Tchaikovsky’s power…exists apart from all context created for it, yet is also congenial to that context. The dual reason I can think of for the Nutcracker’s music continuing until now…as open to us, and one reason for our continuing, whether we understand or not, as open to it. Continue reading Tchaikovsky and Our Now
“Art and literature are my surrogate religions.” In a Gerhard Richter moment, Sir Peter Shaffer offered this statement to the Guardian’s Michael Billington in 2006, effectively placing himself among the playwrights who wear or have worn their creative codes like cassocks. The striking mark of Equus—the skirt of his particular code, represented by the above quote—on the cinema has faded (blame to Sydney Lumet) over … Continue reading The Admirer and His Demons: Milos Forman’s Adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus
There are many sentences of the high aesthetes’ that my spiritual kin and I have categorized as “lasting.” When questioned about the criteria for a lasting sentence, any one of us is incautious with her answer, giving it with an ode to The Waves, The Golden Bowl, The Souls of Black Folk, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Finnegans Wake—and with violence. Yes, often risking … Continue reading What a Sentence Transforms: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Everyone's Aesthete 