Essays on literature, books, music, writers, artists, and the creative life. Topics range from classic authors and poetry to rock music, songwriting, reading, and the enduring power of art. Focus on classical music and famous literature. From an AP English teacher.
I have an acquaintance at my gym who I see reading “Nicholas Nickleby” by Charles Dickens while he rides the exercise bike. He is a doctor – a radiologist, as is his wife. His daughter attended UC Berkeley, and his son is currently at UCLA. Their family is educated, prosperous, and happy. There are plenty … Read more
Dear Grandfather, I write this letter to you approximately 36 years after your death. We lived some 375 miles away from you when I was growing up, so I did not have the opportunity to know you well. And by the time of your funeral in 1989 you had been in the throes of deep … Read more
Yesterday I was at home after work and found myself on the verge of finishing Charlie Sheen’s recent autobiography. I don’t regret reading his book, although towards the end I was heartily sick and tired of his tales of damaging drug abuse, salacious porn/sex, and multiple failed marriages. (I imagine Sheen was tired of it, … Read more
There are musicians, and then there are musicians. Ozzy Osbourne and Daniel Barenboim in the photo above, for example: they are both musicians but their training and careers could hardly be more different. The point of this essay will be to examine precisely how they are different, and how they are similar. The life of … Read more
As a musical instrument the flute or the clarinet can be used in conjunction with other instruments to create harmony or counterpoint. The same is true of the human voice. It can sing, for sure! But as a solo instrument, there are limits. The flute can be the primary instruments in a large orchestral work, … Read more
Way back on January 1, 1995 I sat down with my good friend Brent Burns at the Marine Room Tavern in Laguna Beach, California and we penned our resolutions for that new year. (Here is the document.) I hoped we might make this a tradition. We could hold each other accountable for trying to become … Read more
I have been coaching high school tennis for four years now. I do this because my daughter was on the team, and I wanted her team experience to go well. So I became the coach. “If you want a job done well, then do it yourself,” I thought to myself. After all the isolation of … Read more
Happy New Year everyone! Last month I wrote about the holidays and said the following about New Year’s Eve celebrations: “I never enjoyed a hard-partying New Year’s Eve staying out late, or the hangover the next morning. But I have enjoyed the past twenty or so New Year’s Eves when I quietly stay at home, … Read more
I talk about abortion with my high school students, or about the losses on Civil War battlefields, or the movie Wit about John Donne’s poetry and the process of getting sick and dying. I watch my students very closely for their reactions to human tragedy: the dying of a sick toddler, the casualty of a … Read more
Posts on my webpage go up and down in popularity with Google, for God only knows what reason; I can see all the statistics in the Word Press app or Google Webmaster Console. I don’t care enough about getting attention for my posts to do a deep dive into Search Engine Optimization in the Google … Read more
I saw that Barbara Ehrenreich died three weeks ago. I was saddened. I enjoyed Ehrenreich as an author, although I disagreed with her on just about everything. I especially enjoyed her “Nickel and Dimed” piece of muckraking investigative journalism, and read the first chapter with my economics students each year. I saw that not long … Read more
I read of the death of the author Norah Vincent last week. It was unusual in that she actually died in early July of this year, but the news of her passing was released only a few weeks ago. I enjoyed Norah’s work earlier in this century. She was a lesbian tending towards the libertarian … Read more
All last week I was out of contact with the larger world. No Internet, no newspapers, nada. I was on a cruise in the Caribbean and was mostly in the middle of the ocean, and I loved it! I could just relax and enjoy my vacation. The outside world would still be there when I … Read more
Today on the first day of the new year I came across the above photo of a young lady in front of all the books she read in 2021. The new year 2022 has arrived, and the stage is set for her, me, and you to journey through the next twelve months of literary adventures. … Read more
I saw this ad the other day, asking me what was the death which most affected me: That is easy for me to answer. I saw this ad the other day, asking me what was the death which most affected me. That is easy. It was the death of Viktor Frankl on September 2, 1997. … Read more
Like a snail with its shell it feels as if I have carried them around on my back for decades. My books. I own many of them. Too many? From apartment to apartment, even while in college and early adulthood, I never threw away any book I enjoyed. They added up. A buddy laughingly likes … Read more
Two days ago, on November 7th, 2021, we ended daylight savings time. Now it gets dark as soon as 5:00 pm. That is early. This is what is on my mind tonight. The change in time has got me a bit off my game. The clock says it is 7:30 pm but it feels like … Read more
It must have been around 1988 or 1989. I had a college job where I was wont to be at a desk for long hours at night without much to do. I would arrive to work and unload my backpack with my materials for the night. As was my custom, I would often push aside … Read more
Behold the boy. He sits alone and listens to a piece of music, and he starts to cry. Why is he crying? Watch the below video and ask yourself that question — — this little boy grows up to become the famous concert pianist Glenn Gould, best known for his recordings of J.S. Bach’s keyboard … Read more
“Men have become the tools of their tools… Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” Henry David Thoreau Last week I wrote at length about my long slog through the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield. I wondered why our society … Read more
Some Meditations on Reading a Long Book During Quarantine in 2021: Patience and Perseverance, Purpose and Fulfilment They say that a book should be only as long as it takes to tell the story. It should be neither longer nor shorter than that. But that is plenty vague, and leaves lots of room for different … Read more
Victor Hugo once said that “music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” I am not sure about the “impossible to be silent” part, but music can convey emotions and messages which words, for all their versatile flexibility, cannot. The sound goes straight into our ears where … Read more
I read last week a passage in actor-comedian Kevin Hart’s book “I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons” where he talked about losing his virginity as a teenager. Hart lost it to a girl who was acquiring a reputation for too liberally bestowing her favors upon the neighborhood boys. Hart claimed he remained friends with … Read more
I remember reading decades ago a passage in some book where the author claimed that in response to the traumatic news of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he went to his piano and started playing Bach. He explained there was something spiritual in Bach’s solo keyboard music which offered him profound solace in … Read more
“Change — how do you change yourself? It’s easy to lose yourself or never find yourself. The older you get, the heavier that package becomes that you haven’t sorted through, so you run. I’ve done a lot of that kind of running. I’ve spent 35 years trying to let go of the destructive parts of … Read more
As a young composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff had his first major piece (his First Symphony in D Minor) performed in 1897. It did not go well. Music critic César Antonovich Cui savaged it in a Russian newspaper: If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme … Read more
I had occasion today to watch the famous scene in the movie Philadelphia where Tom Hanks listens to Maria Callas sing the “La Mamma Morta” aria from Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier. The character Hanks plays — “Andrew Beckett” — is dying of AIDS, pulling his IV pole around the room, as he encounters Callas … Read more
I did not receive an inferior college education in the years I spent in the University of California system. I read the important books on a subject and heard experts in the field deliver lectures. There were usually breakout discussion sections led by graduate students. Then we wrote essays and research papers on the material. … Read more
‘Men have become the tools of their tools.” Henry David Thoreau So I have authored eight blog posts since I stopped posting to Twitter three months ago, and pretty much gave up all social media. Those eight essays cost me me many hours and much sweat to write. But they have also been enormously gratifying … Read more
Two weeks ago, in a burst of curiosity, I performed some fifteen hours of research on the current opioid epidemic that rages across the United States. Some 63,000 Americans died from overdosing on opioids in 2017, and every pundit seems to add that this means “more Americans died in 2017 from drug overdoses than died … Read more