Two mini-stories: water-bottle In a library. Put my water bottle on the foutain stand and went into the restroom. Upon returning, my water bottle was gone. While I have left it this way many many times, the water bottle always stays there without leaving. Where is it? I went outside and saw a man leaving. Ran to him and saw my water bottle in his hand. “Excuse me, that water bottle is mine.” “Oh, I thought somebody lost it.” ...
Here is one piece on Cormac McCarthy’s two books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, by Nicolas Medina Mora on Nation (Apr 3/10, 2023). Ned Rorem jokes that everything in the world from music to food to people was either German or French. In the same facetious spirit, the author says every era in the history of taste can be classified into one of two categories: those that prefer the Opera Prima and those that prefer the Late Masterpiece. Periods that favor debutantes are romantic and avant-garde, or else give rise to a classicist revival in which the old forms are imbued with youthful vigor. Times that admire maturity gravitate toward the baroque and the mannered, or else to a modernist refashioning of tradition. When the essence of art is associated with youth, a whole generation rediscovers Mozart; when it’s associated with wisdom, Bach becomes fashionable yet again. ...