friendly, or wise. We're still pondering her observations on the nesting habits of gay penguins."
Lynne Sharon Schwartz and her novel, The Writing on the Wall |
The End of the Moon includes music for violin and electronics creating a duet between the spoken word and Laurie's signature sound. Part travelogue, part personal theories, history, and dreams, The End of the Moon looks at the relationships between war, aesthetics, the space race, spirituality and consumerism. Collectively, Laurie envisions this solo trilogy as an 'epic poem' which aims to paint a large picture of contemporary American culture.
For The End of the Moon , Anderson began examining the question, "Who taught you what beauty is?" Unable to provide an answer, Anderson set off in search of one. The End of the Moon is her NASA end-of-term report, a performance piece that suggests a fateful symmetry between journeys into outer and inner space
Critic John Leonard praised Gordon and Schwartz among a trio of writers of literary fiction (E.L. Doctorow completes the group).
Leonard cited Gordon's novel Pearl as another of her "fearless inquiries into the hydra-headed nature of truth, -- about history, religion, politics, justice, violence, and martyrdom: about the death wish, yes, but also, of course, mother love." Gordon's eighth novel, Pearl is the story of a young woman who has traveled from New York to study in Ireland, receives a political education through the IRA and consequently, chains herself to the flagpole at the U.S. Embassy in Dublin with the hopes of fasting to death as "a witness for peace." The novel begins on Christmas Eve as her mother Maria learns of Pearl's action. The novel explores family relationships as well as the role politics and religion play in daily life.
Laurie Anderson |
Gordon, in addition to being an alumna, is a longtime Barnard faculty member (Millicent McIntosh Professor of English and Writing) and current chair of the English Department. Gordon has written the bestselling novels Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels , and The Other Side , as well as a book of novellas, a collection of short stories, a memoir about her father, two books of essays, and a biography of Joan of Arc. She is the recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the 1997 O. Henry prize for best short story, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship in 2003-04.
Leonard hailed Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall as the "one 9/11 novel outshining all the rest." The book takes place in New York in the weeks around 9/11, exploring troubled intimacy and the constitutive effects of language. Leonard praised the book "as starkly elegant as the Chinese calligraphy [main character] Renata practices--and superior to the 9/11 fictions of both Ian McEwan and Jonathan Safran Foer in its melding of psychological and geopolitical dream worlds."
Schwartz is the award-winning author of 19 books of fiction and non-fiction, including Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award); In the Family Way : An Urban Comedy ; the memoir Ruined by Reading ; Referred Pain ; and Disturbances in the Field . She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts.
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