February 2009
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It's been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much as Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which describes events of 1834-36 and was first published in 1840. It's a great piece of writing. I've heard about it since I was a child, but just got around to reading it this week. It's a book…
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Telephone conversation with an eighty-two year old cousin. "Evreryone down here, all they ever talk about is their pains, their doctors, their diets, their diseases. Now I have something to talk about. For years I went to this doctor, maybe forty years, he's almost as old as I am Every time I go into see him, with…
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I read this great so-called classic of American literature once in the '50s and twice in the '60s and I just didn't get it. I've now re-read it and, after forty-something years of seasoning and experience, I'm still a dissenter. Moby Dick is like opera or ballet — it's so highly stylized that either you…
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Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work — one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire — and was brilliantly performed. It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer. There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses,"…
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According to Richard Ellman, whose 680-page extremely- detailed Oscar Wilde (1988) I've now read and enjoyed, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde came out of more colorful family situation than is generally known. Oscar's father, the famous eye surgeon Sir William Wilde, brought three children to his marriage with Jane Elgee – apparently by three different mothers, none of whom he…
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Last night I awoke from troubled sleep with a mysterious and inexplicable Latin phrase drumming on my agitated brain. As best I can remember the dream, I had taken a razor to an essay I was writing and had cut out the two words–and I mean "cut out" as in scissored, not merely deleted–"sursum corda." And then there I…
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In one modern edition of Shakespeare's The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, Falstaff, in a fit of exuberant swearing, describes Hal as an "eel-skin." But in another edition, the word is "elfskin." What's going on? Only one of these curious words can be "correct." Paunchy Falstaff attacks Prince Hal with a string of half-comic, half-offensive epithets: "you…
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In an earlier life, Dr. M. served as chair of a large academic department at a state university out here in the American west. On the whole, the teachers that Dr. M. nominally supervised did their work very well. They were responsible, self-motivated, liked their teaching and reading and writing, and fortunately, did not expect to be lavishly rewarded…