If anybody asked you (for some diabolical reason) to use the word “unpremeditated” in a poem, you might think it a considerable, almost an unfair, challenge. The word isn’t very poetic-sounding, is it? But prepare to be flabbergasted: That word happens to appear in the first stanza of one of the most famous poems in […]
One of the most hallowed of all Hollywood clichés is that of being saved at the last moment. This was the basic appeal of such ongoing series of narrow escapes, as The Perils of Pauline, or the weekly serials which many of us fondly remember, in which the hero was left in some precarious position, […]
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Life seems full of the ritualized events we call “ceremonies.” Some people like them, others try to be elsewhere. I myself generally avoid weddings and funerals. They are so much alike – flowers, prayers, processions – sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. This can be embarrassing if you forget which one you’re at and, […]
I mean “Fools” here in the Shakespearian sense of clowns or jesters – in our day, professional comics, who make a living making us laugh. The most successful of these are highly paid, so much so that they can afford to hire other people to write jokes for them. As for jewels, the best ones […]
As an aesthetic object, the human ear hasn’t yet received its due. Poems and songs celebrating eyes, lips, even chins and noses, abound. Shakespeare, in his Seven Ages of Man, even depicted a lover “with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow.” But nobody writes ballads, woeful or otherwise, to anybody’s ear. Can it […]
No doubt you have heard the wise old saw which pontificates that “There is no accounting for taste.” Yet any number of psychologists and other professional explorers of the human psyche, to say nothing of all the people engaged in advertising, marketing, and other activities involving the purveying of products, are constantly trying to account […]
A crazy old woman of RhydeAte too many green apples, and died.The apples fermentedInside the dementedAnd soon she had cider inside her inside. I learned that poem from my father, who knew many similarly questionable classics. (Another was “It wasn’t the cough that carried him off – But the coffin they carried him off in.”) […]
One of the most common themes of all songs and poetry is the loss of love. Usually, it is the loser who is speaking or singing. And more often than not, the love he or she thought they had, has been transferred to somebody else. Statistics are lacking, but I would venture to guess that […]
It has been said (by me, in one of my Pot-Shots epigrams) that “Sometimes it seems all of life is a waiting room.” One of the “Beat” poets of the 1950s wrote a poem which consisted of nothing but the word “wait,” repeated hundreds of times, covering an entire page – except for the very […]
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I have always been in favor of equal rights for women (although I admit that, in my lifetime, it has sometimes been unsettling to see women police, and women doing other work which was hitherto mainly or entirely the preserve of men.) It is sad to think of how many gifted women, in former times, […]
There is no statistical proof, but I would hazard a guess that, in most people’s lives, the pleasant surprises are outnumbered by the disappointments. My own life is a case in point. The big happy surprises can be counted on one hand. The disappointments would require all the fingers, and perhaps most of the toes. […]
If you ever see a sundial inscribed with a Latin expression, it will probably say: HORAS NON NUMERO NISI SERENAS, which can be translated as “I count only the happy hours.” This is highly appropriate for a sundial, which tells the time only when the sun is shining. But the idea of always “looking on […]
Embarrassment comes in many shapes and sizes – but what we all find particularly interesting are other people’s “most embarrassing moments.” I’m going to tell you mine – but first, some peripheral observations. Such stories usually seem to involve unexpected revelations of things we normally try to keep “private” – particularly if they have to […]
Until a fairly recently, there was no Mohs in my life. Now there are two of them. The first Mohs was a gift of Google; the second, of a crossword puzzle. Here’s what happened: My dermatologist, whom I’ll call Dr. O, told me that the hard bump which had developed on the back of my […]
