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I've been wanting for a while to get back to that Pitchfork list of 50 Best Shoegaze Albums. As I reported in the post at that link, I've only heard a third or so of the albums listed there, and although I didn't expect to like them all it seemed way more than likely that…
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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…
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Is just “Sayers” enough, or should I have said “Dorothy L. Sayers”? She was particular about the “L,” which stands for “Leigh, her maiden name. Her last name is perhaps right at the threshold of fame where it needs no additional specification. It’s enough for me–I don’t know another literary Sayers–but perhaps not for the…
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I may have mentioned in a post on one of the other Beethoven piano concertos that I thought I had heard the 5th (the "Emperor") in the probably fairly distant past, but didn't remember it at all. Yet when I listened to it a few weeks ago I recognized it instantly. The entire first movement…
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The fairly small number of Hardy’s poems that I read as an undergraduate have been among my favorites ever since. “The Darkling Thrush,” for instance, is one that I probably think of as often as I think of any poetry, and I made it the first in the 52 Poems series that appeared here in…
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I had planned to post this last week, but a combination of computer problems and the nastiest cold I've had for some time got in the way. Last Sunday afternoon I heard the Mobile Symphony and the University of South Alabama Concert Choir in the Messiah–the first time I'd ever heard it performed live, and at…
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I have a bad habit, bad and lifelong, of not bothering to look up unknown words encountered when I'm reading. I make a guess based on the context, or perhaps just ignore the word altogether, figuring or at least hoping that it isn't that important, and press on. I have done that for years with…
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Four years ago I wrote about a very interesting collection called Miserere, subtitled "Music For the Holy Week Litugy." It includes the famous "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri, a setting of Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. and…
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Light On Dark Water 