Category: Access

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Wednesday’s Child: The Quiet Hour

When I was a child, custom required small children to nap for an hour in the afternoon, the Quiet Hour being the accepted euphemism for these postprandial outings in the poppy field.  The rather surprisingly bourgeois practice was also mandatory in Soviet kindergartens, in young pioneer camps, in short, wherever parents, older siblings, or staff wanted to regain a life of their own for at least a portion of the day.  Here in Italy I often think back on that Soviet version of the siesta, which sheds light on a whole variety of goings-on in a country that in so...

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Governor Northam and His Critics

I posted this brief comment on Facebook: I have read some “conservatives” on FB calling for support or sympathy for Gov. Northam. This is almost as pathetic as the conservatives who are denouncing him for racism. Red Phillips strikes the right balance–Northam is not worthy either of defense or offense. Since when does an advocate of infanticide deserve sympathy or support from normal human beings? Of course no one in his right mind would join the pile-on (and isn’t it interesting how few conservatives these days are in their right minds!), but imagine Pol Pot or Mao were attacked for...

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1453: The Fall of New Rome

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Watch our most ambitious video. A conservative calendar has more days printed in black than in red letters.  Fortunately, the days of tragedy and loss are remembered as much for the heroism of those who defended the right–Lee at Gettysburg, Leonidas at Thermopylae, the Scots at Culloden.  No day in our history shines more brilliantly in black than the fall of Constantinople in 1453. If you enjoyed this and want to see more, please subscribe at the Gold Level.  If you are already a Gold subscriber, please consider moving up to Charter, and if you are already in that elite...

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The Other Handel by David Wihowski, Part One 

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George Frideric Handel; say the name and Messiah immediately comes to mind–it is as if Messiah were synonymous with its composer; and there is hardly a city large enough to have a community chorus that does not perform Messiah in some shape or form annually during the Christmas “season.”  But Handel was approximately as prolific in total output as his contemporary JS Bach. Messiah is perhaps Handel’s single greatest composition, but he wrote many other fine, worthy works.

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Interview With Anthony V. Bukoski, Part One

TJF: You are a fictional chronicler of the Polish-American experience, but you have chosen to localize your stories, most of which either take place in Superior, Wisconsin, or have a character from Superior’s East End. Tell me a little about the Superior you grew up in. AVB: I was born in a port city at the western terminus of the Great Lakes. When I was in grade school and high school in the 1950’s and early ’60s, Superior had the world’s largest ore docks, huge grain terminals, shipyards, mills, railroad yards, and a stinking oil refinery, still the only one...

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Is the Pope Catholic?

Once upon a time, the Yankees “always” won the American League pennant.  Halfway through the season, if someone foolishly asked if the Yankees were going to do it again, some wise guy would answer the foolish question by asking another, “Is the Pope Italian?”  In later years, during the unending pontificate of John Paul II, the Yankees were no longer dominating the American League, and, if anyone asked some foolish question such as, “You think Sammy Sosa is taking steroids?,”  the responding question was, “Is the Pope Catholic?”  Today, I wonder how the wise guy would respond to a question...

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Wednesday’s Child: The Truman Show of Mtsensk

Some fields of cultural endeavor are divided between two gurus, who spring to mind together like Abbott and Costello.  Freud and Jung are a classic example, and when the charlatan who is taking a friend’s money isn’t a Freudian, then in all likelihood he’s a Jungian. Another such pair are the Russian directors Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, who divided twentieth-century theater between them as if it were an inherited set of silver spoons. Stanislavsky worked by induction, holding that if a certain reality is in the actor’s brain, then it will duly materialize on stage.  Meyerhold held an opposite, deductive view,...

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Jerry Brown’s Eve of Destruction

Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say? And can’t you feel the fears I’m feeling today? If the button is pushed, there’s no running away, There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave, Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy, And you tell me over and over and over again my friend, Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.  – Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction It’s too bad Jerry Brown didn’t come out with a guitar and belt out that old anti-war protest song from 1965. After...

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Poem of the Week: A Sonnet of Keats

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan

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Wednesday’s Child: The Quick and the Dead

If reading the Gospels has taught me anything, it’s that there is no recipe – no algorithm, a scientifically minded person might say – for the salvation of the soul.  Although Christ said many times that He had come to uphold the law, no one can ponder the events described by the evangelists without seeing that He, not the law, is the Savior.  This is why the Gospels are populated with every form of lowlife, from prostitutes to thieves, and why the virtuous and the strong are so often depicted there in moments of abject weakness.  What we most remember...