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April 25, 2003
Front-Page
News
Cornering
Art “Culture corner,” an article in the “Travel”
section of the April 20 Boston Sunday Globe, highlighted
the “world-class art” at the museums of the Five College
area, including the recently renovated and expanded Mount Holyoke
College Art Museum. “Such a culture would get lost in the
bustle of a big city,” wrote Christina Tree, Globe correspondent
and coauthor of Massachusetts, An Explorer’s Guide.
“Against a backdrop of abrupt hills, fields, orchards, and
classic old New England towns, though, the quality of the art
found in campus museums makes the Five College Area one of Massachusetts’s
better-kept secrets.” Tree noted that Mount Holyoke’s
art museum has been collecting since the 1870s, focusing on Pompeian
frescoes, medieval European statuary, Japanese screens, and nineteenth-century
landscapes. The result, wrote Tree, is a “superb”
permanent collection. Highlights, she noted, include an “exquisite
white marble head of the empress Faustina, William Glackens’s
muted Skaters in Central Park, and Annie Lavelle,
a vivid portrait by Robert Henri.” She also mentioned the
art museum’s current exhibition, A Visual Feast: Promised
Gifts and Recent Acquistions, “which features a stunning
Milton Avery, a delicate gouache by Miro, and a powerful expressionist
canvas by Hans Hofmann, among many others.”
Acting Locally
The community-service efforts of two Mount Holyoke staff members
were spotlighted in articles in the April 10 “Holyoke Plus”
section of the Republican. One article profiled MHC Science
Librarian Sandra N. Ward, who helped set up the recently opened
Holyoke Consumer Health Library at Nuestras Raíces in Holyoke.
She got the idea for the library three years ago, after reading
a newspaper article about the Holyoke Health Center’s plans
to open a medical mall. Ward told the Republican, “I
thought, there has to be a health library, it’s got to be
free and have materials available in both languages.” She
and other volunteers solicited donations, gathered materials,
and put together a Web page for the library, which offers books
in Spanish and English on consumer health issues. MHC’s
student organization La Unidad donated the proceeds from its Halloween
party—more than $300—for purchasing books, and the
College gave shelving from its former art library.
A separate article chronicled Linda Young’s involvement
in planning festivities for South Hadley’s 250th anniversary
celebration in July. Young, senior administrative assistant in
the biology department, is chairing the parade subcommittee, a
job that entails everything from getting bands to march to asking
local groups to build floats (one of which—planned by the
First Congregational Church of South Hadley—will feature
historic town notables, including MHC founder Mary Lyon).
Novel Approach
Novelist Joseph McElroy “is a vigorous promoter of what
might be called the ‘novel as mental Nautilus machine’
school of fiction,” and his latest book, Actress in
the House, is no exception, writes Sven Birkerts, MHC lecturer
in English, in the April 20 issue of the New York Times Book
Review. The story turns “on the impact of a single
glimpsed action—an actor slapping an actress with unfeigned
force during the performance of a play—as it registers on
Bill Daley, a man in the audience,” Birkerts writes. “The
fact of the slap then gathers implication and mystery as Daley
returns to the theater after hours and meets the actress, Becca;
and finally spirals outward as the two get involved and begin,
as any couple might, to ask questions and tell their stories.”
McElroy’s approach to developing that story, Birkerts writes,
results in “a prose that offers readers very few handholds
and minimal reassurance of ‘getting it.’ Turning the
pages slowly, we feel as if we were moving underwater, with visibility
available only in sunlit flashes; there is a distinct (but by
no means unpleasant) sensation of obscure currents moving this
way and that. Instead of plot we experience what might be called
‘congealing moments,’ where random actions and observations
suddenly suggest intense significance. The moments are at once
lifelike and inexplicable.” In the end, Actress in the
House is the “most singular and stylistically uncompromising
of novels” that, alas, “fences out the determined,
ambitious reader.”he
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