• Music

    Brilliant Songs #17:
    Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane, Opus 50”

    November 29, 2020 - By 

    Some music just grabs us as soon as the first sound waves they generate waft through the air on a remarkable (and nearly instantaneous) journey through our ear and nervous system. As those waves turn into electrical impulses that reach our brain, they have been known to cause visceral reactions that often include a primitive language response along the lines of “Mmmhhh” or “OhOhOh…” The 17th selection in this semi-regular series of “Brilliant Songs” fits into that category like few other musical pieces. ‘Pavane’ continues to thrive as a standard part of the concert repertoire some 133 years after its…

  • Fiction

    Love 101: Carson McCullers’s
    “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud”

    November 22, 2020 - By 

    A 12-year-old newspaper boy of a bygone era nears the end of his route and walks into a small cafe in the dark cold and rain of early morning to snag a cup of coffee. A few soldiers and factory workers are hunched at the counter while a man sits in a corner with his nose hovering over a beer. As the boy heads for the door, the man calls out to him, “Hey Son!” The boy approaches tentatively, then recoils in confusion as the man lays one hand on his shoulder and uses the other to place it under…

  • Celebrating Biden victory
    Politics/Culture

    George Orwell and the
    Perils of a Post-Truth Society

    November 15, 2020 - By 

    I’ve been struggling with the question of whether to allow Donald Trump to take up any more mental space in my head (and yours, if you’ve read at least this far). After all, Joe Biden is the president-elect! This is a fact and has been for some time now, one that was acknowledged even this morning in a tweet by the current (for 65 days and counting…) president, who sounded every bit the first-grade schoolboy muttering barely out of hearing to his bigger, more muscular opponent who just vanquished him in a game of tetherball: “Yeah, but you CHEATED!” If…

  • Politics/Culture

    Elation and Exhaustion

    November 8, 2020 - By 

    What a week. I went to bed (very) late Tuesday night feeling disconsolate, woke a couple times to take a peek at my phone, put my head back under the pillow wondering whether it was possible to keep it squeezed hard enough to succeed in self-suffocation, awoke just a bit later having not tried to find out, then felt even bluer in cranking up my laptop and observing the yawning vote gaps separating frontrunning Donald Trump from Joe Biden in key battleground states, including my own here in North Carolina. “Is this really happening?” I asked myself and the fates themselves. “Could…

  • Personal Reflections

    Farewell, Rascal

    November 1, 2020 - By 

    Life, death, suffering, grief, loss, love—it is always more affecting and close-at-heart than we like to let on in our mostly defended moments against the too-muchness of life, its power to overwhelm the barriers we erect to tamp down the great roiling emotions that drive so much of our inner experience. So we leave it to therapists, or spouses, or late night drinking companions, or the ceiling above our mid-of-night tossings in bed, or the sky gods beyond that, to receive our wails, our ponderings, our miseries and questions—and sometimes even our wholly undefended joys. Deep in the pit of…