Arts & Culture

Photo by David KilperThough the vice presidential debate may be over, the political fun continues at WUSTL with the Performing Arts Department Production of “Of Thee I Sing,” the classic musical satire of American public life.

Max GreenstreetJean ValentinePoet Jean Valentine, the Visiting Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23. The author of 11 books, Valentine is currently State Poet of New York.

David Kilper/WUSTL Photo ServicesBiden vs. Palin vs… Throttlebottom? Though the vice presidential debate may be over, the political fun continues at Washington University later this month with Of Thee I Sing, the classic musical satire of American public life.

Within a month of publishing his notorious collection “Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil),” (1857), the French poet Charles Baudelaire was charged with insulting public decency and ordered to remove six works from subsequent editions. Yet Baudelaire’s poems, which center on themes of eroticism and mortality, would influence generations of writers, from Arthur Rimbaud […]

The phrase “modern art” has been widely used for more than a century. In that time, it has become so associated with historical movements — from cubism and surrealism to abstract expressionism, pop and conceptual art — that it has ceased to describe the many new and different forms being made today. So argues Terry […]

Art historian Terry Smith will discuss “Contemporary Art and the Contemporaneity Question” at Kemper Monday, Oct. 13.

Harold Blumenfeld, professor emeritus in the Department of Music, has recorded “Vers Sataniques (Satanic Verse),” a major new piece that will be featured as part of a mixed media concert Oct. 13.

Novelist John Brandon, a 2001 MFA graduate of Washington University’s Writing Program in Arts & Sciences, will read from his work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16. Brandon is the author of Arkansas, a darkly comic novel about rural drug-distribution, which was published last spring by McSweeney’s Rectangulars imprint.

Novelist Zachary Lazar, author of “Sway” (2008) and “Aaron Approximately” (1998), will read from his work 8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, for the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences. The talk — part of The Writing Program’s fall Reading Series — is free and open to the public and takes place in Duncker Hall, Room […]

Though no scores are included in his published works, William Shakespeare frequently employed music in his plays, writing poems for new songs and adopting existing ballads. Numerous characters allude to then-popular tunes while composers such as Thomas Morley and Robert Johnson also contributed original compositions. Next week, the acclaimed period music trio Ensemble Chaconne, joined […]