Essay “Blissfully Unaware of Threat: On Reading Bernstein’s
Chichester Psalms”
Excerpt:
“I believe in science. I believe in the big bang, the
ever-expanding universe, empirical evidence, our relative
insignificance, the resilience of bacteria. But, when I’m
singing Bernstein’s setting of Psalm 100—music this
exuberant, this compelling and affirmative, this inclusive—I
want to shout, I believe!, thereby confirming the Hasidic
belief that singing, ecstatic singing (dancing, contemplative
meditation) brings you closer to God.”
Originally published by Michigan Quarterly Review
(Spring 2015), “Blissfully Unaware of Threat: On Reading
Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms” is long-listed for the Notting
Hill Editions Essay Prize, 2015.
“A Man and an Epigram Walk into a Bar”
Afterword: The End of My Wits by Thomas Farber
Andrea Young Arts/El León Literary Arts 2013
“Twenty years. Four hundred epigrams. A lot of compression.
Born of Thomas Farber’s self-proclaimed mania, this oeuvre
has been nothing if not a tremendous labor of love. I attend. I
inquire. I probe. I dare. I reflect. And: I refute—silence, that
is. Behind all of which is Farber’s favorite dis-apologia:
Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke.”