(Sent today via email.) To whom it may concern, As a KCBS listener for more than 20 years (and a former radio reporter/announcer at KSRO in Santa Rosa), I’m writing to comment on your (apparently) new policy of having hosts…
Category: Crit
Examination, interpretation, appreciation.
First Graf: Silverlock
TAKE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, STAR A grumpy Chicagoan, people the landscape with characters and places from the world’s literature and you have Silverlock — a fable of the human spirit no less great or more complex a story than a man…
Pithyism #72
OUR POLITICAL LANDSCAPE MIGHT BE less prickly were our politics not so personal.
Aside
“THAT’S NOT ONLY BRILLIANT — IT’S ‘why-didn’t-I-think-of-that’ brilliant.”
Faint Praise
“I DON’T MIND WATCHING HIM chew the scenery — he leaves such interesting bitemarks.”
The W-Word, As In “We Are Not Amused”
A CREEPING TREND OF LITERARY infantilization is loose upon the printed land: we refer specifically to the practice of substituting for a contretemps-laden word a reference to its initial letter: “the T-word,” “the F-word,” etc. We recognize and laud the…
A Complex Whiteness
YOU MIGHT THINK WHITE FLAGS mean “Surrender,” but if you’re talking about Aaron Fein‘s “White Flags” art piece — all the world’s flags rendered full-size in white cloth and embroidery — you’d better not say so in a public forum,…
Monumental Question
“Do you honor the hole, or refill it with something?” (This may also apply to more than just the WTC memorial. Me, I vote for honoring the hole.)
I Am In Love With Edna St. Vincent Millay
EVIDENTLY, SHE WROTE A POEM in 1928 called “Dirge With Music.” I have not yet read any of her other works, but I hope they’re like this one. The last stanza says it all: Down, down, down into the darkness…
First Graf: Zen and the Art of the Internet
THE FIRST BOOK I EVER read about the Internet, in 1994, still gives me a wave of nostalgic novelty when I turn its pages now. The ‘Net was new in the public mind and not well understood back then, which…
Aside
“THIS MAY OR MAY NOT be a good time to start things, but it’s a great time to continue ’em.”
Aside
“BUILDING A BETTER MOUSETRAP IS one thing. Testing it is something else.”