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Professor Wayne Biddle’s pop culture picks

October 19, 2017
B5_Biddle

COURTESY OF MARGARET MOON Biddle teaches non-fiction in the Writing Seminars Department.

Professor Biddle is a Baltimore native who teaches in the Writing Seminars Department. A former reporter for The New York Times, his speciality is non-fiction writing. He teaches a variety of courses including this fall’s “Non-fiction in the Post-Factual Era.”

1. Arvo Pärt’s Alina

Head full of razor-blades? Turn off the lights, stretch out on the couch and close your weary eyes. Gone, guaranteed.

2. John Coltrane Quartet’s Ballads

“Too Young to Go Steady” has way more going on than Pat Boone ever, ever did.

3.Woman In the Dunes directed by Hiroshi Teshighara

Sand, sand everywhere; more sand than Lawrence of Arabia. A gem of Japanese New Wave cinema.

4.The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz

Mass destruction of the patriotic myths deployed — still deployed — to justify nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

5.Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959

Listen closely as you might think you hear the tiniest bit of ragtime. No accident Scott Joplin was called the American Schubert.

 


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