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Five Books Everyone Should Read Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago to name five books I think everyone should read. As an habitual maker of pop music lists (see the movie High Fidelity) I was intrigued, but the scope of the charge was really impossibly broad, so I had to narrow it somewhat…
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I'm going to be out of town for a couple of days. For your entertainment and education, here are a couple more pictures from Hurricane Katrina. I don't do graphics very well at all, and it always takes me a while to get images cropped and size to appear correctly on this page, so I'm…
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I take a day off work to hang around at home while two guys from Affordable Plumbing rework all the plumbing in the house. They finish around 1 and I sit down at the dining room table with one of them to settle the bill. While he's writing it up I idly scan the tv…
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What might have been is an abstractionRemaining a perpetual possibilityOnly in a world of speculation.What might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never openedInto the rose-garden. —Eliot, “Burnt Norton” As regular readers have probably…
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Procol Harum: Shine On Brightly The conversation with Ryan C about this album (see comments on this post) made me get it out and give it a listen for the first time in quite a few years. Shine On Brightly was Procol Harum’s second album, and I still find it, as I did when it…
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Prepared to Love If I am not at least prepared to love God, I cannot “see” him. —Roman Guardini “Prepared” can mean “willing” or “able” or both. In context, Msgr. Guardini’s remark has more to do with “willing,” but taken alone it is equally applicable to “able,” and in fact it is difficult to separate…
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Earlier today I read a very interesting post on another blog which was, in part, about the possibility that pornography is damaging relations between the sexes, and in fact damaging the capacity to enjoy and appreciate sex itself, to experience sexual pleasure with another person, or maybe at all. I was going to link to…
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Last weekend I finally saw this (The Eclipse), the last in the so-called (not by the director) trilogy that also includes L'Avventura and La Notte. Judging by other comments I've read here and there, I'm not alone in thinking L'Avventura the best of the three. And I might have said this is the worst if…
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I almost believe in synchronicity. Let's say I don't believe it doesn't exist. On the face of it I don't see why it shouldn't be considered an aspect of God's providence. And those weird little coincidences just happen too often. Case in point: for the past few days I've been pondering the fact that the…
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Louis Philippe: An Unknown Spring (again) In an unprecedented development, Light on Dark Water devotes two weekly reviews to one piece of music. I suppose—no, I know—that part of the reason popular music has such a hold on me is that it makes use of both words, my natural and favorite medium, and music. Really…
