Archives for March 5, 2013

Van Cliburn plays Scriabin’s Etude in D-Sharp Minor, Op. 8, No. 12, in Moscow in 1962:

TEDxBroadway recently posted a video of the motivational speech that I gave in January at its latest New York conclave. The title is “Why Do You Want to Be on Broadway?” What I said there was, or seemed to be, quite well received, and I thought that some of you might possibly want to see what the fuss was about:

From 2003:

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker. He was working on a piece that made reference to H.L. Mencken, and very apologetically asked me if I could perhaps help him by answering two questions (one was simple, the other subtle). I told him that Mencken would have approved of his labors, which is true. Mencken did quite a bit of writing for The New Yorker in the Thirties and Forties, and referred admiringly to its fact-checking department as “Ross’ goons” (Harold Ross being, of course, the magazine’s founding editor and resident tutelary spirit).
That call filled me with nostalgia. As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art….

Read the whole thing here.

“Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
C.S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”