Monthly Archives: February 2023

(The most prescient novel ever created about the destruction of the individual by intrusive, secretive, and corrupting bureaucratic autocracies; a 1925 classic incredibly relevant today still; also, one of Orson Welles’ best films–the 1963 classic starring a dreadfully nervous Tony … Continue reading →

5 decades of over 70 memorable, hummable, singable hits by hundreds of artists!Burt Bacharach (aided and abetted with Hal David’s supporting lyrics and Dionne’s rapturous voice).We will never see his like again. (from the excellent 3 CD Rhino boxset: The Look … Continue reading →

and seek transcendence, specifically, I still turn to beautiful Nature and the Arts (great works of literature, poetry, books, music, painting, film, etc.). Via those, I regularly  and predictably attain acceptance, peace, solace, answers, and wisdom.

5 , bored, and wandering my grandmother’s big house and returning to her powder/music box to play this nostalgic post WWII music box over and over. To hear the very same music box today, paste the link below into your … Continue reading →

At a moment of great emotional stress in his life he is said to have read from ‘An Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray to his officers and said “I would rather have written that poem than … Continue reading →

better than anyone else has been outstanding in many roles including as Winston Smith in Michael Radford’s intense Nineteen-Eighty-Four. And add the 1979 BBC tv series (available on DVD; 225 mins., 3 parts) of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to his … Continue reading →

of the smell of ’60s-’70s beachside public bathrooms at Grand Beach, MB!

The Odyssey War and Peace To the Lighthouse Nineteen-Eighty-Four Pride and Prejudice The Secret Agent The Mayor of Casterbridge Hamlet Crime and Punishment Great Expectations Death of a Salesman The Great Gatsby Walden

(Virginia Woolf: A writer who was quite preoccupied with sensibility in her various writings.) As originally understood in the 17th century, sensibility starts out as sense information taken in and/or expressed. But sensibility was also thought of as refined experience, … Continue reading →

Common sense is seeing things as they are; and doing things as they ought to be.― Harriet Beecher Stowe