Continuing the theme of music and its multifarious explorations… I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. –Samuel Beckett, Molloy What an evocative quote to start Alex Ross‘ most recent book, Listen to This. His columns in The […]
Words
Admit Them, Admit Them
Thank you, collective mind. And in this particular case, thank you friend Sally Reed. In response to my posting below entitled Talisman, Sally sent me the following: This brings to mind another less acute, but still astute, evocation of grief as a dog. It’s by Denise Levertov. Talking to Grief Ah, Grief, I should not […]
Staying Awake in our Unending Dream
Emergency Kit When I find myself among a laughing tribe, I know they hide something from me; I conjure up a laughter box whose button I press to outlaugh them all. As long as they hear their music, they leave me free; I don’t want to surrender all I have. I am a moving stump […]
Talisman
A Surprise in the Peninsula When I came in that night I found the skin of a dog stretched flat and nailed upon my wall between the two windows. It seemed freshly killed – there was blood at the edges. Not my dog: I have never owned one, I rather dislike them. (Perhaps whoever did […]
Now That I Have Your Heart by Heart
Song For The Last Act Now that I have your face by heart, I look Less at its features than its darkening frame Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame, Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook. Beyond, a garden, There, in insolent ease The lead and marble figures watch the show Of […]
Feelings and Ideas
Tom Stoppard and Conor McPherson each hold pole positions in their respective areas of expertise—Stoppard is the master of idea-driven theater and McPherson is the feelings first guy. In the production of Shining City currently playing in Boston, McPherson’s characters carve out a reality driven by the way it feels inside rather than some rational, […]
The History of “History”
As a follow up to my posting on March 9th regarding this last outbreak of false memoirizing, here are a few more bubbles under that tablecloth that can move around but never disappear. Jill Lepore, a prof at Harvard, has written yet another of her fascinating articles for the New Yorker magazine. She’s so damn […]
More than Meaning
One of the reasons I get rather depressed by the current fad for documentary style fiction, is its insistence on the explanatory above the symbolic. Good writing goes beyond its subject matter. Language is more than meaning. The things that we have read that we remember seem to move with us through our lives as […]
Freedom, History, Loss: Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll
What is it that Tom Stoppard does that moves me so deeply? Rock ‘n’ Roll was as intoxicating an experience as Coast of Utopia had been the year before. In many ways it is a continuation of many of the same themes, just brought forward 100 years and closer to home. (The play takes place […]
The Shape of Her Soul is a Square
She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul (Mrs. Morninghouse, after a Sermon Entitled, “What the Spirit Teaches Us through Grief”) The shape of her soul is a square. She knows this to be the case because she sometimes feels its corners pressing sharp against the bone just under her shoulder blades and across the wings […]