This poem by Alec Wilder was read at the composer’s funeral. Wilder is best known for several popular songs, especially “I’ll Be Around” (recorded by his friend Frank Sinatra) and “While We are Young,” but he also wrote chamber music pieces generally condemned as “unoriginal.”
As I came up into the town
Wherein my father’s house abide,
I met a man in tattered gown,
In ragged garment blowing wide,
If we were to take on Diogenes as our role model, as we attempt to shine our light in the nooks and crannies of American journalism, whom could we name? To make the game more amusing, we should, in addition to picking out the eccentrics, also have to name a famous contemporary who typified the regime lackeys that are the true heirs of Pulitzer and Hearst.
In most novels, this suicide would be the end of an uninteresting and unnamed character, but here it is just the beginning, as he continues to wander about, more lost than ever before.
Authorities are prioritizing keeping violent criminals out on the streets rather than behind bars where they belong. It’s time to consider a more effective and permanent alternative to incarceration.
This is the text of a little speech I gave at the New York City Yacht Club in 1992. Yes, don’t say it, a rather unusual venue for a professional trouble-maker.
I don’t know how many of our readers know enough French to work through this brief poem, but for them, I shall give a few notes as well as the bald translation. If anyone knows of a good translation, I shall add it to the post.
The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, and we are all happy that a repulsive gaping sore in American law is gone and that Satan’s helpers have got a swat on the snout… However,
The play is a veritable choreography of vengeance. A negative appraiser might find the complexities tedious and contrived, but we might, by examining some of the characters, come to a more positive conclusion;
Since there are no questions or comments on Act I of The Revenger’s Tragedy, we can move on to October’s book: Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams. Williams, as I think everyone knows, was a friend of Tolkien and Lewis, and with them he helped both to vitalize Christian fiction and to lend respectability to supernatural tales.
