Category: Wednesday’s Child

There is a pop singer in Russia, a young woman who goes by the name of Alsu…  But no, I beg the gentle reader’s pardon, regret the intrusion, and retract the introduction.  Why should his brain be burdened with yet another useless fact?  Alsu, indeed!  When I was a young man, still living in America, I read somewhere of an alleged poet who called himself Imamu Amiri Baraka.  Forty years on, I still can’t get that ridiculous moniker out of my head and would gladly offer $100 to any hypnotist who promised to cleanse my consciousness of it.  Ideally, of...

I shall leave the circumstances of my breaking the Orthodox Easter fast shrouded, like a bottle of champagne in a pretentious restaurant, in a starched napkin.  Instead, the present post takes up the theme of nostalgia where I left it last week, somewhere among the trees of life.

Though its trunk appeared to have died some twenty years ago, this year the Oak of Abraham has actually fallen.  Beneath the five-thousand-year-old tree, better known as the Oak of Mamre and found on the grounds of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Palestine, is where Abraham invited the three angels to rest, as recounted in Genesis.

News of Sir Roger Scruton’s dismissal has not been overlooked by our eagle-eyed commander-in-chief, though in and of itself the British government’s decision to drop the controversialist – indeed, like the position he was occupying – is not worth the ministerial paper it’s written on.  Scruton was there to “advise” architects on how to build buildings that look like something other than the monstrous carbuncle on the face of a beloved friend of Prince’s Charles’ memorable phrase, and yet it is quite clear that this role, more than anything that has actually been built since he took it up, was...

The rubber stampers known collectively as the Russian parliament have just passed a new law that forbids “disrespectful” public comment about the government, its structures, and its representatives.

I am often at a loss when challenged on my conclusion that diversity, in the world we inhabit today, is a synonym of conformity.  My opponents in the argument make me feel like a conspiracy theorist, someone who has some truths to impart but needs a better broom to sweep them back from under the carpet and into the light of day. It’s not that he doesn’t have the facts, it’s that the facts are too many. What I want, I have often thought, is an illustration, a “meme” as is now fashionable to say, something with the simplicity of...

“I have never been so keyed up!”  I think I won’t be very far from the truth if I say that what most Americans know of Royal Ascot is Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of this line in My Fair Lady, in 1964 the most expensive film ever made.  Remember?  “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here, ev’ryone who should be here is here,” she gavottes, At the gate are all the horses Waiting for the cue to fly away. What a gripping, absolutely ripping Moment at the Ascot op’ning day! When I lived in England, I never missed a day...

Young Nietzsche declared that tragedy was born from the spirit of music, but this proposition – as in the case of most nineteenth-century paradox mongers – may also be safely read in reverse.  Surely one can argue that music was born from the spirit of tragedy?  In fact, in an essay written a year earlier than The Birth of Tragedy, this is just what Nietzsche himself seems to have argued.  Anyway, my wife, who is a musician, agrees, which is why she told Mario’s father that what the boy needed was to be better acquainted with the idea of tragedy....