After last year’s globe-spanning celebrations marking the bicentenaries of the births of Wagner and Verdi, the field of composers-to-be-commemorated may look rather sparse as we survey 2014. To be sure, none of this year’s honorees…
Posts tagged as “essays”
Every now and again I will come across an article or a documentary or a book about an artist no one ever heard of until that artist died and it was discovered she left behind paintings or drawings or sculptures or musical compositions or novels or poems or mathematical equations or architectural designs hailed by some authority or another as works of towering genius.
Friday I emerged from bed a couple hours after noon, made a pot of tea and went out back to toss a loaf of cheap ass white bread to the five hens and one cock…
Ithaca, New York — I live between a gorge and a cemetery, a position that often gets me to thinking about the fleeting nature of life. The gorge to our south began forming a mere 10,000…
We were having supper with friends recently, and somehow the conversation came around to Shakespeare and the news that a number of American universities have dropped the Bard entirely from their lists of required courses for English majors. And the question was asked, “Why should Shakespeare be required reading for English majors in this age of tweeting and texting and unedited garbage topping the bestseller lists and the English language disintegrating faster than the earth is warming?
Charles Mallory Hatfield was certainly the most successful person to practice the art of pluviculture, or artificial rainmaking. Born in Kansas but raised in southern California, Hatfield first gained broad public acclaim when, in 1904, he climbed to the top of Mt. Lowe and released a secret mixture of chemicals into the air.
Last autumn, I received permission to harvest apples from our neighbor’s tree. I had no idea what variety they were; they looked a bit like Gravensteins, but ripened later and were not very good eaten…