In 1963 Andy Williams recorded a new song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” meaning the Christmas season, and the lyrics included the lines, “There’ll be scary ghost stories/And tales of the glories of/Christmases long, long ago.” Most likely the reference is to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but it points to a tradition [...]
There is fitting irony that Matt Cvetic (1909-1962) died while waiting to renew his driver’s license. For nine years as an undercover informer for the federal government, and then as a public speaker, he had dedicated much of his life to fighting a bureaucratic vision of society, advocated by men and women who, as Ludwig von [...]
Aldo Leopold, in his essay, “A Man’s Leisure Time,” often printed with his A Sand County Almanac (1949), suggested that “a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.” He declared that a hobby is “a defiance of the contemporary,” and that “no hobby should either seek or need rational justification.” Further, [...]
In the late 1980s we corresponded briefly, Mr. Auchincloss kindly answering some questions I had about his writing. From 1947 to 2010, much of his fiction, literary criticism, and histories deftly chronicled well-heeled residents of the middle and northern part of America’s eastern seaboard. For his characters, poverty meant hitting principal, while my world was closer [...]
“Okay,” he said, slowly, patiently, “now, squeeze.” A father with a .22, teaching his son how to shoot: A memory evoked by Frank Miniter’s The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide, published in 2009 and now, ten years later, followed up with The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide to the Workplace. (In these casual times, a clue comes from [...]
Sixty-five years ago, Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine compiled an anthology, Short Story Masterpieces, three dozen examples of great short fiction in English from the previous sixty or so years. Authors included ranged from Stephen Crane and Henry James to Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty. Among them was Joseph Conrad’s tale from 1897, “An Outpost [...]
“You are in for a treat,” John Berky told me when he heard that Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra would be in the basilica church of Saint Vincent Archabbey to perform Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony in D Minor. Berky is Executive Secretary of the Bruckner Society of America and edits the society’s web site [...]
“If I were giving a young man advice,” said Wilbur Wright, “as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.” That advice certainly applied to his older contemporary, a fellow Ohioan and the twenty-fifth President of the United States, William [...]
With reluctance a monk opens this new book, a sleek, slim paperback having the appearance of appealing to the sepia-toned spirituality of people who see monks and nuns as living Hummels. “In this desolate world,” writes Nicolas Diat, a French journalist, “I had the idea to take the path of the great monasteries in order to [...]
Sixty years after the death of Raymond Chandler, and eighty years after the publication of his first novel, we mark the first anniversary of a brilliant achievement, The Annotated Big Sleep. In 1939, Chandler (1888-1959) published The Big Sleep, introducing a fictional Los Angeles private investigator, Philip Marlowe, and in 2018, Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, [...]
