In Brief: We Love Proust Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Ha ha, Germaine Greer is ignorant and wants you to be, too. Actually, by the end of her diatribe, it sounds like she actually does want you to read Proust. [The Guardian]


• With hat tip to Bookslut, this online round table about The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky's novel and Janacek's opera, coinciding with the Met's first production of the opera. (I have been listening to the premiere, from Thursday night, recorded on my Sirius Stiletto radio. It was by all reports the resounding success it deserved to be.) [New York Times]


• Via Maud Newton, the word on some new English translations of Maupassant. [London Review of Books]


• The importance of gay couples as potential arts and classical music donors. [Boston Globe]


• Gidon Saks was one of the best parts of the Washington National Opera's recent performance of Götterdämmerung: don't miss his interesting interview with Anne Midgette this week. [Washington Post]


• Trying to predict, as some are doing, what living composers will be most widely played in 50 years' time is folly. Would anyone in Vienna in 1900 have been able to predict how often the symphonies of Gustav Mahler would be played in that city fifty or one hundred years later? Norman Lebrecht and lots of other people give it a shot. [Slipped Disc]


• Blogger Alex Baker appears to be in Washington for the long term? Welcome to the District! [Wellsung]