Category: Access

I sometimes wonder how many of those reading me in this space realize what a privilege it is for a writer or journalist to set down on paper whatever comes into his head.  I recall, with a sadness not much tinged by sympathy, how my erstwhile colleagues in the profession would spend days searching for what their editors called a peg, which in practical terms meant that as March 8 rolled around the lot of them would be filing regurgitated biographies of Rosa Luxemburg.  The peg, in other words, amounts to censorship by social order.  Everything written to fill this order is, quite literally, off the peg, like a suit of cheap clothes.

As the gentle reader may remember from previous posts, my wife is a concert pianist who, over the last few years, has been busy bringing to light the time capsule of classical music which Shostakovich left buried in Azerbaijan, largely in the form of his beloved Kara Karaev.  Now Azerbaijan is at war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while in Europe her concert engagements have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus.  So evenings Olga and I sit in the kitchen, poor and sober, debating what can be said in appeals to potential sponsors of the recording...

One such soup I decided to concoct last week, and may I warn the gentle reader not to try it at home.  I began preparing beef stock the day before, and on the following day the confounded recipe kept me in the kitchen from nine in the morning until the dinner guests arrived