Director J. Daniel Veneciano will discuss artist Aaron Douglas, who graduated from the University of Nebraska. This program, part of UNL's Diversity Working Group talk series, will be held in Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. It is free and the public is invited. Visitors who bring brown bag lunches may eat in the Sheldon boardroom after the talk.
From a hieratic, hermetic art object the novel is blooming into something more casual and open: a literature of pleasure. The critics will have to catch up. This new breed of novel resists interpretation, but not the way the Modernists did. These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.
In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure. Difficult, in a word. This is different. It's a revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks.
What do you think, readers? Is plot the next big thing? Do you prefer a suspenseful plot, or do you put more value on other aspects of the novel?
It takes a big book to portray such an immense, complex place, and this spacious volume, vividly introduced by poet Ted Kooser, fits the bill. Intrepid photographer Michael Forsberg presents breathtaking images of wide-open spaces and portraits of wildlife from bison to butterflies, bobcats to frogs. Historical geographer David Wishart contrasts the lives of the region's Native peoples with the deleterious impact of settlers, who plowed up the grasslands, sending countless species into decline and losing precious topsoil to wind erosion. Wildlife biologist, rancher, and writer Dan O'Brien-flinty, funny, and skeptical-dissects the mythology of the Great Plains, the `monumental hubris, greed, and lack of common sense' that led to its near destruction, and, on the upswing, today's bold restoration efforts. In all, a quintessential and crucial American story, powerfully told. -BooklistYou can learn more about the book and Michael Forsberg from this Journal Star article.
What caused the accident, no one can say — the only witnesses are the sandhill cranes, half a million of them, who stop outside Kearney each year on their migratory journey. Ancient and silent, the birds “dance as they have since before this river started,” re-enacting their hard-wired ritual of departure and homecoming. That Powers will use these denizens of the natural world as feathered avatars of his human characters is a given; that he is able to tease out surprising resonances is part of his gift.Check it out on Amazon
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