A life in words

  • Boko Maru

    At a jazz festival I once heard a band called Boko Maru. They were really fun to see, and I’d like to hear their music again. Yet the band seems to have ceased to be quite a while ago. (See this archived version of their old web page and this review.) So here’s a request:…

  • Conflicting Views of Georgia

    I’m not sure who out there has been paying attention to this when they could be watching Michael Phelps swim, but a conflict has arisen between Georgia (the country, not the US state) and Russia over a separatist region known as South Ossetia (technically part of Georgia, though in essence independent.) Here are a few…

  • Solzhenitsyn (Updated)

    I just learned of the August 3rd 2008 death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1970 and author of the monumental GULAG Archipelago. Many were his critics, East and West, but to me Solzhenitsyn was a hero. A quotation from the New York Times’s obituary sums it up: Hundreds of well-known intellectuals…

There is nothing I dread so much, as a division of the Republic into two great Parties, each arranged under its leader and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This in my humble apprehension is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.John Adams, Letter to Jonathan Jackson, 2 Oct 1780