David Gates

If you were one of John Harbison's music students at MIT, you'd want a resume like his when you were 60. Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur "genius" grant, gigs as visiting composer, 40-odd pieces recorded.

When Frederick and Steven Barthelme were charged with cheating at a Mississippi gambling casino in 1997, everybody wondered how two distinguished writers, the brothers of the late postmodernist master Donald Barthelme, got into such a lowlife jam.

Before we discuss some of this year's best children's books, can we vent a little? Really: are parents so anxiety-ridden that they want to cram edification into a kid's every waking minute--worse, into every going-to-sleep minute?

I can tell you just when and where I first heard Beck's "Loser" (1994, 3 a.m., car radio, back road in East Hartford, N.Y.) and just what I thought: who in God's name is this?

TV & VIDEO Aftershock(CBS, Nov. 14, 16) Massive quake turns New York into the Big Applesauce. Fun disaster pic inflicts the odd tedious subplot, but delivers heaps of rumbling action and mountains of gorgeous carnage.

Country music's reverence for tradition has yielded some of the best cover records ever--Willie Nelson redoing Roy Acuff's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"--and some of the looniest, like Webb Pierce's duet with Carol Channing on his own "Back Street Affair." But "LeAnn Rimes," the 17-year-old star's new CD of country classics, may be uniquely bizarre: not because it's unidiomatic, but because it's so emotionally empty.

"Did you know I played in the American première of 'Moses und Aron'?" asks John Adams. "I was a Harvard undergraduate, playing clarinet with the Boston Symphony.

Body Shots Eight drunk, annoying twentysomethings, one wild night. Something bad happens--but was it date rape? This disappointment from Michael Cristofer feels like an R-rated after-school special.

See if you sense any ambivalence here. Eurythmics, the great British pop-music duo of the '80s, reunites after 10 years for a new album and a world tour to benefit Greenpeace and Amnesty International.

By late last week, William Bolcom had finished his last-minute busywork. His much-anticipated opera "A View from the Bridge," based on Arthur Miller's play about Verdi-esque intrigue in 1950s Brooklyn, would have its world premiere Saturday night at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

"There was little about melancholia that he didn't know," W. H. Auden once wrote of Tennyson, whom he deemed the stupidest English poet; "there was little else that he did." Jeffery Smith, author of the eccentric, affecting "Where the Roots Reach for Water" (292 pages.

Last Wednesday, midtown Manhattan, 11 p.m. The Dixie Chicks are hemmed in on all four sides by the studio audience for PBS's up-close-and-personal "Sessions at West 54th"--from the front row, you could reach up and pluck Emily Robison's banjo or Martie Seidel's fiddle--and America's hottest band is ready to roll.

These days Wen Ho Lee is trying not to think about his predicament. The Taiwanese-born scientist, suspected of spying for China, spends his days listening to Mozart and reading 19th-century French novels.

Back in the 1890s Thomas Edison predicted that the phonograph he'd invented and the moving pictures he was tinkering with would combine to provide high-class home entertainment for the wealthy.

Two of this season's most appealing CDs, the Chemical Brothers' "Surrender" and Moby's "Play," are bound to get pigeonholed as "techno" or "electronica"--catchall terms for music assembled with samplers, sequencers, synthesizers and drum machines.

If one moment in "Who's Irish," Gish Jen's debut story collection, sums up both her matter and her manner, it might be the image of a first-generation Chinese-American woman whose pinkie "reared like a prairie dog when she picked up a teacup." This comic cross-cultural simile--Asian beverage, Anglophile decorum, all-American varmint--obviously suggests the intermittent weirdness of hyphenated-American lives and Jen's own deftness as a performer on the page.

Nobody doubts Kurt Andersen, cofounder of Spy magazine and now a New Yorker writer, is a hypersmart guy, but how many people want to hear him riff for 659 pages?

At one point in A. M. Homes's new novel, "Music for Torching," suburban women take an ax to a dining-room table damaged in a house fire. "I could do this forever," one says. "Anything else need the old chop-chop?" She looks out the window. "I wonder if that tree out front is alive or dead.

At least he could joke about it. In a 1935 Esquire "Letter from Key West," Ernest Hemingway reported tourists besieging his house. "This is all very flattering to the easily bloated ego of your correspondent," he wrote, "but very hard on production."Today, though he's been dead for almost 40 years, Hemingway's still the century's most visible American writer--and people still won't stop invading his privacy.

Even in the introduction to Jean Strouse's monumental Morgan (796 pages. Random House. $34.95), we know we're in good hands. Strouse admits that she, too, once saw Gilded Age capitalists as "robber barons" and old J.

Is all that winsome mugging in the CD-booklet photos of Cecilia & Bryn meant to convince us that the world's highest-profile mezzo-soprano and bass-baritone are just folks?

It's a jolt for an old member of Joe Henry's loyal cult following to hear this paragon of acoustic purity describe how he works nowadays. "I've completely gone away from any idea that I'm going to pick up a guitar and a song will come out," Henry says.

In what will undoubtedly be the must-see TV of the week, Monica Lewinsky talks to ABC's Barbara Walters about her terror of Ken Starr, her depression as her relationship with Bill Clinton fell apart, and that cigar.

IRIS MURDOCH, WHO DIED last week at the age of 79, was a 20th-century thinker who wrote 19th-century British novels teeming with characters, plots and subplots and the intellectual speculation natural to a student of Wittgenstein's who taught philosophy at Oxford.

(404 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $27.50). With the millennium bearing down and the globe warming up, it seems weird to read a book where everything's not heading south.

IT'S HARD NOT TO ENJOY PAGING through The Commissar Vanishes (192 pages. Metropolitan. $35), photo historian David King's compilation of crudely doctored photographs and kitschy art from Stalinist Russia.

Bob Dylan has reinvented himself all his life. Now he's back--from a near-fatal illness and a near-terminal career slump--with his best record in years. How does it feel?

The kid from Memphis put "Elvis' on his guitar in stick-on letters and took his turn driving to gigs. It was the best time. It couldn't last. HE SEEMS MOST LIKE OUR Contemporary when he was most remote from us - back in the early days, a kid just out of high school, with his first band and a little indie-label record, driving all night to nickel-and-dime gigs with the bass lashed to the roof of the car.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG DIED BELIEV- ing he really was born on July 4, 1900. Only in the '80s did his baptismal certificate turn up, proving the actual date was Aug. 4, 1901.

WE DON'T GET IT EIther. Why are alternative-rock stations playing "Hell," by Squirrel Nut Zippers, about every five songs? This Cotton-Club-meets-calypso warning of eternal damnation has a ukulele intro, archaic squiggly sax and honor-comic lyrics. ("Teeth are extruded and bones are ground/And baked into cakes which are passed around.") "Hot," the new CD by this purist septet from Chapel Hill, N.C., offers a dozen original songs, somejust as bent, in '20s-'40s style: Ellingtonian plunger-muted...