No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
Posts tagged as “essays”
The Time: Autumn, 1958. The place: the playground of the Washington Consolidated School, Washington, Connecticut. A big crowd of kids are in a circle around two fighting boys. Jimmy Tompkins has his arm hooked around…
"The Lottery" is a famous short story by Shirley Jackson about an annual small town drawing whose winner is stoned to death. The story makes the point that small towns can be mean places. Lately,…
I've taken my share of beatings in my life; more, really, given that the average beating occurrence among Americans is probably not much more than zero, beatings being pretty finely distributed among very specific demographics…
“Life is cheap up here on the Canadian,” is a line from Lonesome Dove that has stuck with me. When something goes even moderately wrong at the ranch I sometimes say, “Life sure is rough…
All traces of snow are at last gone from the picturesque nineteenth-century cemetery in Ithaca, New York. Down below in the nearby the Cascadilla Gorge the creek gathers momentum from late-arriving spring’s rain. Just beyond…
We have always loved our City Council. We know they are flawed but they have always been a big part of what makes life gracious in our little city — the freedom to build our…
Having just completed a well-deserved and long-deferred vacation, I am now questioning the wisdom and efficacy of that course of action, weighing the relief of stress against the loss of momentum and comforting allure of…
Mozart’s music is for everybody, from diaper-clad babies to mass-murdering dictators. That chilling truth launches the brutal slapstick satire—or do I mean hyper-realist romp?—of Armando Iannuci’s delightful and disturbing film, Death of Stalin. What we…