• Poetry

    The Maelstrom of War:
    Louis Simpson’s “Carentan O Carentan”

    May 28, 2018 - By 

    In June, 1944, Carentan was a French town of some 4,000 people that tourist guides might have described as “bucolic” just a few years earlier. But following within days of the Allied Forces’ invasion of Normandy on June 6, it became the scene of a pitched, frantic battle between German and American troops that took place from June 10-15. The prize was access to high ground and ultimate control of two beaches—codenamed “Omaha” and “Utah”—that flanked Carentan and would prove pivotal to the invasion’s success and the final vanquishing of the German military machine less than a year later. Among those American troops was Louis…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs No. 2: Dawes’s
    “A Little Bit of Everything”  

    May 19, 2018 - By 

    With his back against the San Francisco traffic On the bridge’s side that faces towards the jail Setting out to join a demographic He hoists his first leg up over the rail With those first four lines of plaintive scene setting just above a simple piano riff, songwriter Taylor Goldsmith of the folk/rock/indie band Dawes places listeners right there behind yet another Golden Gate Bridge would-be suicide jumper, perhaps reflexively reaching their arms out or emitting an involuntary and horrified, “NooooooDON’T DO IT!” Talk about the power of words to imagine, to relate, to respond. I am indebted to reader and…

  • Music

    Swan Songs: A Departing Symphony Conductor’s Homage to Mahler’s Ninth

    May 9, 2018 - By 

    Program selection is an art in itself among symphony conductors, quite apart from everything they do at the podium. But some program choices come easy, which appeared to be the case this past weekend in Santa Rosa Symphony Conductor Bruno Ferrandis’s farewell concert after a robust 12-year tenure. For his final concert weekend, the last performance of which I was privileged to see and hear on Monday night, he zeroed in on Gustav Mahler’s epic Ninth Symphony, long in duration (80+ minutes, depending on who’s conducting) and large as only an ambitious symphony can be in emotional force. Mahler’s Ninth, quite uncoincidentally,…

  • General Nonfiction

    Wild With Desire: Eleanor Bass’s
    “Yours Always: Letters of Longing”

    May 6, 2018 - By 

    I’ve been luxuriating, which is to say, “reading slowly,” through a lovely book of letters on the subject of “longing.” The type that one human being has for another, sometimes reciprocated and sometimes, tragically, not. The editor, Eleanor Bass, an academic from King’s College London, has compiled quite the lineup of literary and cultural all-stars here, most of them at their abject, somewhat-miserable-and-desperate but florid selves, with which anyone who has ever hurtled over a cliff of wild desire for another’s acknowledgement, presence, breath, word, smell, arched eyebrow, anything, can surely sympathize. Charlotte Bronte, Winston Churchill, Henry the VIII, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway,…