STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT’S NIGHTMARE NUMBER THREE
BY WAY OF background, my meager appreciation of poetry seems to have come through vastly different means: “Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote/The droghte of March hath perced to … Continue reading
THANKS, MARIE, FOR THE TINS
BACK WHEN I made my unorthodox attempt at the Aussie HSP (Halal Snack Pack), I cooked it in a recycled Marie Callender’s pie tin. Well, wouldn’t you know, Rukmini Iyer … Continue reading
THE OPERA AIN’T OVER TILL … WAIT! IT IS OVER!
IMAGINE: TEN OPERAS performed in the time of a single Wagner Götterdämmerung! Seth Colter Walls offered an example of this in “A Grand History of Small Operas,” The New York … Continue reading
HUMOR LURKING IN EXASPERATION
“IT’S ENOUGH TO make you laugh,” the adage goes. And, these days, there’s humor to be encountered in matters that are also exasperating and deadly serious. In particular, consider the … Continue reading
BEASTLY AND NAIVE PART 2
THE FAUVISTS RECEIVED their “beastly” moniker in the early 20th century because of their intense colors that more than surpassed nature: Reality was downright ignored. Today in Part 2, we … Continue reading
BEASTLY AND NAIVE PART 1
IN THE FIRST years of the twentieth century, Fauve and Naive painting were bridges between impressionism and abstract modernism. Fauvists were the “wild beasts.” At least one Fauvist called a … Continue reading
MAIGRET INVESTIGATES PART 2
YESTERDAY, WE MET Parisian Police detective Maigret, who had an evidently well-paid literary agent in Georges Simenon, what with Maigret’s 103 adventures chronicled between 1931 and 1972. Today in Part … Continue reading
MAIGRET INVESTIGATES PART 1
DR. JOHN H. Watson’s literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, would have envied Frenchman Georges Simenon. Doyle’s client Watson chronicled a total of 60 Sherlock Holmes adventures: 56 episodic tales and … Continue reading
CELEBRATING MAYHEW’S BAKED POTATO MAN
FOR DINNER LAST evening, we had baked potatoes, the sort that are wrapped and zapped in a microwave for 12 minutes the pair (our microwave is a baby one). Wife … Continue reading
IT SEEMS LIKE AN INFINITY… AND SO IT IS: ∞
IN MY CONTINUING exploration of math symbols, what better one to examine these days than ∞, the symbol for infinity. Here are tidbits on its definition, origin, and modern uses. … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 