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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

My Year 2012: Centers Collapse

Douglas Messerli

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For the 13th volume of his cultural memoirs, author Douglas Messerli considers the collapse of centers: political, social, cultural, and even architectural. As he summarizes: "…we all knew by the end of 2012 that our once cherished institutions, the shared experiences we had so loved, the very casual intimacy with which we had previously spoken to our neighbors, was probably a thing of the past. Our sense of blissful balance had been, we realized, just another grand illusion."

His essays broadly consider a bad day on the streets of Seville in Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, a send-up of the Method School of acting by the dramatic group The Rude Mechs in their work The Method Gun, the sudden police accusations of an innocent man in Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, the "slightly sour" marital relationships and life experiences of former "follies" girls in Stephen Sondheim's musical Follies, a series of notable British and American dialogue fictions which explore a defragmentation of societal norms, a re-exploration of several Samuel Beckett plays, the endless travels by taxi and other methods of travel around the city in the Broadway musical version of Pedro Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (which begins with a woman burning her own bed), and the spinningly off-kilter musical investigation of the AIDs crisis in Falsettos.

As in every volume since 2000, Messerli also observes the deaths of many great figures who were lost during 2012, while discussing his personal relationships with the artists he knew.

The author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Stay (2018), Messerli also writes fiction, drama (under the pseudonym Kier Peters), and has edited numerous anthologies. As the publisher of Sun & Moon and Green Integer, he was awarded The American Book Award and the ALTA Award for publishing translations. He was named Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.