April 2010
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While I admire the highly skilled, I am also much attracted to the guys who do a lot with less. It's good to throw 100 mph, but my hat goes off to the pitchers who succeed with little more than desire and guile. I don't mean just baseball. I've been watching the NBA playoffs and…
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We all remember, and we're all still shocked and amazed that the late, unlamentable Jerry Falwell proclaimed that the 9/11 attacks on the US were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians." How to understand either the logic or the brain of such a thinker? We…
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Except for its title, which misses the mark, Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever" is an exquisite and near-perfect short story. I'm not sure if I would love it quite so much if I hadn't recently indulged myself with an Edithathon of 25 or 30 long novels, of which "Roman Fever" is a quintessence or distillation. Packed…
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Our new neighbor is a white-haired woman, seventy-five or eighty years old. She has fair, wrinkled skin, uses lots of cosmetics, and dresses conservatively. She carries a cane. On the inside of her right ankle, she sports a faded red and black tattoo of Mickey Mouse.
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So it was 1946 and I was in first grade in P. S. 217 and I must have been throwing my massive seven-year-old weight around because one of the "class mothers" took me aside and accused me of quote picking on unquote her dear son Michael who was at least six inches taller than poor…
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Plutarch makes much of Antonius' "hardness in adversity notwithstanding his fine bringing up." Shakespeare knew these words very well; in fact, his copy of Plutarch was open to this exact sentence when he mended his quill and began to compose the famous speech in Anthony and Cleopatra that begins "Anthony, leave thy lascivious wassails." Here…
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It's a patache, and George Sand (in The Miller of Angibault [1852]) offers a detailed account. The patache, it would appear, was a blast from the past even in the early nineteenth century. "Madame de Blanchemont left in a simple patache, that respectable relic of our forefathers' plain tastes, becoming rarer with each passing day.…
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The most famous, I think, must be Itzhak Perlman, who is the earth's most versatile and distinguished violinist — and is also father of five next-generation members of the musical tribe. Almost as widely known but perhaps not so spectacularly talented, is Rhea Perlman, better known as Carla Tortelli, mother to many. The most brilliant…
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In Anthony and Cleopatra, Caesar, who is disciplined and ascetic, both envies and scorns Anthony. In one of the play's greatest moments, Caesar apostrophizes his hedonistic, indulgent rival. "Anthony," he begins, "Leave thy lascivious wassails." "Lascivious wassails" is a most marvelous phrase — not only because of its serpentine hissing, but because it is so colorful. In another context, the word "wassails" might…