• Fiction

    So Much From So Little:
    Claire Keegan’s Novella, “Foster”

    November 26, 2023 - By 

    I’ve gotten to an age where I’m starting to do some basic math on how many 400-pages-and-more books I have left in me to read. Faced with one highly regarded tome of 500 pages and two others of more or less equal interest at 250 pages each, my tendency in recent years has been to go with the latter, particularly when stretching the timeframe out to the 10 or 15 or more years I might reasonably hope to live (should I be so fortunate, every new day being its own blessing). Sure, if I choose to limit my reading most…

  • Music - Religion

    Brilliant Songs #42:
    Duke Pearson’s “Cristo Redentor”

    November 19, 2023 - By 

    If I’m drawn to a piece of music, it usually begins to spin its magic on me in the first few notes. Doesn’t matter the genre or era, and doesn’t always require that I be listening closely at the time. Maybe the radio or Spotify will be on low volume and I’ll barely hear a melodic snippet or phrase or emotional lilt and the next thing out of my mouth to whomever is close to the dial is, “Can you please turn that up?” And so it was a few weeks ago when somewhere—so many inputs, such cluttered memory—the late…

  • Philosophy - Plays - Psychology

    Heaven, Hell and OTHER People: Finding Happiness in “The Good Life”

    November 12, 2023 - By 

    French philosopher and playwright Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play, “No Exit,” envisioned a hell devoid of searing flames, torture devices or red-eyed devils pitchforking inhabitants for eternity. But that doesn’t mean the punishment for unredeemed sinners wasn’t awful beyond imagining. Sartre instead placed multiple people in a locked room—in this case, two women and one man—carefully selected to provoke maximum and mutual psychological discomfort upon one another by picking astutely at the scabs of the moral failings that landed each of them in this dreaded situation, yes, for all eternity. “Anything but that!”, we can hear ourselves saying in sympathy with…

  • Poetry

    Embracing the Gods: “Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World”

    October 28, 2023 - By 

    Somehow or other I missed this poem all these years, despite its prominence in anthologies and wide acclaim for its author, Jane Hirshfield. “Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World” is a dramatic, “big” poem—big in ambition, imagery, and theme. Hirshfield is not content here to search for heaven in a wildflower or angel dust on a vase. Not that there’s anything wrong with such poetic devices, as Hirshfield herself would surely attest. But when her second line launches in on a “strange and frightening creature” that we know from the title is a “white bull,” we…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    Answering Alzheimer’s: Amy Bloom’s
    “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss”

    October 22, 2023 - By 

    Amy Bloom gets right down to it in her 2022 memoir, “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.” The city of Zurich and the fact of her husband Brian’s Alzheimer’s disease comes up in the first paragraph as the couple boards a plane headed to that Swiss city. Their purpose for the trip is revealed in the fourth paragraph, which begins with these two stout declarative sentences: “Dignitas’s office is in Zurich, and that’s where we’re headed. Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization offering accompanied suicide.” Through the subsequent 200+ pages, the multi-talented, much-honored Bloom (novels, short stories, non-fiction,…