An Unforgettable Adventure in Uganda
May 6, 2023
How I’m Ditching Glasses After Many Years
December 20, 2022
The Novelty Advantage
October 2, 2022
That last week’s opening night of the Metropolitan Opera presented Medea (an Italian revision of Cherubini’s Médée) reminds me of a wonderful story that Hugo Weisgall told. Leonard Bernstein had a brilliant success at La Scala conducting the work with Maria Callas in the title role. As a result, the theater gave him a generous contract that was cancelled after he conducted Puccini’s La Boheme. He was lamenting this fact to some colleagues, saying that he couldn’t understand the change of attitude by the opera company and the public. To which Virgil Thomson suggested: “Lenny, they KNOW La Boheme.”
It Was Good
May 14, 2022
Nine years ago today, I was on my last visit to Catalonia before I moved here permanently. I took this photo from my lunch table in old Girona. It remains a favorite moment.
Nature’s Restorative Beauty
May 18, 2021
In the past, I have seen wild boars exiting the park and crossing the road with nonchalance, and the terrain also includes rabbits, Mediterranean tortoises, quails, Bonelli’s eagles, falcons, and other birds of prey. But those were all evidently feeling shy where I was today.
The way home
Regression
February 12, 2021
Lately, books that I read with pleasure in the 1970s have figured prominently in my reading. Yesterday it was this book that I took up, which is interesting but not one of my favorites. In fact, Lewis later disowned aspects of it. (He felt that he misused the term Romanticism, on which the book is largely based.) But, as we all know, he and Tolkien loved imaginary lands and their maps. The endpapers of this book thus include this map of the pilgrim’s progress (or, rather regress) through Romanticism.
2020–2021
December 24, 2020
Birthday by the Mediterranean
December 4, 2020
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