Category: Wednesday’s Child

It is true that the word “bastard” was not equally offensive in every period of history, as we know that William the Conqueror is called “William the Bastard” in some contemporary official screeds, but after Shakespeare, in King Lear, fashioned the underlying notion into the definitive metaphor of vice, the word was pretty much spoken for. The term’s origin, in the age of homosexual marriage and gender dysphoria, may seem rather innocuous, since etymologically it does not mean anything more shameful than “here today, gone tomorrow,” an approach to conduct regarded as perfectly legitimate at least since the great moral...

I first visited the Shostakovich Center–Association Internationale Dimitri Chostakovitch, if you go by the name on the doorbell–last October, and wrote about it in this space. A friend, now dead, used to live across the road in the Rue des Saints-Pères. The street, which marks the border between the 6th and 7th  Paris arrondissements, dates back to the sixteenth century, with all the glories of intervening ages sucked up by it as by a sponge of sedimentary calcite. The Center is in a small courtyard, its stones overgrown with ivy and moss, and of an afternoon one can sit on...

I often plead indigence in this space, never forgetting to identify its root cause as indolence, and these days the darn thing seems to be getting out of hand.  Of course I could write a blockbuster novel, or else get silicone implants and start posting bikini selfies on Instagram, but, fortunately, all this takes work and indolence stands in for conscience to put its foot down.  Perhaps a decorative position, a sinecure of some kind, could improve matters, and so I thought of ordering business cards that would suggest an affiliation with some fictitious enterprise of moment. After some reflection,...

This is my eighty-seventh Wednesday’s Child, and I’ve always prided myself on posting these tearjerkers of mine on time – except this week, when I didn’t.  Appealing to our sainted editor’s sense of scribblers’ camaraderie, I pleaded that I’d had my mind on other things and my body in too many places to be able to produce something intelligible, in short, that I’d been uncommonly busy.  The sainted editor fired back, reminding me of the Amos and Andy episode in which the loafer is lectured on the stress of modern life, with the peroration running something like this: “First you...

I cannot but agree with my learned friend Dr. Fleming, who writes in response to last week’s post – where I suggested that the official explanations of a recent terror bombing, which the Russian blogosphere unanimously rejects, may be intentionally implausible – “Give me the serenity to ignore what I do not know.”  My instinctive concurrence with my friend’s apophthegm, however, comes with an autobiographical caveat. The Russian émigré grandmother of an acquaintance of mine, a Hohenlohe by birth, refused to come out of her house in Rio de Janeiro to look at Sputnik, which everybody said could be seen...