By Tommy Bourgeois
This just in from Harriet Dinerstein: “I am still an active (unretired) professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. My research specialty is analyzing the chemical make-up (amounts of different elements) in gaseous nebulae, especially ‘planetary nebulae,’ which are actually cast-off outer layers of stars like the sun. I observe them with a variety of spectroscopic instruments at different wavelengths of light, including with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. My husband Dan (University of Oregon) and I have two adult daughters, pursuing lives and careers in other states, California and Colorado, and not following in their parents’ footsteps (we are both astronomers). Lately I have joined an Austin-area Yale Alumni Book Club.” Thanks for the news, Harriet. I am in awe of your fascinating work, and I surmise the book club will have you reading about matters closer to home.
I reported a while ago on my visit last November with Michael Stein in NYC, referencing among other things some tips I offered him about his then-looming trip to my native New Orleans, and I put Michael on the spot by teasing an account of his recent exploits as a travel writer. With this missive, looking back on all his travels, Michael has made me a man of my word: “Thanks for all the NOLA recommendations; it was indeed a great assignment. Here’s one tip I’ll pass on: by all means take in loud, bratty, frat-y Bourbon Street once at night, for the scene and some great street performers, and Fritzel’s for the beer and the banjo band, but far hipper and better music and food is to be found on Frenchmans Street relatively nearby.
“Vienna was actually before NOLA, where highlights included the Hotel Stefanie, the city’s oldest, where the food and pastries were great (beaten only by the Sacher torte), and the ‘musts’ are the Leopold and Freud museums and the Prater, the amusement park where Coney Island meets the Weimar Republic. I got to ride the Orson Welles ‘Third Man’ Ferris wheel for its great views and a chance to recite the ‘cuckoo clock’ line to an empty cab.
“Final trip was the best: Madrid to Porto to Lisbon, which is now my second favorite European city after Paris. It’s been a wonderful gig, as in full of wonders, remembered and newly experienced, and now it’s time to spend the next year putting revised versions of my articles—American, Canadian, and European—into a mini-guidebook format that will be the third ‘dippable’ part of a narrative of all my travels. Travel may be recreation for most, but for me it was constant re-creation, from Woodstock through Morocco and Tanzania in the ’80s, through Berlin and Prague right after the fall of the Wall, through Alaska and Hawaii, and then the past ten years on my ‘beat.’
“Hopefully this will be completed in several months—as well as an expatriation article available in about a month through my website (streetlightbooks.com), based on interviews in Spain, Portugal, and maybe Montreal and Edinburgh, especially aimed at anyone casting an eye on current politics and getting (un)happy feet. More news about all this for our Yale class and other communities very soon. Meanwhile, everybody, in this hinge-of-history year: be strong, be together, be helpful, be useful, be compassionate, but also laissez les bon temps rouler while we still can.”
In other literary news, Thomas (Tim) Gustafson writes, “Rutgers University Press in its series on New Jersey history has recently published my book, American Anti-Pastoral: Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth. I grew up on a dead-end dirt road in the middle of a small town of 3,500 people in New Jersey called Brookside, which Roth makes the model for Old Rimrock in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel American Pastoral. My book compares the history of Brookside with Roth’s fictional Old Rimrock, exposing fissures of race and religion in the bucolic countryside, and it studies more generally New Jersey literature and American cultural history. I thank Rob Watson for first telling me I had to read the novel, and I give an assist to Fred Cantor, Rob’s roommate and a fellow midfielder with me for Yale soccer, who commented on an early draft as did Rob. For the past 40 years, I have been a professor of English and American studies at USC and living in Los Angeles.”
Congratulations to composer Lori Laitman, who reports on her website www.artsongs.com: “Since its release in March 2024, The Apple Orchard film won Best Music Score for Short Film at the 2025 Berlin Kiez Film Festival and a Silver Medal in Composition at the Global Music Awards; became an Official Selection at Cannes World Film Festival for Best Song; won Honorable Mention at the Mindfield Film Festival in Albuquerque; and was a nominee for Best Original Music in the Swedish International Film Festival. My initial art song film, Sarong Song, was the winner for Cinema Carnival’s Spring 2024 Season for Best Original Score, won for Best Animation in the Scotland International Festival of Cinema, won Best Original Song in the Global Music Awards, received Honorable Mention in the Mindfield Festival and Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Composer of the Season in the Montreal Independent Film Festival and Swedish International Film Festival.
“Both films were made in conjunction with Positive Note Films in the UK. Many thanks to all my collaborators: poets David Mason and Dana Gioia; mezzo-soprano Kitty Gregory, tenor Dan Norman and pianist Simon Lepper; directors Jeremy Hamway-Bidgood and Dan Norman; and illustrator Ian Beck.”
As always, I welcome your news, and I hope to be able to pass along the 2025 class reunion schedule in my next notes. If you’re not yet on our private Yale Class of 1975 Facebook page, I encourage you to join so you can learn the important when-and-where details as soon as Yale issues its announcement.