January 2025
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Well, maybe this concerto plan of mine–getting to know the five Beethoven piano concertos–just wasn't a good idea. Or maybe this just isn't the right time for it. It's not you, I say to the second concerto, it's me. I listened to it once inattentively, then three times attentively, or as attentively as I could. And…
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The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that I don't know how "Arbuthnot" is to be pronounced. ARbuthnot? ArBUTHnot? Is the "not" even fully pronounced or is the "o" sort of squeezed out, swallowed, as if it were "n't"? I do not know, and these things bother me, in this case every…
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I don't listen to the radio very much, but sometimes when I'm making the ten-mile drive into town and don't want to bother picking out music to play from my phone, I press one of three presets on the radio. The three stations are: the one that claims to be "alternative," but doesn't really go…
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Peter Hitchens, writing in The Lamp a year or two ago, asserts that le Carré was "Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century." (I would provide a link to the piece, which is a review of a volume of le Carré's letters, but I'm pretty sure it's subscriber-only). I have too little acquaintance with contemporary…
Light On Dark Water 