Category Archives: Uncategorized

The making of poetry, paintings, and Umwelt. I received an email from my friend, the painter Ellen Wiener, in which she mused upon the global reach of her grown children’s curiosity compared to the more focused and, as she acknowledges, Eurocentric purview of her own. “We are sliding,” she wrote, “and in most ways rightly […]

On Jeremy Denk’s memoir. To write about music is hard. Jeremy Denk does it with as much poise and ingenuity as he performs Bach and Mozart and Brahms, turning the intensity of his study into expression both inviting and absorbing. I’ve enjoyed his prose for years, eagerly seeking it out on his now defunct blog, thinkdenk, […]

On the painting of Joan Mitchell and birds on the wing. Note: Although it stands well enough on its own, this post picks up where an earlier one, A New View, leaves off. Lacking precise pathways, the sky, muses the unnamed narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, “never preserves our tracks. The sky, unlike the sea, never […]

Henry James accepts his brother William’s challenge. The passage from William James quoted above is from “The Stream of Consciousness,” the eleventh chapter of his Psychology: Briefer Course. It’s nestled in a subsection headlined “‘Substantive’ and ‘Transitive’ States of Mind,” a fascinating consideration of how the conclusions we come to color our understanding of the movement […]

A note from Russell Baker. I’ve always wanted to keep a large correspondence, animated with letters from friends and strangers, immersed in a to-ing and fro-ing of ideas, events, writerly insights and readerly pursuits. And for a long time I did, although I confess I am only now coming to realize this as, in a […]

Staring out the window after moving house. I stand at the window and watch the storm suffuse the sky, a palette of grays and blacks blending into one another as the heavens concentrate dark power. Twenty-two storeys above the modest streetscape I survey, I see the city hunch its shoulders against the sodden twilight; the […]

A younger self’s definition of a retirement project. Another discovery I made scanning the basement shelves led me to the OED to look up the word dwell. What I found surprised me. The first meaning—to lead into error, mislead, delude; to stun, stupefy—is traced back to the year AD 888 and King Alfred’s Old English version […]

Late November brought news of the death, after nearly a century of life, of the historian and literary geographer (“travel writer” sells her short by a long shot) Jan Morris. Among her many splendid books are The World of Venice, one of the richest portraits I know of that oft-portrayed city; Conundrum, an account of her midlife gender […]

Bookshelf autobiography, via an old catalogue. I closed a recent post with a question posed by the philosopher Simone Weil. Happily, she’d also provided an answer. I didn’t reveal that Weil’s words were top of mind because I’d come upon them while flipping through an old copy of A Common Reader. As some of you know, that […]

On Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. Thursday night, December 3, we held our last Battle of the Books for 2020. I’d like to share some thoughts about one of the books that was championed (by Kiera Parrot, of the Darien Public Library): Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.  Tan is an artist-storyteller, creator of some of the most imaginative […]