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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Reading Room Blues

I’ve always loved the reading rooms of great libraries: the busy hush of research underway; the reluctance of old pages being turned; the furtive glances at the mysterious materials laid out on the desk alongside and at the person who’s ordered them; the fleeting eye contact made over the top of tomes

Sophomoric Violence & Onanistic Self-Love

After the warmest North American December on record, Old Man Winter has finally made his appearance in Upstate New York. With the natural world in full, furious retreat, the seasons increasingly have to be visually…

The Curious Case Of Carter Burwell

How does a punk-rockish performer experimenting his way through the New York scene of the 1980s end up pasting together a languid soundtrack for a period-piece melodrama involving sumptuously-suited lesbians? I refer, of course, to…

A Delightfully Cynical Christmas

It’s little wonder that Thanksgiving and Christmas are the number one and two movie-going days of the year. The reason for this burst of cinematic fervor is often ascribed to family tradition. If custom is…

Panderings & Missteps

The current clan occupying the English throne came to it not through military conquest but the generally less trying expedient of marriage. The route laid out by this marital union was circuitous: two generations after…

Health Care Cantata

While reading Peter Roderick’s account of the dismantling of Britain’s National Health Service in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, I put on the relevant Bach cantata. Bach has many lessons to…

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