“Parting Words from Moristotle” (07/31/2023) tells how to access our archives of art, poems, stories, serials, travelogues, essays, reviews, interviews, correspondence….
A few months ago, roughly coinciding with our daughter Vera’s arrival, I put together a playlist of classical pieces that I considered suitably sleep-inducing. After mining my own memory for appropriate selections, I enriched our nighttime listening repertoire with a few “readymade” albums, such as “More Bedtime Serenades.” This compilation came up as I searched for one of my favorite pieces by J. S. Bach, the “Arioso,” which is perhaps best-known and most widely performed today as a cello solo with piano accompaniment. This is the version heard on More Bedtime Serenades, in an interpretation by Janos Starker that to me brings home the sense of Arioso as “almost an aria” – a piece striving towards full-fledged aria status, and almost getting there. Starker’s is a lyrical interpretation that still retains a hint of the spoken quality that was also an important element of Baroque music and the “rhetoric” behind it.
Could this really be the species that imagined the Old & New Testaments, the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution…? “Christmas Revelers Leave 16 Tons of Trash on Australian Beach” [Brett Cole, NY Times, December 28]. Excerpt:
Nice Christmas picture: “‘Everyone was stunned’: Snow falls in Sahara desert town for first time in 37 years” [Jason Samenow, Washington Post, December 21]. Excerpt:
Desperate as I usually am for something to base my monthly column on, I thought to spend a few words on Christmas. The winter holiday has, for some time now, been part of the social discourse in ways it never was. “The War on Christmas,” nativity scenes banned from the public square, stockings filled incorrectly because Santa ate one too many pot-laced cookies – this 2,000-year-old holiday is being asked to deal with issues it was never meant to tackle.
Aussies don’t know how to make a decent pecan pie. A lot of the time when you find it available in a cafe it’s made with molasses. That’s just not right.
Manchester by the Sea, starring Casey Affleck, Ben’s younger brother, is a superb film, the best I’ve seen all year and, in fact, in some time. And that’s as far as you should read here if you haven’t already seen (and want to see) it, because the rest of what you’ll find here will tell you a great many things about what happens and what’s key in the film.
Personal note from the editor: It has been a week since I’ve posted anything. Only this morning did I think I begin to understand why: I’ve been paralyzed in the inaction of waiting to hear the news of Donald Trump’s death.
Not sure why I suddenly became un-paralyzed. Maybe it was driving through a bright patch of sunlight this morning and being reminded of the feeling I experienced as a child when I “saw the light” and believed that I had just been saved by Jesus. One gives up hope after a while.
Doctor’s dementia test. Can you meet this challenge?
We’ve seen this with the letters out of order, but this is the first time we’ve seen it with numbers. Good example of a brain study: If you can read this out loud, you have a strong mind. And, better than that, Alzheimer’s is a long long, way down the road before it ever gets anywhere near you.
Above the chair’s arm and her perfect card,
his glasses mirror back a blank regard.
She seeks for eyes behind those disks of light,
gold-edged, and lensed in brilliant newsprint white.
While listening to WKNO Memphis (NPR for the Mid-South) on one of my many afternoon commutes, I recently discovered another artistic gem based in my city.
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