June 2025
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Usually I have some loose plan for what I'm going to post about over the coming two or three weeks–I've read this or that, or listened to this or that, and intend to write about it in the not very distant future. It's not a schedule but it's a guide. This symphony, however, was not…
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Sometimes I get tired of being a curmudgeon regarding various current phenomena in the continual flux that is the English language. I'm pretty sure my wife is tired of it, too–of hearing me grumble, for instance, about how annoying the word "iconic" has become in recent years. (But then I don't think she pays much…
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I should not be reading my first Hardy novel in my 70s. It was not by oversight or accident that I have not done it earlier; it was a more or less conscious choice. Back in the early 1970s, when I was still young and more sensitive than I am now, a BBC dramatization of…
Light On Dark Water 