AdamSmith

‘Any change, in any thing, for any reason, is to be deplored.’ — The Earl of Cambridge

One of the 2 or 3 genuine genuises I have ever known. Reynolds Price Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back In his third volume of memoir, Reynolds Price explores six crucial years of his life -- his departure from home in 1955 to spend three years as a student at Oxford University; then his return to North Carolina to begin his long career as a university teacher. He gives often moving, and frequently comic, portraits of his great teachers in England -- such men as Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, and W. H. Auden, who was the most distinguished English-language poet of those years. In London the poet and editor Stephen Spender becomes his first publisher and a generous friend who introduces him to rewarding figures like the essayist Cyril Connolly and George Orwell's encouraging widow, Sonia. He spends rich months traveling in Britain and on the Continent; and above all he undergoes the first loves of his life -- one with an Oxford colleague whom he describes as a "romantic friend" and another with an older man. Back in the States, in his first class at Duke he meets a startlingly gifted student in the sixteen-year-old Anne Tyler; and he soon combines the difficult pleasures of teaching English composition and literature with his own hard delight in learning to write a first novel. At the end of three lonely years, he completes the novel -- A Long and Happy Life -- and returns to England for a fourth year before his novel appears in Britain and America and meets with a success that sets the pace for an ongoing life of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations (Ardent Spirits is his thirty-eighth volume). The droll memories recorded here amount to the unsurpassed -- and, again, often comical -- story of a writer's beginnings; and the young man who emerges has proven his right to stand by his fellows of whatever sex and goal. Ardent Spirits is a book that penetrates deeply into the life of a writer, a teacher, and a steadfast lover. About the Author Reynolds Price (1933-2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages. Review “His beautiful books, his tremendous productivity, his spirituality and cheerfulness, his abiding friendships—all these generous traits and dynamic accomplishments have characterized Reynolds Price…. Ardent Spirits is … effervescent.”--Edmund White, The New York Review of Books “Ardent Spirits is Mr. Price’s third memoir [and] it is the best of this winning lot… Price’s warmth, vigor and good humor consistently shine through.”--Dwight Garner, New York Times “The most compelling book he’s published since Kate Vaiden in 1986. Price has always been one of our finest storytellers, but in Ardent Spirits he rises to new heights, delivering a compelling account of a profoundly exciting period in a young man’s life.”--Charlotte Observer From Publishers Weekly In this new memoir, award-winning novelist Price (Kate Vaiden) takes up where his 1989 Clear Pictures left off—with a young Price heading for England on a Rhodes scholarship, a young man lighting into new and unfamiliar territories and the lessons he learns about literature, life and love. Covering the years 1955 to 1961, Price chronicles the challenges of living in a strange place, his emotional insecurities and his anxieties about his ability to complete the thesis on Milton, his adventures in Europe with a close friend and his eventual return to his alma mater, Duke University, to teach writing and literature. Along the way, Price recalls his friendships with Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly, W.H. Auden and his brief encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre and J.R.R. Tolkien. Price's memoir also displays the tenacious desire with which, after warm encouragement from Eudora Welty and William Styron, he embarks on a round of writing that produces his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, published to acclaim in 1962. Although the detail can be tiresomely meticulous, Price, as usual, powerfully articulates the strength of memory in shaping our lives and gracefully draws us into a literary life lived fully. Photos. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library Journal In his third memoir (after A Whole New Life), award-winning author Price details his life from 1955 to 1961—his studies at Oxford, where he befriended W.H. Auden and met such writers as Robert Frost and Eudora Welty; his European travels; and the beginning of his Duke teaching career. The detailed stories he includes come from copies of letters he wrote to his mother and brother. Two underlying streams in this memoir are Price's homosexuality and the beginning of his first novel, A Long and Happy Life, which he refers to as his "pregnant-girl story." Price's true friendship with an Oxford classmate, Michael Jordan, and his intimate relationship with Matyas, a British academic, reveal Price's personal growth during his studies. He outlines the universal writer's dilemma of working the "necessary job" to pay the bills while struggling to begin a writing career. Readers will identify with his journey and eventual satisfaction. Recommended for all academic collections.—Joyce Sparrow, JWB Children's Svcs. Council, Clearwater, FL Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda After graduating from Duke University, Reynolds Price sailed off to Oxford in 1955, where he spent three years as a Rhodes scholar. During this time he published his first short story and produced a B. Litt. thesis on John Milton's dramatic poem "Samson Agonistes." He then returned to Duke for a short-term appointment as a teacher of creative writing and literature. Fifty years later, Price is still there in Durham, but now as the very distinguished James B. Duke Professor of English and one of America's most revered men of letters. This engaging memoir, however, covers just six years in a young man's life, albeit a life that was unusually rich in friendships and youthful accomplishment. At Oxford, Price's teachers included such eminent scholars as the aristocratic David Cecil, who used to grow so excited in lectures that he would spray spittle on students in the front row; the formidable Helen Gardner, an authority on John Donne with a disturbingly flirtatious way of twiddling with the pendants she always wore; and Nevill Coghill, who had once been the teacher of W.H. Auden. During his holidays, Price also managed to meet some truly famous people: He recognized and spoke with the very young Brigitte Bardot, glimpsed philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre on the street and was given a curt bow, and actually exchanged grins with fat Nikita Khrushchev. Following a performance of "Titus Andronicus," Price was introduced to Vivien Leigh and a nearly naked Laurence Olivier in their dressing room. He attended a to-die-for performance of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" conducted by Karl Böhm and sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried, Christa Ludwig and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He even dined at the home of the great actor John Gielgud. Like so many provincial Americans before him, Price eagerly, relentlessly sucked up as much English and European culture as he could. Of course, he also fell in love. Twice. Much of this memoir recounts Price's intense friendship with a fellow undergraduate named Michael Jordan, a relationship that taught him "an enormous amount about affection, love, steadfastness, wit, and patience." That friendship continues to this day, though it has never had any physical component. On the other hand, late in his Oxford sojourn Price virtually seduced a somewhat reluctant older East European scholar he calls Matyas. Yet like many of the people Price cared about, Matyas was essentially bisexual and ultimately settled down with a wife and family. In general, Price is very low-key about what he prefers to call his "queerness." (He notes that a "queer" friend once said: "Please don't call me gay. If you need an adjective, call me morose.") While clearly dazzlingly handsome (as the cover photograph of "Ardent Spirits" shows), Price claims never to have been a "draw" for men or women. He's never felt comfortable in gay bars. In his fiction he nearly always writes about heterosexual love and family life, insisting that he just doesn't know enough about homosexual couples. Fundamentally, Price presents himself as a generous mentor to the young, a deeply loyal friend and a born teacher. Back at Duke, though, he discovers that he has absolutely nothing to teach one member of his very first writing class, a 16-year-old girl named Anne Tyler. His other early students include the now well-known poet and fiction writer Fred Chappell and the journalist and environmentalist Wallace Kaufman. Courteously, Price only hints at the jealousies and rivalries of Duke's English department, though he speaks frankly of mentor William Blackburn's eventual paranoia, and repeatedly makes clear his own current disdain for today's cult of theory and cultural studies. Surprisingly, he also questions the value of his own specialty, creative writing: "I never urge advanced writing-study on talented students. I'm more than convinced that the best writing of fiction, poetry, and drama is the result of intense independent work by a naturally gifted man or woman who finds the time . . . to deepen those skills in the act of probing further down into what will prove to be his or her best subject matter, matter to which only he or she has guided him or herself, not a teacher nor a group of workshop colleagues." Certainly, this was Price's own method. "Ardent Spirits" traces his own literary self-formation: a first story and essays published in Encounter (he reviewed Albert Camus and Iris Murdoch with "deplorable condescension"); encouragement from people like William Styron, Stephen Spender and the agent Diarmuid Russell (whose clients included Eudora Welty); and the gradual realization that what he thought was just another story was in fact his first novel, "A Long and Happy Life" (which won the William Faulkner Award in 1962). While much of "Ardent Spirits" feels agreeably conversational and digressive, Price's individual sentences and similes can be striking: "Their mutual devotion was clear as clean water"; a landlady's black tea was "strong enough to ream a radiator"; Bill Blackburn "could scarcely write a postcard." Still, some of these pages do seem to lack punch, mainly because Price scrupulously sticks to just what he can remember. One wishes that he'd kept a diary and recorded the exact words and witticisms of his brilliant teachers and friends. David Cecil, he does tell us, once warned him that the famously ugly and notoriously sharp-witted Cyril Connolly was "not as nice as he looks." Fortunately, Price does offer some typically winning vignettes of W.H. Auden, who was in residence at Oxford as professor of poetry: "I mentioned my love of Emily Dickinson; he nodded with no enthusiasm -- 'Very little-bitty at times, don't you feel?' . . . He asked for my favorite opera composer. I said Wagner; he grinned, shut his eyes in bliss, tilted his head back: . . . 'I long to direct a production of Tristan und Isolde with two large lesbians -- no man and woman could ever carry on so fervently about one another.' " When Auden finally left Oxford, the neat and tidy Price was given a glimpse of the poet's living quarters: "I looked round at two rooms in a state of disarray that I'd never before seen generated by any human being. And Wystan had only been in residence for two months. The desk, the floors, the tables, and every other surface were inches -- if not feet -- deep in abandoned books, magazines, clothing, galley proofs, dirty dishes, whatever. My face may have betrayed my literal shock; but Auden only gave a brisk wave above the chaos and said 'If you'd like to come back later and see if there's anything you want, by all means do.' " Does the fastidious Reynolds Price come back to rummage through the great poet's trash? You'll have to read the very enjoyable "Ardent Spirits" to find out. Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* The distinguished American novelist, author of, among many celebrated works, the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Kate Vaiden (1986), remembers being a Rhodes Scholar at England’s Oxford University in the mid-to-late-1950s, when he was in his twenties. Price examines both the three years he spent at Oxford and the following three years, when he began teaching at Duke University in his native North Carolina and completed his first novel, A Long and Happy Life. Many readers will identify with his recollection that “since early adolescence, I’d all but tasted the strong desire to visit Europe.” But few will have had the range of experiences Price enjoyed in England: not only studying the poetry of John Milton at Oxford but also making friends with such literary luminaries as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender and working to become a fiction writer. Scholarship and fiction writing initially seemed at cross purposes to the young Price, but eventually he came to reconcile both impulses. Fans of his fiction are the natural audience for this account, but it will also appeal to anyone interested in literary memoirs. --Brad Hooper Product Details Publication date: April 24, 2009 File size: 4016 KB Word Wise: Enabled Print length: 418 pages Publisher: Scribner; Reprint edition (April 24, 2009) ASIN: B0027G6X6K Screen Reader: Supported Language:: English X-Ray: Not Enabled Text-to-Speech: Enabled Enhanced typesetting: Enabled Lending: Not Enabled About the author Follow the author to get new release updates and improved recommendations. Reynolds Price + Follow

Likewise. I can’t believe the number of young guys I know who sit around bitching about the futility of grindr, but then express incredulity at my suggestion they just go out to a bar/club and pick up somebody in person.

TV in general makes my stomach turn but I watched him most days back when he had his daily evening commentary show. He was/is great.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s5X0HqBPcCQ

I think The Guardian, notwithstanding their origins, tends to hold with Gladstone: The AmericanConstitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a giventime by the brain and purpose of man. https://www.quotes.net/quote/3589

The Guardian view on the 2020 US electionsIt’s time to dump Trump. America’s only hope is Joe Biden Four years of deranged and unpredictable behaviour is proof that the current US president is uniquely unsuited to the job Tue 27 Oct 2020 14.30 EDTLast modified on Tue 27 Oct 2020 20.57 EDT Shares 988 Comments 797 Donald Trump’s presidency has been a horror show that is ending with a pandemic that is out of control, an economic recessionand deepening political polarisation. Mr Trump is the author of this disastrous denouement. He is also the political leader least equipped to deal with it. Democracy in the United States has been damaged by Mr Trump’s first term. It may not survive four more years. If the Guardian had a vote, it would be cast to elect Joe Biden as president next Tuesday. Mr Biden has what it takes to lead the United States. Mr Trump does not. Mr Biden cares about his nation’s history, its people, its constitutional principles and its place in the world. Mr Trump does not. Mr Biden wants to unite a divided country. Mr Trump stokes an anger that is wearing it down. The Republican presidential nominee is not, and has never been, a fit and proper person for the presidency. He has been accused of rape. He displays a brazen disregard for legal norms. In office, he has propagated lies and ignorance. It is astonishing that his financial interestsappear to sway his outlook on the national interest. His government is cruel and mean. It effectively sanctioned the kidnapping and orphaning of migrant children by detaining them and deporting their parents. He has vilified whistleblowers and venerated war criminals. Mr Trump trades in racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Telling the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, to “stand back and stand by” was, in the words of Mr Biden, “a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn”. From the Muslim ban to building a wall on the Mexican border, the president is grounding his base in white supremacy. With an agenda of corporate deregulation and tax giveaways for the rich, Mr Trump is filling the swamp, not draining it. A narcissist, Mr Trump seems incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Coronavirus has exposed a devastating lack of presidential empathy for those who have died and the families they left behind. Every day reveals the growing gap between the level of competence required to be president and Mr Trump’s ability. He is protected from the truth by cronies whose mob-like fealty to their boss has seen six former aides sentenced to prison. A post-shame politician, Mr Trump outrageously commuted the sentence of one of his favoured lackeys this summer. The idea that there is one rule for wealthy elites and another for the ordinary voter damages trust in the American system. Mr Trump couldn’t care less. The people’s enemy Like other aspiring autocrats, Mr Trump seeks to delegitimise his opposition as “enemies of the people” to mobilise his base. In 2016, the institutions that should have acted as a check on Mr Trump’s rise to power failed to stop him. This time there has been some pushback over a Trump disinformation campaign about Mr Biden’s son. It is an indictment of the Trump age that social media companies acted before politicians in the face of a clear and present danger to democracy. Mr Biden has his flaws, but he understands what they are and how to temper them. Seen as too centrist in the Democratic primaries, his election platform has borrowed ideas from the progressive wing of his party and incorporated a “green new deal” and free college for the middle class. Mr Biden should not retreat into his comfort zone. The failures of capitalism have been thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic. If elected, he will raise taxes on richer Americans and spend more on public services. This is the right and fair thing to do when a thin sliver of America has almost half the country’s wealth. It’s not just Americans for whom Mr Biden is a better bet. The world could breathe easier with Mr Trump gone. The threat from Pyongyang and Tehran has grown thanks to President Trump. A new face in the White House would restore America’s historic alliances and present a tougher test to the authoritarians in Moscow and Beijing than the fawning Mr Trump. On climate change, Mr Biden would return the United States to the Paris agreement and give the world a fighting chance to keep global temperatures in check. With a President Biden there would be a glimmer of hope that the US would return as a guarantor of a rules-based international order. Perhaps no country has so much to lose from Mr Biden’s victory as Britain. It has the misfortune of being led by Boris Johnson, whom Democrats bracket with Mr Trump as another rule-breaking populist. Mr Biden, a Catholic proud of his Irish roots, has already warned the Johnson government that it must not jeopardise the Good Friday agreement in its Brexit negotiations. Having left the EU, the UK can no longer be America’s bridge across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, Britain has a prime minister who led the country out of Europe just when an incoming President Biden would be looking to partner with it. Faustian pact Whether Mr Trump is defeated or not next week, Americans will have to learn to live with Trumpism for years to come. The first impeached president to run for re-election, Mr Trump avoided being the first to be removed from office because the Republican party has lost its moral compass. The party of Abraham Lincoln has become subsumed by the politics of grievance and entitlement. The GOP turns a blind eye to Mr Trump’s transgressions in return for preserving the privileged status of white Christian America. The most obvious sign of this Faustian pact is the Senate’s confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the US supreme court — Mr Trump’s third justice. Conservatives now have a 6-3 advantage in the highest court in the land. Compliant judges are key to retaining the status quo when Republicans face a shrinking electoral base. The Republican strategy is twofold: first is voter suppression; if that fails, Mr Trump appears ready to reject the result. He has spent years conditioning his supporters, especially those armed to the hilt, to mistrust elections and to see fraud where it doesn’t exist. We have been here before. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million ballots. The election turned on a handful of votes needed to capture the electoral vote in Florida. But the votes that counted were not found in the Sunshine State. They were cast by the five supreme court justices named by Republican presidents who gave the election to George W Bush. In the 2018 midterms, a coalition of millions marched into polling booths to disavow the president. It is heartening that more than 60 million people have cast their ballot in early voting at a time when the president is doing much to call US democracy into question amid baseless claims of a “rigged election”. Americans are busily embracing their democratic right, and a record turnout in this election may show that voters, worried about whether democracy would endure, strove to save it. Anything other than a vote for Mr Biden is a vote to unleash a supercharged Trumpism. All pretence of civility would be dropped. The divides of race, class and sex would become even wider. Mr Trump is a symptom of America’s decline. Finding a solution to this problem begins with a vote for Mr Biden. Tue 27 Oct 2020 14.30 EDT

Actually, it is interesting to see Roberts, as stealthily as he can, crab-wise his way a little bit back toward the center. To maintain the authority & ‘integrity’ of the institution.

One Art BY ELIZABETH BISHOP The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QcbR1J_4ICg

Easy bruising of the elderly is a frequent side effect of being on prednisone or some other corticosteroid. For which there could be a number of clinical reasons, which in the public interest he ought to disclose. Fat chance, of course.

Agent fee?

Tell me in graphic detail about your parties with him.

You will — yet again — not very much like me saying this, but one knows him personally very well from years of living close by in Cambridge MA, and also both being originally from North Carolina. Many hours together at dinner parties & such talking & musing about national & various regional political contests. Extremely intelligent, knowledgeable , perceptive. A great pleasure to be around.

Very good to know. Whom?

No real relevance, just a random rememberance: One spent 4+ years in psychoanalysis in one’s 30s under this very constructive school of thought: https://www.stlpi.org/perspectives-self-psychology/

We’ll see. Toobin is fairly well known and mainstream as a journalist, not just some obscure eccentric.

Agree (somewhat contradicting myself above) this whole thing is a bit silly, and should go away. But imagine if a Walter Cronkite had made such a muddle?

Agree in full. If it’s not in the public view, curiosity-seekers can consign themselves to hell.

I mean, one can be out on the public street & adjust one’s privates through the pants pockets without attracting undue notice.

Why in God’s name would one do this anywhere near a live computer?

It would seem to me it is about exactly that, and then the underlying conditions that got us here. They are interconnected.

Repeating myself a bit: after comforting Uncle Joe greases the slides and gets in, it will shortly get to be time for a fierce bitch of color to take control and really straighten things out. Beyond time already.

http:// Bard Subscribe Donate Newsletter Print Current Issue Upcoming Issue Back Issues e-Books Selected Texts Online Multimedia Store About Us Advertise Support CONJUNCTIONS:4 Three Poems John Ashbery I See, Said the Blind Man, As He Put Down His Hammer and Saw There is some charm in that old music He’d fall for when the night wind released it: Pleasant to be away; the stones fall back; The hill of gloom in place over the roar Of the kitchens but with remembrance like a bright patch Of red in a bunch of laundry. But will the car Ever pull away and spunky at all times he’d Got the mission between the ladder And the slices of bread someone had squirted astrology over Until it took the form of a man, obtuse, out of pocket Perhaps, probably standing there. Can’t you see how we need these far-from-restful pauses? And in the wind neighbors and such agree It’s a hard thing, a milestone of sorts in some way? So that the curtains contribute what charm they can To the spectacle: an overflowing cesspool Among the memoirs of court life, the candy, cigarettes, And what else. What kind is it, is there more than one Kind, are people forever going to be at the edge Of things, even the nice ones, and when it happens Will we all be alone together? The armor Of these thoughts laughs at itself Yet the distances are always growing With everything between, in between The tall hedges that seem to know what life is: An offering that stands to one side. And we dream. A Fly And still I automatically look to that place on the wall— The timing is right, but off— The approval soured— That’s what comes of age but not aging, The marbles all snapped into the side pockets, The stance for today we know full well is Yesterday’s delivery and ripe prediction— The way not to hold in when circling, As a delighted draughtsman sits down to his board. Reasons, reasons for this: The enthusiast mopping through his hair again As he squats on the toilet and catches one eye in the mirror (Guys it has come through all right For once as delivered it’s all here and me with time on my hands For once, with writing to spare, and how many Times have there been words to waste, That you had to spend or else take big losses In the car after an early dinner the endless Light streaking out of the windshield A breakthrough I guess but don’t just now take into account, Don’t look at the time) and time Comes looking for you out of Pennsylvania and New Jersey It doesn’t travel well Colors his hair beige paints the straw walls gilds the mirror On the balcony deflecting the morning sun’s rays Onto the straight carpet The thing is that this is places in the world, Freedom from rent, Sundries, food, a dictionary to keep you company Enviously But is also the day we all got together That the treaty was signed And it all eased off into the big afternoon off the coast Slid shoulders into the groundswell removed its boots That we may live now with some Curiosity and hope Like pools that soon become part of the tide When the Sun Went Down To have been loved once by someone—surely There is a permanent good in that, Even if we don’t know all the circumstances Or it happened too long ago to make any difference. Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky, Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong? Which of the others on your team could darken the passive Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began? Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems As enormous as a plain, to have to be told That its horizons are comically confining, And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge Of the different forms of love, reducing them To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open To the elements? And some see in this paradigm of how it rises Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour? The refrain is desultory as birdsong, it seeps unrecognizably Into the familiar structures that lead out from here To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions: It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation. There are times when music steals a march on us, Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist; Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed Like jewels down a well; the answer, also, To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten, Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together. John Ashbery (1927–2017) was one of the greatest twentieth-century American poets and the recipient of nearly every major American award for poetry. He was the author of more than twenty books, including Breezeway; Quick Question (both Ecco); Planisphere (HarperCollins); A Worldly Country (Ecco); Where Shall I Wander (HarperCollins); Chinese Whispers; Your Name Here; Girls on the Run: A Poem; Wakefulness; Can You Hear, Bird; And the Stars Were Shining (all Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Hotel Lautrémont; Flow Chart (both Alfred A. Knopf); and April Galleons (Penguin).

THE FENNER DOUGLASS ORGAN/JOAN LIPPINCOTT The Fenner Douglass Organ Taylor and Boody, Opus 36 (2001) Bower Chapel, Naples, Florida Joan Lippincott, organ Joan Lippincott plays "The Bach Legacy," a program based on music by Bach and those inspired by him, on this new Taylor and Boody organ of Bower Chapel in Naples, Florida. Named for organist and scholar Fenner Douglass in November 2006, this three-manual organ is perfectly voiced for the beautiful acoustics of the chapel, and Lippincott’s registrations demonstrate some of the organ’s most compelling sounds. Sample: last movement of the Bach Trio Sonata: https://www.gothic-catalog.com/The_Fenner_Douglass_Organ_Joan_Lippincott_p/g-49255.htm https://westfield.org/public/newsletters/fennerdouglass0408.pdf As mentioned before, one spent a beautiful semester in Fenner’s 7-student seminar on ‘History of the Organ and its Literature.’We spent like close to half our time crawling up and into the Duke Chapel Flentrop organ. Accessible from the back by a series of ladders and platforms that were somewhat alarming to navigate Though for the same reason enjoyable. https://chapel.duke.edu/sacred-music-arts/music-worship/organs-carillon