UB Reading Series Opens Thursday with Literary Star Arundhati Roy and Acclaimed Gertrude Stein Expert, Ulla Dydo

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Wednesdays at 4 PLUS, the distinguished reading series founded by poet Robert Creeley, former David Gray Chair in Poetics at the University at Buffalo, opens its Fall 2004 program this week with two literary stars who will make presentations on Sept. 9: Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy and author Ulla Dydo, a "reader of Gertrude Stein without equal."

Roy, critically acclaimed author of "The God of Small Things," winner of the Booker Prize, and "Power Politics," will be the featured guest in a live interview with Amy Goodman titled "Another World is Possible: A Conversation with Arundhati Roy" at 8 p.m. that day at Central Presbyterian Church, One Symphony Circle, Buffalo. The event is co-sponsored by Visions for a Better World. There will be a $10 admission charge.

Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now," a nationally syndicated public radio program produced by the Pacifica Broadcast Network and carried locally by WHLD 1270 AM, weekdays from 8-9 a.m.

Roy, born in Bengal, and raised in Kerala, India, trained as an architect at the Delhi School of Architecture, but became better known for her complex, scathing film scripts. In keeping with her longtime interest in social issues, she has immersed herself in causes such as the anti-nuclear movement and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a national coalition of environmental- and human-rights activists, scientists, academics and project-affected people, working to stop several dam projects in India's Narmada Valley.

Her two major essays, "The End of Imagination" and "The Greater Common Good" are available online as well as in print. Her personal fame has drawn attention and donations to these causes, to which she has also made significant monetary contributions. Her involvement in these causes has attracted controversy, with some criticism from all sides of the political spectrum.

Ulla Dydo, one of the world's foremost authorities on Gertrude Stein and the co-author of "Gertrude Stein: The Language That Arises: 1923-1934," the most extensive study to date of Stein's writing, will present a talk titled "I am not any longer I when I see," at 12:30 p.m. in 436 Clemens Hall on the UB North Campus. The talk is open to the public and free of charge.

Dydo is the editor of "A Stein Reader" and co-editor of "The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder."

Dydo's latest book examines the process by which Stein created and recreated her work as it moved from notepad to notebook to manuscript -- from an idea to its ultimate refinement as the author's intentions and concerns assert themselves.

"'The Language That Arises' is not a biographical study," writes one critic, "but sets each text in the context of Stein's daily life and work, showing how the elements of her immediate world enter her writing and are enlarged upon, deleted, transformed or combined with other elements of reading or remembering. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word by word, text by text, and over time."