Sunday, August 31, 2025
Saturday, August 30, 2025
Friday, August 29, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Monday, August 25, 2025
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Saturday, August 23, 2025
Friday, August 22, 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Tracking the decline …
… The replacement of disinterested judgment by the rule of the uninterested ( Hat tip, Dave lull)
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Monday, August 11, 2025
Nice place for a stroll …
… A Review of Four Walks in Central Park by Aaron Poochigian ( Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Something to think on …
Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?
— Anne Frank
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Wagner’s renegade urge …
… ‘Wagner and the Creation of the Ring’ Review: Back to Valhalla
(Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Saturday, August 09, 2025
Sad anniversary …
… In ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour,’ memory is a wound that will not heal.
i spent an afternoon talking with Father Arupe in that cafeteria of what was then St. Joseph's College. The Jesuits had the only cinder-block building in the region and it survived the blast. They did all that they to treat the wounded.
Roots …
… ‘It never leaves me’: Wisconsin author’s hometown is his longstanding muse (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Friday, August 08, 2025
Thursday, August 07, 2025
Wednesday, August 06, 2025
Angus Wilson
I can't remember where I first encountered that name -- Angus Wilson -- but I'm glad, having now finished one of his early collection of stories, that I did. Published in 1949, The Wrong Set and Other Stories is an exceptional collection: indeed, some of the stories here are among the finest I've read. Which is saying something -- as I often lose my way with short stories. But these are entirely different: whereas short stories often serve as vignettes, Wilson's work functions -- in my reading -- as an attempt at crescendo. Each story in The Wrong Set culminates in a localized crisis, a moment of understanding, or reckoning, or revelation. And then, in most cases, Wilson leaves it there: the crisis speaks for itself; there is nothing more to say because its arrival is so clear, its meaning and implication so obvious. Wilson wrote after Fitzgerald, of course, but there was something reminiscent of the American master here: like Fitzgerald, Wilson wrote well, for instance, of drinking and of social custom. And more: there's an element in Wilson's stories -- as in Fitzgerald's -- of powerful personalities, of local figures made grand: only then, in a moment of weakness or exposure, to be cut down to nothing. The Wrong Set is very much a product of its time: the inter-war period, leading to the Second World War. And in this way, it's more than literature: it's a historical work as well, highlighting facets of British society at this time, and the way they mixed to generate equal measures of beauty and catastrophe.