[contextly_auto_sidebar id="MrCO2VFKSM6GvoqcLDS6xaupSfsgna7y"] RECENTLY I spoke to the author of the novel HBO has adapted into a Sunday-night series. Both the novel and the show concern a small town from which a small but significant number of people have mysteriously vanished; most of the storytelling concern the way people deal in various -- and variously conflicting ways -- with the loss. … [Read more...]
Massenet’s “Thais” at LA Opera
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="GYlAzT4O3lEomZ10GqKrQmACXiv7ZjHE"] WHAT kind of love is the truest and most enduring, spiritual or erotic? That’s a theme that echoes through the opera I saw the other day. My experience with Massenet is limited, so I have little sense of what to expect. But Thais, which stars Placido Domingo as an earnest and confused fourth-century monk seeking out an Alexandrian … [Read more...]
Richard Rodriguez on Religion, Atheism and Politics
SOMETIMES I wonder why the words -- especially the personal essays -- of Richard Rodriguez hit me so directly. He is a gay Latino born in the '40s, a devout if conflicted Catholic, and on many issues a political or social conservative. My origins and allegiances are very different and coincide with none of those categories (I have long thought of myself, for instance, as a Protestant agnostic on … [Read more...]
Christianity and Tom Perrotta
ONE of my favorite-ever author meetings was a lunch interview with Tom Perrotta around the time of The Abstinence Teacher. (I was in New England and swung to the fringe of Boston to meet him.) The novel's film adaptation was already rolling despite the fact that the book hadn't come out yet -- credit the success of Little Children for that one.The Abstinence Teacher, like his new one, The … [Read more...]