Archives for March 2007

“Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.”

W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker

I’ve just given the right-hand column an extensive updating. New items abound. Take a gander.

I am now officially over the flu. Regular blogging resumes on Monday!

I kept on seeing shows while I was sick, and I report on three of them in today

“For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

How like a winter hath my absence been

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,

What old December

Here

“Bach no more composed for us than he lived for us. His music comes from far away; it speaks a language that we understand yet in which we hear echoes of another language, outside our expressive range.”