The organ is a wind instrument whose bellows are its lungs. There is something ironic, therefore, in the fact that Duke University, a place that flourished thanks to tobacco money, is one the great organ centers in the world.
Posts tagged as “essays”
Author’s note: What is this anyway? A saga, a story a travelogue? It began as a report on the situation and quickly disintegrated into vignettes of personal experience. The idea being that maybe, just maybe…
My brother, a software systems analyst and project manager, sent me the following quote from the book Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies by Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda that my brother says sums up…
E.M. Forster, best known for his novels Room With A View, Passage To India and Howard’s End, published a great short story in 1909 entitled The Machine Stops, an extremely prescient imagining of a future we may soon inhabit. Forty years before the advent of television, Forster foresaw computers and the worldwide internet, the demolition of the global environment, and the total collapse of technological society.
When I was a child, I wrote “I hate Daddy” on the flowered yellow wallpaper above my bed in my room in Baltimore. When my friends asked why and how I'd gotten away with this,…
Even though Mom used to warn against women who laughed too loudly, my cousin Monica and I cultivated our “cackles” and had fun doing it. It could be pretty noisy with the two of us…
Today I was riding a bike around a neighborhood, or “quarter” as they call it here. I’m looking for a house to rent for just Yvonne and me. I hear strange banjo music. I stop…
Konrad Lorenz famously defined aggression as “the fighting instinct in beast and man which is directed against members of the same species.”