Yearly Archives 2022

I’ve never quite cottoned to people who can’t bring themselves to insert a joke, a hint of irreverence, a witty aside or a slightly jaundiced observation into their writing or conversation. Oh, I can respect and work alongside and even benefit in one way or other from knowing them. They’re not bad people.

But a severe humor deficit, a flattened, sparkless demeanor, as if a person has just emerged back up to ground level after a double shift in the coal mine and now has to walk three miles home in a steady drizzle, has always struck me as lacking too much of the animating life force that completes us as human beings and, in a powerful sense, helps at least somewhat to make the all-too-common tragedy and anguish of life bearable.

And as P.J. O’Rourke, the conservative gadfly, satirist, former “National Lampoon” editor, “”Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me” radio show panelist and all-around droll wit pointed ...

We’re not much given to ecstasies, visions or fantastical disruptions of form, light and sound in the workaday world. Observe the social conventions, show up in the conference room at the appointed hour, monitor your in-box, and don’t say anything stupid or offensive on social media from the confines of your cubicle.

Keep that up for 40 or so years, let the IRA compound, then hunt for the perfect landing place—single-story, welcoming and with a woodsy name—to ensure your own version of domestic, senescent tranquility.

And then there are artists, whose creations, in the words of 20th century French philosopher George Bataille, inhabit “a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world.”

I’m not sure artists “give up” the real world so much as they challenge the very foundations of what most people claim the real world is...

William Styron’s 1979 novel “Sophie’s Choice” stands as an iconic description of a moral dilemma pushed to the furthest extreme of human cruelty and torment. A Nazi physician stands at a train station fronting massed and miserable Jews in 1943, directing some left, some right. Word has spread that one group is bound straight for the crematorium, while the other will be spared for the moment by going on to Auschwitz.

Sophie is a Polish Catholic who has landed here for smuggling a ham for her ailing mother in violation of wartime rules reserving all meat for the military. As she approaches the doctor with her young daughter and son in tow, the following conversation ensues:

Doctor: You’re so beautiful. I’d like to get you into bed with me. I know you’re a Polack, but are you also another one of these filthy communists?
Sophie: I’m not Jewish!. Or my children—they’re not Jewish either!...

Dementia hovers over America’s 54 million seniors (most recent 2019 figures) like a slightly noxious cloud that either already affects some 7 million of them or has the remaining 47 million (and their families) making nervous jokes about constantly misplacing their keys. While dementia comes in various forms and severities (some 70% from Alzheimer’s disease), its common core is heartbreak.

These emotional impacts are borne not only by those who fall to it, but in many ways, even more heavily by family members and other intimates who must watch their beloved not merely decline and die, but in the often long dying, turn into someone almost unknowable, alien to who they had been.

Canadian writer and Nobel Literature Prize winner Alice Munro, now 90 herself, explored some of this heartbreak and the adaptations caregiving spouses try to make in coping with it in her widely hailed short story, “The Bear Came Ove...

For the average person born and brewed in everyday contemporary English, reading Shakespeare is no walk in the park. Despite his essentially one-name status reflecting a worldwide reputation as a playwright and poet barely this side of a god, Shakespeare goes either under- or unread by the vast majority of people largely because of his arcane, at-first-glance impenetrable prose, which can be a challenge for even the most learned readers.

The Irish critic Fintan O’Toole captured this truth with his usual panache in his slim-but-packed 2002 volume, “Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy.”

Recapitulating his “Shakespeare Is Hard…” title in the text, O’Toole goes on to add “So long as you can see that there is a lot of life in Shakespeare, then the effort begins to make sense.”

Castle hallways are long, empty, and mournfully shadowed, every inch lifeless gray mortar, th...