Neighbors, even in these postmodern times, have their uses. Who but the nosey neighbors will call the police if they observe strangers trying to enter your home when you are away? Who but a neighbor is at hand to lend you the ax or cup of sugar you need?
“Giorgio Armani: provocative outfits are a kind of rape,” was yesterday the banner headline in a British newspaper. Another newspaper went with current events instead of applied philosophy: “Rapist Harvey Weinstein is rushed to hospital in the ambulance that was transferring him from court to prison after shouting ‘I’m innocent’ as he was convicted.” Armani has never made a piece of women’s clothing that is even remotely feminine, so his ploy to exploit the me-too trend for personal gain is just good business practice. The other headline is more poignant. It has the characteristic breathlessness that accompanies reports of popular...
According to librarians, reading is a good thing, and it hardly matters what you read. On that principle, bad books are shoved off on unsuspecting children with goodness knows what deleterious effects. I half expect to see, before I depart, comic versions of Sade’s Justine and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly. In general most of us read many too many books. I don’t mean simply that we read junk–I have read thousands of mystery novels, without a single blush. I mean we read too many books about books rather than books that are themselves a kind of reality.
Propelled by his victory in Saturday’s Nevada Caucuses and previous combats, Bernie Sanders looks to be the Democrats’ nominee in 2020. He presents himself as a “progressive” bringing us the wave of the future, “democratic socialism.” His slogan: “Not me. Us” (emphasis in original). But when I hear him talk, I hear the Marxists I used to debate in the 1970s at the University of Michigan. Listen for when he screams against “the billionaire class,” as he did in the Eighth Debate from New Hampshire: “The way you bring people together is by presenting an agenda that works for the...
To one who has never visited it before, Messina comes as a shock. Even if the visitor comes from elsewhere on the same island – Palermo is about three hours away by car or by train – the shock is seismic, and yet it is exceedingly difficult to analyze or to describe. Perhaps it is the air, which, unaccountably, reminds one of the Italian Alps, so crystalline it is, as though suffused by vernal sunlight reflecting off freshly fallen snow. Locals say the clarity of the air is due to peculiar currents of wind and water in the Strait, where...
The renowned organist Marianna Vysotskaya has been staying with us while my wife, who is a friend of hers, is away in Moscow, preparing for a recital at the Rachmaninov Hall of the Conservatory. Marianna is here in Sicily to play three concerts, one at San Pietro in Trapani, one at the Palermo Cathedral, and one next Sunday in Messina. The sailing has not been smooth, as everyone in the district, on seeing me in the company of an unknown woman, feels duty bound to mention my wife in a preternaturally loud voice. “When is Olga back?” thunders Signor Baldo...
Since the State of the Union Address, President Trump and Nancy Pelosi have been going at it hammer and tongs (though Pelosi would probably prefer a hammer and sickle match with Bernie) . The Buffoon-in-Chief is in great form, praising his supporters with childish epithets endlessly repeated and damning his enemies with more vigor, at least, though not with a wider vocabulary. Thriving on hatred, Donald Trump is like one of those Sci Fi monsters that grow stronger with every attack. Trumpzilla. Opposing the President with every fiber of her aging and malevolent being is the harridan whose daughter calls...
Robert E Lee, Poe, George Burns, Gordian III, Fellini, Stonewall Jackson, John Hancock, Francis Bacon, Neil Diamond, Stendahl, Walter Miller… Try to turn off before the concluding music
Well, Brexit did happen in the end, contrary to my son’s prediction of a Thirty Years’ War, and we toasted the news with vodka. I spent the following week recovering and reading up on the history of that magic potion, learning much about it I had not known. No Russian I’ve ever met, for instance, would tell you that the word itself, “vodka,” is scarcely more than a hundred years old. Instead, for many centuries, and well into the nineteenth, the term “bread wine,” or simply “wine,” was generally used to describe forty-proof alcohol made from grain. Strangely enough, when...
A 29 minute podcast on Hadrian, Douglas MacArthur, Eddie Van Halen, Mozart, St. John Chrysostom, Richard Bentley, Lewis Carroll, Artur Rubenstein, W.C. Fields, Lighthouse Harry Lee and his son Robert, Walter Savage Landor, John Basil Turchin, Tokugawa… Warning: The discussion of Turchin’s court martial is botched. James Garfield presided and overruled the other judges. These podcasts are obviously unrehearsed.
