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MONTAGE is a nod to Dostoyevsky) is a large and often ful fullness, going from what Selin is read- loose account of Selin’s first year of college. ing—Nabokov’s lectures, Bleak House, Epicte- Explore More Over the course of the book, she falls in love tus—to varied details about undergraduate with an older math student and eventually life: the food at Annenberg, passages from a For more online-only articles on follows him to Hungary, where she teaches beginner Russian textbook, the conversa- the arts and creativity, see: English in a village. (Among her responsibil- tions of other students. (In an art seminar ities: judging a Hungarian leg contest.) It’s called “Constructed Worlds,” for example, “A Category of animated by a voice that seems at once very “One student had constructed a world that One” much Batuman’s own and fully recognizable was just Star Wars. It was completely identi- A new off-broadway to any student who enters Harvard Yard: cal to Star Wars, only she had given all the play captures the overwise yet totally naive. At the open- characters old Welsh names.”) enigma of Edward ing of the book, Selin sets up an Internet Partly this fullness results from the book’s Gorey ’50. connection. “‘What creation process. By the time she got to Har- harvardmag.com/gorey-16 do we do with this, vard, Batuman knew she wanted to be a writ- hang ourselves?’ I er, and was constantly writing everything Visitors, Not Viewers asked, holding up down in spiral notebooks “to a very weird de- At the Radcliffe the Ethernet cable. gree.” Much of this material, including many Institute, a touchable ‘You plug it into the emails she sent, made it into the novel. But exhibit plays with wall,’ the girl said.” she didn’t yet know how to write for others, perception. Batuman has la- trying instead to cram dozens of points onto harvardmag.com/ mented, in criticism the page. “It didn’t occur to me that I could jacob-17 for N+1 and The Lon- say all the things I wanted to say in a way don Review of Books, that anyone could understand.” She credits that contemporary her senior tutorial in Russian literature for fiction is too often teaching her how to write something some- continues, when you realize that what gets artificially concise one might actually read. Her professor made you from one point to another in the text and whittled down, writing “a situation of kindness,” where the is an experience of your life you hadn’t ever while “the ghosts of deleted paragraphs reader wants to have a good time—and so thought of before. During such moments of rattle their chains from the margins.” The does the writer. consonance between experience and litera- novel, she thinks, should contain seemingly Batuman is now working on a book about ture, “It feels that reality is supporting you…. inconsequential bits of daily existence: “all Turkey, as well as a sequel to The Idiot. “I had You’re being carried on a cushion of the world the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem this idea,” she says, “that writing autobio- as it is,” she says. “It’s the most exciting part of that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, graphical fiction was cheating in some way, reading, too”: noticing something you hadn’t to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself.” or it was less creative.” But there’s a problem- been aware of before, and wouldn’t have And so The Idiot, appropriately, has a delight- solving element to writing about oneself, she thought could be described. flames engulfed the water. It wasn’t the Harmonic Progression first fire on the Cuyahoga—a polluted river in an industrial city—but it was the most Composer Robert Kyr embraces peace, love, and nature. publicized, and for Kyr, a high-school junior on the West Side who had recently joined a by lydialyle gibson student environmental-outreach group, it was “a five-alarm bell.” Or maybe here is the place to begin: with here are so many places to begin had happened in each one. Then she wrote Kyr at the piano. He’d been banging on the with composer Robert Kyr. Like up a classified report and never talked about keys since he was two or three, and began here: “I grew up in a family where it again, until one day out of the blue when taking lessons—and composing songs—at T the scars of war were very much her son was 16. “She spoke for about 20 min- 10. At age 11, he started playing pieces from with us,” he says. His father had served in utes and then fell silent, and we sat there for Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, a collection the South Pacific in World War II; his un- what felt like an eternity,” Kyr, JF ’81, Ph.D. of music that the Baroque master wrote for cle had lost a leg in the Italian theater. And ’89, remembers. “And then she said, ‘I just had his wife. “The first time I heard Bach was his mother, working for the Red Cross, had to tell you, because I thought that someday through playing those little pieces and his been one of the first to see the death camps you might do something with this.’” 15 two-part inventions,” Kyr says. “I kept after they were liberated. As an administra- Or one could begin in 1969, when the returning to them again and again because tive assistant to the American military, she Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. they spoke to me in a way that no other mu- walked through room after room with offi- Sparks from a passing train ignited oil- sic ever had.” Or ever would. cers, taking shorthand on the atrocities that slicked floating debris, and smoke and Now 64 and a professor of composition 58 March - April 2017 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE and theory at the University of Oregon, Kyr is one of the most prolific composers of his generation. Some days he spends as many as 14 hours composing (it helps that he sleeps C hapter & Verse only four hours a night). He’s written 12 Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words symphonies, three chamber symphonies, three violin concerti, a piano concerto, and too many choral works to count: cantatas, Douglas R. Bunker asks if anyone can ratification of the Constitution.) Bernard oratorios, a passion. Patient, tender, emo- offer a citable source for a definition of Witlieb recommended examples from tionally complex, and easily approachable, power, attributed to Stalin, as the “stra- A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical his music draws on Western medieval, Re- tegic or intelligent use of cruelty.” Principles (1946), edited by Mitford M. naissance, and Baroque styles—Bach is his Mathews, including, from the Fredericks- lodestar—as well as Eastern traditions, es- “Union” (January-February). Hiller burg Virginia Herald (February 1829): “To pecially the Balinese gamelan. Zobel noted that in the U.S. Constitution, the purpose of party leaders, intending to His oeuvre orbits broad themes planted “Union” appears in the preamble (“…a accomplish the dissolution of the Union deep since childhood: peacemaking, envi- more perfect union…”) and in Article II, and a new Confederacy….” ronmental concerns, love, compassion, for- section 3 (“…information of the state of giveness. That long-ago conversation with the Union…”), among other places. (Ar- Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter his mother influenced his 2012 work “The ticle VI, section 6, regarding the new na- and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Unutterable,” which featured a narration of tion’s prior debts, refers to “the Confed- Street, Cambridge 02138 or via email to Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” as part of a eration” among the states existing before [email protected]. three-month Holocaust remembrance proj- ect in Austin. Elsewhere, he has integrated testimony from witnesses and survivors of Deer roam the yard and hawks fly overhead. “I Catholic, his mother Lutheran—but when his violence: the 2005 symphony “Ah Nagasaki: live in a forest,” he says. “When I look out the parents died in 1981, he found himself explor- Ashes into Light,” sung in both Japanese and window, I don’t see neighbors. The architec- ing religions from around the world. “I discov- English, commemorated the sixtieth anni- ture of the Pacific Northwest is trees.” Many ered that I’m interfaith,” he says. “I celebrate versary of the atomic bombing with perfor- of his works celebrate nature and call for its with people of all faith backgrounds.” Since mances in Nagasaki and its American sister preservation. For his 2007 oratorio, “A Time 1993 he has spent about eight weeks each year city, St. Paul. More recently, “Waging Peace,” For Life,” he wrote a choral text weaving Na- at Christ in the Desert Monastery, a Benedic- a five-movement work, emerged from 400 tive American prayers, songs, and chants with tine abbey in the gorgeous and remote wil- pages of written accounts by residents of Ba- Eastern Orthodox hymns and Old Testament derness of a New Mexico mesa canyon: “My ton Rouge, a city torn by crime and conflict. verses; the symphony “Yosemite: Journey into spiritual home.” During solitary hikes along Kyr’s home in Eugene sits 1,000 feet up from Light” combined photographs and video of the Chama River, he composes music “inter- the valley floor, surrounded by 70-foot trees. the national park with Kyr’s music.

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