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Bearing Fruit
Peaches on a White TableclothColor has touched this fruit only in certain places, but with the greatest care.The shadows of the muslin are of a cool blue, like that of crockery in a humble cottage just...
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Collector's Corner - Nostalgia Reigns
Everything in America eventually turns into a corporate stock fight, for the rights to exploit something that kids once got an innocent kick out of. When I was a boy, it seemed that there were endless...
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The Trojan Drones
Back in 2009, I discussed the issue of censorship in the blogosphere ["Thoughts on Blogging" -- April 8th, 2009]; and in 2010, I talked about the issue of information control, secrecy and the public...
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Spring Reading List
Let's begin at the beginning. Is reading a good thing for people? Our distant ancestors, who created language, must have been delighted when writing took on this novel, symbolic, signified value (as...
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The Favorite Movies Post
The ranking of movies is like the ranking of any media form. We live in a competitive society, in which the drive to succeed, to exceed, plays a crucial role in the democratic playground of the pursuit...
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The Cocktail Lounge - Delayed
In the world of blogging, you can't choose your readers. At least, unless you create a restricted list of "permitted" readers, you're out here naked for anyone with an internet connection and the...
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The Supreme Court Decision in the Michigan Race-Based Preference Ban
We presently have a divided Supreme Court, with the balance tipping towards conservative. So it was not much of a surprise to hear that they had upheld the State of Michigan's voter initiative that...
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Tipo plays Scarlatti
Maria Tipo is my latest discovery. Perhaps if I had followed my early youthful interest in the keyboard into adulthood, she'd have been a familiar name to me by this time, but I've been pulled in so...
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Great Paragraphs
As a unit of measure, the paragraph may be the single most important quantity in literature.The individual word, isolated from the context of the sentence, has limited applicability. The sentence, of...
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2014 Giants Season One Month In
Well, it's May 1st, and the first month of the major league season is history.It's way too early to make strong predictions, but a few things have already become apparent in the National League West....
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More is Less
As a general concept, or a fulcrum of disequilibrium, the phrase Less is More has often been used to characterize a condition in which the inherent value of a thing is greater than the sum of its total...
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Reductivist's Bluff
In my last blog post, I meditated on the idea of MORE. That was aimed at the contemporary paradigm of our cultural desire for expansion and proliferation, without regard to, or respect for limits in...
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Dunes
Sand dunes are much more complex than you might realize.I've spent many an hour trudging across dunes, looking for interesting photographic compositions. These three prints are from those I took in the...
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Dancing the Gavotte
George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti were all born in the same year, 1685. That may be one of the great coincidences. George Frideric Handel [1685-1759]We often think...
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Immaculate Concoctions
Time gets shorter for each of us, that is, as we count each day from our birth forward towards an undoubted end. Does that make each moment sweeter, or more bittersweet? All we know of this life is...
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Benjamin Franklin To the Royal Academy [1791]
To the Royal Academy of Farting: GENTLEMEN,I Have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year . . . that you esteem Utility an...
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Detached Sentences [Ian Hamilton Finlay]
Little Sparta. Detached Sentences. Ian Hamilton Finlay. Robin Gillanders. Afterword Alec Finlay. Edinburgh, Scotland: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1998. I've written about Ian Hamilton Finlay's...
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Mocha Faville (2000-2014)
Mocha was a quixotic figure in our household.When we first brought him home, he was just a fuzzy little white kitten, whose Siamese points hadn't begun to darken. He'd had a difficult birth--the runt...
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B O R I N G World Cup competition begins in Brazil
This week the World Cup Soccer Matches begin in Brazil. I am not a soccer fan, have never been a soccer fan, and never will be a soccer fan.I am an American. I like American sports. Football. Baseball....
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Granados - Master of the Late Romantic Spanish National Style
Previously, I have done blogs on Albeniz, Rodrigo, Montsalvatge, Mompou, and Lecuona. But it would be inconceivable to discuss 20th Century Spanish classical music without mentioning Enriques Granados....
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