December 2013
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The library should know better than to let me keep books for a year (because I taught a few courses some years ago and therefore qualify as faculty). It just means that I keep them for over a year. I've now had The Letters of Caryll Houselander since December 21, 2012. Great book, no wonder I
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What excitement we had at Mass yesterday! At the recessional, priest, acolyte, and thurifer headed down the aisle, singing, along with the little congregation, "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," led as usual by the acolyte, who has the strongest voice. The thurifer, a seminarian whose identity I won't publish, is, along with the priest, a
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I ran across a 50-cent copy of Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age a while back, and have been reading it a little at a time. He closes the first essay with this quotation; I mention that because I think it would be dishonest for me to leave you thinking I've read Proust: All that we
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I tend not to like jazz reworkings of Christmas carols. There's almost always a kind of levity that either borders on or crosses over into irreverence. And for that matter I'm not fond of classically-trained voices singing anything except classical music. But this seems an exception on both counts. A friend sent it to me,
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This is a carol I did not know until fairly recently but have come to love, by way of this King's College recording, which I think I've recommended before. It's an inexpensive two-disc set of wonderful performances of most of the best-known and some lesser-known carols, plus a Vaughan Williams "Fantasia on Christmas Carols" (which
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If you don't know Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, you should. It's a selection of Middle English poems related to the Nativity, set to music. Here's a performance of the entire piece. And here is something I posted a few years ago, a sort of recipe for a very tasty holiday drink. I said then that it
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I hope Our Lady would take the title of this post in the affectionate tone in which I first heard it, which was from the lips of a college teacher in reference to his own wife's gravid condition. She was within earshot, if I remember correctly, and seemed to be more amused than not. This
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Drive a Crooked Road I'm not making any great claims for this noir-ish drama, but I think it's surprisingly good. I almost deleted it without watching it, and I'm glad I didn't. It stars Mickey Rooney as a mechanic who drives race cars on weekends. There isn't much in his life apart from cars; he
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Good news: two police officers are caught having sex on duty and demoted or suspended. Why is it good news? Because she's black and he's white, and it's not a racial story, it's a police discipline story. It will take generations for Alabama's image to recover from the stain of slavery, segregation, and most of
Light On Dark Water 