“Elbow,” he said.

It is the provisional answer to a question in the best TV series ever made. At least on my list.

The question? “What’s the loveliest word in the English language? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes on the page?” It is the kind of question a writer thinks about, but not so much a civilian. It is the hospitalized crime writer Philip Marlow in Dennis Potter’s 1986 BBC serial, The Singing Detective. “E-L-B-O-W,” comes the answer. Pronounced in the euphonious baritone of Michael Gambon as he talks to his Nurse Mills, played by the young Joanne Whalley.

I had avoided watching the series when it was first broadcast in the U.S. on PBS in 1988 because I thought the title meant it was an airy musical, perhaps in the Doris Day mode. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It is dark and gritty and brilliant. And it is No. 1 on my list of greatest television series.

Of course, any such list, whether Top 10 or “100 Greatest…” are ultimately meaningless and catalog simply one person’s taste. Your mileage may vary. But I’m pretty secure in my choices, with the proviso that although I am 78 years old and was born roughly the same time as television, I haven’t seen everything ever aired, not even all that was broadcast in this country. No one has.

There are a number of popular and well-thought of series I have never seen. Game of Thrones — I am bored by quasi-Medieval post-apocalyptic fantasy. Lonesome Dove — I love Robert Duvall, but mostly gave up cowboys after Hopalong Cassidy retired from the 12-inch black-and-white screen. The Wire — I should probably watch it, but it sounds unrelentingly grim.

But of the things I have watched, here are my top five series of all time. There are some qualifying parameters. I’m not talking about long-running TV series, or notable sitcoms or dramas. So, I’m not including All in the Family or Seinfeld. There are plenty of those, and they would qualify for a different list. I’m talking about limited series presentations, usually with a direct beginning, middle and end, like mini-series or one-offs.

And my taste runs to character-driven shows rather than plot-centered ones. Very few gunfights or car chases and a lot of talking and psychologies. I have nothing against one-liners or action thrillers; they have their place. But I am more taken with more complex stories, something more akin to art than simply entertainment.

And so, here are my top five TV shows of all time, and can all, in their way, be talked about as sharing some of the depth and insight of, say, Shakespeare or Tolstoy.

The Singing Detective (1986) — The six roughly hour-long episodes follow an English pulp fiction writer suffering in a hospital ward from psoriatic arthropathy, who tries to fight his boredom and maintain his sanity by mentally rewriting one of his books — about a private-eye who moonlights as a dance-hall singer — but increasingly hallucinates about a traumatic episode from his childhood during World War II, the suicide of his mother, and a foul deed he committed in school. The episodes become increasingly confused and mixed, punctuated by popular songs from the 1930s and ’40s. The whole is a phantasmagoria of paranoia with some of the most brilliant writing ever put to screenplay.

“Mr Marlow, you can’t deny I’m paying you good money…” “Money. You’re paying me money. Why put ‘good’ in front of it? Who knows its virtue? I don’t know where it’s been. Do you?”

The mystery he is imagining concerns smuggled Nazis, Russian spies, and ladies of commercial morality, all played out in a cheap dive called Skinskapes. The writer’s West Country childhood, with the deep accents and vocabulary of the region, concerns his love for his father and the infidelity of his mother, which he witnesses. Then, there is the interaction he has with his doctors, nurses, and fellow ward patients and most notable with his psychiatrist who tries to fathom the roots of the writer’s hysteria. And then, there is his estranged wife, who visits him in the ward and whom he abuses most horribly. All Osterized into a grand, almost operatic imbroglio, rising to a peak and resolution in the final episode.

The cast is a who’s who of all the actors you will find in later British classic TV shows, such as Midsomer Murders or Downton Abbey. We get to see them younger, before they aged: Patrick Malahide, David Ryall, Gerard Horan, Ron Cook, Janet Suzman, Alison Steadman, Bill Paterson, and, of course, Jim Carter and Imelda Staunton. These are names well known to anyone streaming British TV on Britbox or Acorn or PBS Masterpiece.

The Sopranos (1999-2007) — Over six seasons and 86 episodes on HBO, we followed Mob boss Tony Soprano and his two families — domestic and crime — as they turned obscure New Jersey into a nationally familiar landscape. Hooray for Hoboken.

It is primarily the first two seasons that were memorable, changing American TV viewing habits permanently, and launching a new “Golden Age” of television. Over the quarter-century since its debut, streaming has taken over from network television and made CBS, ABC and NBC into also-rans.

It took great acting and great writing to do this, and we followed Tony as he suffered panic attacks over some ducks in his swimming pool, challenges to his leadership in the mob, various betrayals, both by him and against him, and, most importantly in the first two seasons, the absolutely awful behavior of his mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), who Rolling Stone magazine named as the “Third Greatest TV Villain of All Time.” I assume she is beaten only by Iago and Satan.

After Marchand’s death in 2000, the show didn’t exactly go downhill, but it never again had the norm-smashing impact it had at the beginning. It was still riveting, but less revolutionary.

Two of its best episodes came in those first two seasons. “College,” in which Tony takes his daughter, Meadow, to college and discovers a mob informant living under witness protection and proceeds to garrote him in the most realistic-feeling depiction of strangulation I’ve ever seen in a film or on TV. It took a long, agonizing time to accomplish and viewers felt every second of it. And, on the other side of the spectrum, “Pine Barrens,” in which Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti attempt to dispose of a Russian gangster in snowy South Jersey and get lost in the process. Both episodes are listed in Wikipedia as among the 30 best television episodes ever.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) — This is all down to Alec Guinness, who defines the role of British spy George Smiley so microscopically that no matter what great actor attempts the part — and Gary Oldman is not chopped liver in the 2011 movie version — it can never be topped or even equalled. Guinness can “say more with a slight parting of his lips than most actors can say while shouting from the rafters,” wrote The New York Times.

The seven-episode adaptation of le Carré’s 1974 novel did away with all the hokey James Bond razzmatazz and gave us slow, believable procedure as Smiley sniffs out a traitor in the British secret service. Le Carré made up all the slang and the spycraft, but made us believe everything must really work this way in the real MI6.

The story proceeds slowly and carefully, and the dramatis personae comprise some of the best and best-known British actors of the time, including Ian Richardson (House of Cards); Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation); Sian Phillips (I, Claudius); Michael Jayston (Nicholas and Alexandra); Michael Aldridge (Last of the Summer Wine); Warren Clarke (A Clockwork Orange); and other stalwarts of U.K. films and television, Bernard Hepton; Ian Bannen, Joss Ackland; John Standing; Anthony Bate and others. It’s a joy to watch them all doing what they do best.

Fleabag (2016-2019) — It isn’t just the Golden Oldies that count. More recently Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s extension of her one-woman stage show became nominated as one of the best TV presentations ever. It is comic, nasty, witty, intensely observant and a punch in the eye of Postmodern meta brilliance.

Her character, never named except as “Fleabag,” clumsily negotiates family, sex, relationships, and grief in ways embarrassingly both egocentric and clueless. And all the while speaking to us, the audience, in private asides — direct progeny of George Burns talking out of the TV at us in his 1950s sitcom.

Its second season may even be better than the first, when she develops a crush on the Sexy Priest (Andrew Scott). In that season’s Episode 3, the priest notices — for the first time anyone in the whole series has done so — that Fleabag is zoning out and talking to the camera, which is a way she has of disengaging from awkward situations. This disruption in the normal contract of fiction between the reality of the story and the reality of the story-telling is a shivering moment, and leads to the resolution of the entire series.

I, Claudius (1976) — I hesitated in picking No. 5 for my list, because there are other legitimate contenders (see below) for the spot. But finally, I have to pick the BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ two novels about the first four emperors of the Roman Empire (five if you count the foreshadowing of Nero).

It suffers from the early videotape technology, which required a bland sort of lighting. But it compensates by its psychological complexity, great acting and something not normally noticed — great directing.

There is a YouTube video by the name of Moviewise that offers a careful examination of the combined blocking and camera positioning and movement that keeps the action moving seamlessly (Link here). When it is pointed out, you can’t help noticing how craftily it is all done.

Yes, it all plays out as a kind of Roman soap opera, but that is the point — what we think of as grand history is really just today in togas. All the social climbing, back-biting, treachery, power grabbing and hidden agendas we come to see every day on cable news. Caligula seems all too familiar.

Then, there are all the great actors: Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, Brian Blessed, George Baker, Margaret Tyzack, John Hurt, Bernard Hepton, Patrick Stewart — all familiar names from other shows on this list and elsewhere.

As I said, lists like this are fun, but they are arbitrary. There has been so much good on the airwaves over the decades. Picking the five best has meant not including Prime Suspect (1991-1996, 2003, 2006), one of the grimmest, most realistic police procedurals ever, which first brought Helen Mirren to a wider public (at least in America — in the U.K., she has been a known quantity since at least the 1969 Michael Powell film, Age of Consent.)

Then, there’s the Mike Nichol’s TV version of Angels in America (2003), with Al Pacino playing villain Roy Cohn. I saw the original Broadway production of the two-part stage play, and later two other versions live, and the filmed version cannot carry the visceral gut-punch of live theater, but it does as well as can be done on film.

And how can you not include Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), probably the funniest 12 episodes of sitcom ever put together, with John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and Connie Booth. Ended after two short seasons because you cannot top perfection.

And a special mention to the most literate silly sitcom ever, The Good Place (2016-2020), with Ted Danson and Kristin Bell. Both smart and funny, it seems to have slipped past most viewers on its original airing, but plays with philosophy, life and death in thoughtful and playful ways. It counts for me as one of the best things TV has ever given us. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.

Finally, there are two made-for-TV series that were later edited and released as theatrical films that most people think of as movies rather than television shows, but they are truly masterpieces and best seen in their multi-episode forms.

First, there was Scenes from a Marriage (1973), by directed by Ingmar Bergman, following the ennui and dissolution of an otherwise happy marriage, with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. It was groundbreaking when first made, focusing on all the small details most stories elide past. (One also has to acknowledge the American TV series An American Family, from the same year, which takes a more documentary approach to the same themes, but has a more “reality TV” feel about it, more performative than deep.)

And there’s Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), which is perhaps the richest, warmest, most inclusive family portrait ever screened. Nobody doesn’t love Fanny and Alexander. At 5-hours long, it was shown on Swedish television in five episodes, but later edited to 3 hours for theatrical release. It is considered one of the greatest films of all time, but could equally be added to the list of greatest TV.

So there, you have a challenge. What would make your list of the five greatest TV series of all time?

Ballad of Reading

February 4, 2026

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I have been a reader for about three quarters of a century. It began so long ago, I don’t remember exactly when I started — probably in kindergarten when I discovered words. But once I began, I couldn’t get enough.

I read anything I could get my mitts on, from the backs of cereal boxes to the funny pages in the newspaper to road signs when the family was out driving. I’m sure I drove my parents nuts by pointing out stop signs and mileage markers.

This is not to claim any sort of prodigy. I believe most kids latch on to text as soon as they learned to decipher it.

But lately, I’ve been thinking about how my reading habits have changed over the years, and how those changes parallel life experience, and the needs I sought to satisfy as I grew up. Shakespeare wrote about the seven ages of life, and I think about the stages of reading.

My early reading is chronicled by years. In third grade, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and read all the books I could find in my elementary school library (which was also the town library). There was Roy Chapman Andrews and his All About Dinosaurs, part of a series of “All About” books written for kids.

By the fourth grade, I had moved on to whales, and spent the school year absorbing everything I could about cetaceans. And so it progressed through astronomy, airplanes, and, by the seventh grade, I was into World War II. By then I had left behind the books written for young readers and took on the history books and memoirs. Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis; Day of Infamy by Walter Lord; Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower.

Other boys my age were reading Hardy Boys books and maybe Sherlock Holmes, but I was single-minded in reading non-fiction. I wanted to learn everything. I was a compendious fact basket. Dump it all in.

We were given a 1930s copy of the Compton’s Illustrated Encyclopedia and I read through it constantly. It might have been out of date, but it had lovely drawings of autogiros and streamlined trains and learned about everything from Angkor Wat to frog-egg fertilization and The Great War.

My parents, who had just high school educations and had lived through the Great Depression, were eager to educate their children to guarantee them good jobs in life. There was never any doubt they would send their three sons to college. And so, they encouraged this reading.

They thought they would help by buying books for me, including a copy of some young adult fiction. I sneered at it. Fiction? “I don’t want to read anything that isn’t true,” I said.

This first phase was the fact-gathering stage. I wanted to learn as much as possible and reading was the funnel that poured it all into my hungry brain. You have to fill the pepper grinder before you can grind pepper.

And so, it poured in and stuck: 44 B.C.; A.D. 1066; 1215; 1588; 1776; 1914 — and Aug. 6, 1945, a date that hangs over anyone my age like a threatening sky.

I stayed away from fiction until, I was, perhaps, 12 or 13 years old, when I discovered science fiction. I gobbled it up like candy. All the mid-level sci-fi writers that were popular in the late ’50s and early ’60s: Poul Anderson: Lester del Rey; Robert Heinlein; Frederick Pohl; and, of course, Ray Bradbury. I must have burned out on it, because I cannot read any fantasy or sci-fi anymore. Lord of the Rings? God help me. No, never.

But there were the Fu Manchu books of Sax Rohmer, with their Yellow Peril and archly Victorian prose. All pure pulp, but they opened the world of fiction to me and transitioned me into the second phase of readership, which is perhaps the most embarrassing phase.

By high school, I wanted to prove I was a grown-up, and what is more, an intellectual grown up. I subscribed to Evergreen Review and Paul Krassner’s Realist. I was hip, in my tight jeans, pointy shoes and hair slicked with Wildroot Cream Oil.

And I began reading important fiction of the time: Saul Bellow; John Updike; Norman Mailer; Thomas Pynchon. Of course, I didn’t understand any of them. I was a pimply-faced high-school kid. What did I know? But I looked oh, so sophisticated carrying around Herzog under my arm. It was only when I read it again a few years ago that I fully realized how funny the book is. I didn’t know it was a comedy when I first read it. There is nothing more earnest than a teenager.

I did manage to pick up and understand On the Road and other Kerouac books, and J.D. Salinger spoke directly to my adolescent soul. On the Road held up on re-reading years later; not Catcher in the Rye, which is now close to unreadable. I couldn’t even finish a re-read.

The problem with adolescence is you have almost no life experience. It’s all just literature to you. You get caught up in “symbolism,” and what a book “means.” As if it were written in code to be deciphered. A 16-year-old is in no position to know what was going on in those books. It wasn’t much different from when we were assigned The Scarlet Letter or The Great Gatsby in eighth grade. I could understand the words, but not understand what was said between the lines.

A teenager thinks the world is simple. It is the tragedy of youth.

The following stage was college reading. There was, of course, a lot of it. But I loved it, especially the Classics courses I took, reading Greek and Roman authors, the English Romantic poets, and Chaucer. I took to Chaucer immediately. I still read him for the pleasure of his language. There was a course on Milton and another on William Blake. I ate the stuff up. I still do.

And I was then old enough that I actually understood much of what I was reading. I was beginning to have a life and feel the complexity of the world.

College only lasted four years and after that came marriage and divorce and unemployment and — just as bad — employment. I still read, but mostly I just tried to keep it all together, and not always successfully. (Unemployment gave me a lot of reading time and for months, I managed a book a day.)

The fourth great phase of reading came after divorce and other traumatic events, when I had what might now be called a break down. It didn’t stop me reading, and actually it led to a fever of it. I read all of Henry Miller (or as much as was available, not counting his privately printed short works); all of Melville, or pretty near; piles of D.H. Lawrence; and basket-loads of Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner — and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which seemed to sum up my situation — and that marked a change in my relationship to books.

This was a turning point that not everyone seems to experience. Until this point, I measured my life against what I read. Was I like Nick Carraway or Sal Paradise? I wanted to be “important” like them and thought literature was there to show me the way.

After that point, instead of measuring my life against the books, I measured them against my life. Did they seem true to what I had experienced? When I was young, the books were real and my life a simulacrum; as I grew, it became clear my life was the real thing and the literature was only a reflection. Not “did I measure up,” but “did the books measure up?”

Books, as a percentage of time spent, varies quite a bit over the course of a life. I find the more I am engaged with doing something, like work or socializing, the less time I spend reading. And the fifth phase began when I started teaching in Virginia. It wasn’t that I stopped reading, but that I did less of it, and that the books I did read tended more toward histories, biographies, memoirs and essays.

I tore through Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War; a one-volume selection from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; tons of H.L. Mencken, including all his Prejudices; Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago; and as antidote, all the David Sedaris I could find.

This phase continued through 25 years working for The Arizona Republic, in Phoenix, where I was, among other things, the art critic. I read a lot for work — including background on things I was writing about.

The relationship with books had changed, but so had my relationship with words altogether. When I was young, I was eager for knowledge and read by the boatload in search of ways to fill my insides. But somewhere along the line the well was full and the words spent less time piling in and more gushing out: I became a professional writer and all that back-pressure of words, information and experience burst out. I wrote like a hose spraying water. I couldn’t fill the buckets fast enough.

Even on vacations, driving around this country or others, I spent part of every day writing down notes that later turned into stories for the paper.

So, there were those two major shifts in life: first when I began measuring the books against my life; and second when instead of just adding more words to the pile, all the millions of words dammed up behind my cranium began pouring out.

Through all of these phases, but increasingly over the years, I found myself re-reading as much as reading. My favorite books I tackled again and again. I cannot number the times I have read Moby Dick or Paradise Lost or James Joyce’s Ulysses — all dived into time after time for pure pleasure. There are others: Thoreau’s Walden; Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises; Gatsby, of course, now that I know what’s going on in it.

I try to re-read the Iliad once a year, usually with a different translation each time. I sometimes change pace and do the Odyssey. I tried Dante, and can gobble up Inferno any time, but admit I find Purgatorio and Paradiso quite a slog. I’ll stick with Hell, thank you.

The books I’ve mentioned so far indicate a fairly parochial taste for Western culture, and I have to admit to that. But I’ve soaked up a fair amount of early and non-Western writings to try to keep some balance. I’ve read and re-read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mahabharata, Lao-Tze, Beowulf, and Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, among others. I’ve read large swaths of the Vedas and Upanishads, and even a bit of various versions of the Book of the Dead. There is Sufi poetry and the Popol Vuh. I have tried to soften the boundaries of my cultural walls.

There is a sixth phase, where I am now — retired. Although, as I’ve said many times, a writer never really retires. He just stops getting paid for it. I now write this blog, for which I’ve written more than 800 entries with another hundred more for other online venues, all of which total a million and a half words, all since 2012 when I left the madding crowd behind.

I have slowed down some, but I still read. Now, I read a good deal of poetry. I find it satisfies my love not just of meaning but of the words themselves, the taste and mouth-feel of them. It is a connection with the world, and with the netting of language that holds that world up before my mind.

It is said in some cultures, after a life of striving and ambition, that there comes a time of quiet and reflection, a time to spend on weighing the life and figuring out where it falls in the larger picture of time and the universe.

I certainly feel that. But it hasn’t reduced my need to recharge that well from which I draw my words. My Amazon account proves that. I keep getting new books and find that I simply don’t have any more space on my bookshelves, and so, they pile up on top of other books and in dangerous stacks on the floor.

Every once in a while, there is a book-avalanche and under the chaos I rediscover some book I had forgot and sit down and open it up again. I’ll deal with the mess later.

Gardens and other Edens

January 27, 2026

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During the 1980s and ’90s, I made a series of photographs of gardens. Mostly the gardens of friends, and a few public gardens. And not photographs, but rather, photographs in series — groups of 10 or 20 meant to be seen as a single unit, much like a music suite: various movements making a single titled presentation.

There was a moment back then when “sequences” were fashionable. Duane Michaels made a living off them. But those were meant to be read like panels of a comic strip, telling a single story. Frames from a film.

But what I was thinking of was a series not a sequence. They were meant to be shifting moods or patterns, understood the way multi-movement music was heard. A suite of images: Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, and Gigue, for instance. And intended to be understood as a single thing rather than merely a collection.

Whether I was successful or not, it was what I was thinking.

I created perhaps a dozen or so of these series, each boxed up and ordered, with a title card and with individual photographs shown in an order, and all taken during a single day as a single experience. I still work that way, although less formally. I had a show at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, Va., where I had taught in the mid-1980s, and included 12 of these series on the walls. There were more than a hundred prints, lined up and organized by book.

I’ve continued to work in series, but it was gardens I focused on back then. The photos seemed personal without being intrusive. They were metaphors of their creators. I thought I might share a couple of them.

One of the first was made on a visit to New Orleans while staying with friends and former colleagues Judy and Dave Walker. Judy had been the food editor of The Arizona Republic and Dave, aka “Cap’n Dave,” had been our TV writer. They both left Arizona to work for the Times Picayune.

Judy was one of the most gracious and kind people I have ever known. She was one of those people everyone felt comfortable with and at home in any social situation. It was her garden that I thought mirrored her personality.

Here is that set, in order:

Another kind of series was of the public garden, in this case the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. I had visited many times, walking the sunny paths through cactus, cholla, agave and boojum trees.

One winter, my friend Alexander came to visit us in the desert and I took him to the Botanical Gardens and we walked around all day. It was his first time visiting the West and I got to see it all again for the first time through his eyes.

I first met Sandro — for that is what we call him — my sophomore year at college. He was nuts about classical music and we spent many hours in each others’ dorm rooms spinning vinyl on our portable stereos. We became lifelong friends and spent many camping trips to the Outer Banks. And later, when I was going through a rough patch in life, Sandro and his wife, Mary Lou, took me in and gave me a place to live, fed me and took care of me. I am forever grateful to the two of them.

They later moved to Maine and live in an old farmhouse in Sullivan and I have visited them many times, although it has gotten more difficult now that I am old, and both driving and flying have become a problem.

Later, just before I retired, I had a show of my garden photographs at the same Desert Botanical Garden, although this time, it was individual images from the series. The bulk of the images were of Monet’s garden in Giverny, but images from the earlier books were mixed in, in a show titled “Giverny and Other Edens.”

I now photograph my back yard and watch it through its seasons, and my own as well.

Click on any image to enlarge

Rock solid

January 23, 2026

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In the TV show, Big Bang Theory, physicist Sheldon Cooper claims that geology “isn’t a real science.” He’s quite a snob about it. But if you unfold any standard geological map — one that outlines the underlying bedrock of any state or county — you will see something so mindbogglingly complex and incomprehensible, that it couldn’t be anything but science.

A geologist is someone who can tell the difference between diorite and andesite, and can measure the schistosity of mica, and explain how seashell fossils came to be found on the top of Mt. Everest. Geologists find petroleum and metals under the earth, and tell us the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. And a good deal of what is written in the field is — much as with quantum physics — well beyond the ken and vocabulary of mere mortals.

They write things such as: “Mass transport deposits (MTDs) occur as intercalations within turbiditic sequences above the ophiolites. They represent syncontractional submarine slides that occurred on frontal accretionary prism slopes during the Late Cretaceous–Paleocene closure of the LPOB.” That, by the way is “Ligurian-Piedmont Ocean Basin,” in case you were confused.

Southern Utah

So, yes, they are scientists. And it’s fun to learn as much as you can, and collect interesting rocks and minerals. But geology is also for poets, artists and cooks. And it is the humanistic aspects of geology that have fascinated me since first studying geology in college.

I read a good deal about geology, including the four books written by John McPhee in the 1980s — although they are about geologists as much as about the rocks they study. They are at the comprehensible boundary between general and specialist knowledge. And you’ll never drive through an interstate highway roadcut the same way again.

Along the Colorado River, Utah

Geology is just everywhere and affects all of our lives not only daily, but even hourly. Think of your car. Every bit of it, save only the rubber in its tires and the fabric or leather of its upholstery, came originally out of the ground. Whether it is the steel of its engine, the platinum in its catalytic converter, the glass in its windshield or the plastic of its dashboard — all dug out of the ground before being polished up and installed on your Hyundai.

And even your tires, these days, are only partially rubber. The rest of it was dug up, too.

The skillet in your kitchen is just a rock that has been processed. The knives, too, and the potato peeler. All just carefully refined stones. In many ways, we still live in the Stone Age; we’re just more sophisticated about it than those guys banging rocks together in the Paleolithic caves.

Paleolithic bison carving

Our human prehistory has been divided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. I suggest we now live in the Metalithic Age. (Everything now seems to be “meta.”) We do amazing things with the ore we dredge out of the ground and the petroleum we pump, but the foundation of our civilization is still geology.

New York on the Hudson River

Cities are the index of civilization and most of the world’s great cities are built on harbors or rivers. The Indus, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Huang Ho. That’s geology. The cities are built with steel and concrete. Geology. Their streets are paved with either concrete or tar and gravel. More geology.

Our food grows in dirt, or grazes on the grasses that sprout from the soil — a soil derived from the bedrock underneath. What are vitamins and minerals but the residue of those same rocks?

Blue Hill, Maine

Geology drives history, too. For instance, because Norway and Greece are so rocky and ungenerous for agriculture, their peoples took to the sea and the Greeks colonized everywhere from Spain to the Black Sea, and the Vikings from Constantinople and Sicily to England and Iceland. Geology kept the Old World and the New from interacting significantly until 1492. It blocked the westward expansion of the British colonies in North America for a century. It is the reason that Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires.” Plate tectonics — “continental drift” — and the formation of Eurasia as a single east-west landmass has been hypothesized as the cause for European and Asian historical dominance.

Asarco pit mine, Arizona

And geology, in the form of coal mining and petroleum extraction, is the cause of catastrophic climate change and global warming.

Geologist Donald Beaumont wrote, “Geology will, unfortunately, remain an under-recognized, ‘phantom,’ science in that its role in explaining the foundations for human society may never be fully appreciated.”

I’m not making the case that geology explains everything, nor that it is the only thing that made us what we are, but I am saying that it helps explain it, and that you can see the same forces acting out elsewhere in the world.

Olympic Mountains, Washington

It isn’t only physical, it is psychological also. Geology creates emotions. And so artists and poets have used geology to elicit in their audiences certain emotional states — rocky metaphors.

Pleasant Cove, Chuckanut, Wash.

It is to seek this power that great landscape artists — whether painters or photographers — make their pictures. It is not to make a postcard of a pretty piece of scenery, but to find in the land a metaphor for thought, emotion or state of mind — or even a political philosophy.

Canadian Rockies, Alberta

That mythic force is why we feel the rise in our throats when we sing of “amber waves of grain,” and “purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain.” Rocks and terrain serve as metaphors for internal states.

“The Nymphs of the Luo River,” by Gu Kaizhi

European artists have used that metaphor since the Middle Ages, Asian artists since the Jin Dynasty.

“La Gioconda” detail

Consider the Mona Lisa. Yes, it is a portrait, but behind the smiling lady is a rocky landscape. It is not like anything actually found in Italy, but rather it is a metaphorical landscape — a mountainous desert. Renaissance artists often used such stony views as a reminder that life on earth is a kind of spiritual desert (and the afterlife is where true fulfillment is to be found). As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote: “Here nis noon hoom, here is but wildernesse.”

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, Calif.

St. Jerome lived in a cave, and painters used the story to show the geology of spiritual isolation. Here are only three of many Renaissance paintings of the saint, by Andrea Mantegna, Lorenzo Lotto, and Joachim Patenier, all from the early 1500s.

Romantic painters in the 19th century used the vast Alps as a reminder that the cosmos is infinitely larger and more impersonal than we like to believe. Geology becomes an image of The Sublime.

“Manfred on the Jungfrau” by John Martin

Chinese landscape painting features some amazing mountains. I used to believe these scenes were pure fantasy, but no, these mountains actually exist. On porcelain, by Huang Huanwu, a traditional painting — and a photograph, to prove they’re real.

Three paintings and a photo

Prehistoric peoples used the rocks for their art, too.

We use stone for permanence. Consider all the marble statuary and granite architecture.

And the way we scrawl our names on rock faces. “K and A Forever.”

The stone is certainly more permanent than the relationship.

Hudson River Palisades, N.J.

Even the pigments that artists use comes from the ground. In the past, it was actually rocks that were ground up and processed. Now, there are pigments also made from petroleum.

Lapis Lazuli

Different rocks, with their colors and textures, evoke different emotions. Think of a brilliant diamond or ruby; think of a cinder. Different emotions.

Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska

We use geology in our language, although often the words mutually exclusive import.

“You must have been stoned when you thought that up.” “No, I was stone cold sober.” “Well, the theory is either a bit rocky or it is rock-solid.” He answered with a stony silence.

Schoodic Point, Maine

The colors, textures and the grain all impart meaning.

By John Ruskin

I began seriously considering the art elements of geology after seeing a splendid drawing of gneiss by English artist and critic John Ruskin. He made it over several days while visiting Scotland in 1853. The drawing had everything I respond to: texture, detail, close observation and an attention to the world as it is, that is as close to love as is possible to hold for the inanimate world. Ruskin was an astonishing draftsman.

By Mel Steele

It has been one of the lessons of the 20th century and Modernism that meaning in art can transcend anecdote and be more than a story told in a still scene and can impart meaning purely through shape, color, texture, line and scale. Emotions can be evoked by all of them. We have had well more than a hundred years of abstract art.

Even realistic painting depends on the medium it is made from. It isn’t just the face or the scene, but the color and texture of that face and scene.

Craggy Gardens, N.C.

And a camera pointed at the shapes of geology can create meaning in the same manner as the abstract painting we lionize.

I have since found many rocks, with their esthetic pleasures. There is bright color

Blue Ridge Parkway, N.C.

There is gnarly texture

Blue Ridge Parkway, N.C.

There are planes of surface

Schoodic Point, Maine

Repetition of shapes

Hug Point, Arch Cape, Ore.

Complexity of image

Schoodic Point, Maine

And a starry night

Pisgah National Forest, NC

Or flying over the continent and looking down at erosion

Over Colorado

One of the primary functions of art is to make us pay attention. It is an interaction with the world and a response to it.

Rio Puerco Ruins, N.M.

The most important lesson I was ever taught was by a college professor who would not accept glib work. Like many bright students, I was adept at giving a teacher what he or she wanted — basically repeating back what was said in class. But when I did that in my English Romantic Poetry class, he gave me a D for a paper that was otherwise correct in every aspect except one. “Don’t give me back what I’ve said,” he told me. “Engage with the material.” Real engagement cannot be faked.

What was real were the words written, not the words written about the words. Dive directly into the poetry. Don’t waste time learning “about” the poetry.

Try to take the material under study seriously and be real about it. If what you find contradicts what the teacher said, all the better. You’ve learned something.

Engage with the material — something you should do with friends, family, society, even the air and the rocks. Engage. Don’t gloss.

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The doing

January 10, 2026

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On Schoodic Mountain, Maine

I am within days of turning 78 and I feel my age, slowing down and dealing with new aches daily. I seem to be in reasonably good health, considering. But I don’t know how long I have left, and the length of string in front is clearly shorter than the length trailing behind. I am increasingly aware of mortality.

And I have been considering all the things I have made and written over those piled decades and sometimes wonder why. Nothing will happen to any of it after I’m gone: It will eventually find some landfill somewhere. And part of me is perfectly alright with my life’s effort in words or images being utterly forgotten. Most of what anyone has produced over the millennia is long forgotten, and it’s fine. But I did a few things moderately well, and I can look at it all and note it.

Over the past weeks, I have been spending time trying to consolidate a definitive version of some of the work from over the years. One has a tendency to take the long look and attempt some sort of codification of the evidence of a life lived. And so, I’ve been editing and winnowing.

It is related to the unavoidable sadness one feels, having spent that life learning a huge trove, not merely of facts, but of useful experience — things we never understood as arrogant youths, full of ourselves and dead certain we were smarter than all those benighted generations that gave us birth — and knowing there is no way to impart that accrued experience to the children and grandchildren we love, that they will have to go through all of it again, on their own, and in turn come to rue that they will not be able to keep their own children and grandchildren from the same pains, mistakes and ignorances.

And it will be the same for the physical evidence of that experience — the art and writing. So, I look over a lifetime of production and question to what end?

Even I am astonished at the amount of work put in, a constant chugging away at the production machine, pictures and paragraphs. In 25 years at the newspaper, I wrote more than two-and-a-half million words, and since retiring, I have written another million-and-a-half on this blog — with another 100 essays written for the Spirit of the Senses website in Phoenix, having also given at least a score of well-researched lectures for that salon group. There are also an uncounted number of letters penned, and also both fiction and poetry.

To say nothing of the tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of photographs I have made.

I have always been this way. I didn’t think about it when I was a boy, but even before first grade, my idea of fun was a pile of paper and a pencil or crayon and I would spend hours drawing. Most kids do that, but most slowly lose the need as they grow up. In high school, I was given access to the darkroom and began making photographs, while also writing for the school newspaper. Always scribble, scribble, scribble. Eh, Mr. Nilsen?

After college, I found work writing, editing and making photos for a Black weekly newspaper, where I pumped out a weekly cooking column and the “Dear Carol” advice to the lovelorn column, in addition to writing the editorials and coming up with the headlines. (My favorite: When the iconic Greensboro, N.C., nightclub closed, I wrote in giant 128 point type, “Cosmos Folds!” Thought it a grand joke.)

In the single month of March of 1980, I wrote 500 pages of letters to friends, on a tiny plastic aqua-colored portable typewriter on a tree-stump “desk” in the back yard. When I finally began work at the daily paper in Phoenix, I averaged about three stories a week. I thought I was being lazy, but apparently I was producing more than most. (At least, that’s what my editors told me).

I would use the word “creating,” but that seems too important for what I was doing. I was producing.

Los, with his forging hammer, by William Blake

There is a character in poet William Blake’s obsessive mythology called Los, and he is one of the four main “gods” of human psychology, and Los spends eternity forging an endless chain. Why he does so is irrelevant: It is what he does. He is defined by it. He produces. It is what I have done: produce.

Many jobs in life call more for other talents. Nurses and doctors, for instance, or office workers who keep the paperwork flowing, or in selling or organizing. The actual creation of something new is not for them the goal. But in my life, like that of Los, all that matters is production. Make. Make. Make. I cannot imagine spending my life without making stuff.

And so, I am going over the thousands of files stored on computer and CD-ROMs and winnowing down what I think has been the better examples, and working on them to create the best or final versions “for posterity,” by which I mean, so I can look at them and contemplate what I have spent my life doing.

I just finished editing the bulk of the portraits I have made, cleaned them up, re-framed some, improved contrast and tone, and come up with a final version. If I were to present a portfolio, these images are what I would offer. I have about 200 such images in the file.

I previously did the same thing for the nudes I took over the years; there were fewer of them and even fewer of those were worth saving.

There have been uncounted thousands, probably tens of thousands, of landscapes I have pointed my camera at. Most are just snapshots — memories of travel — but there are hundreds saved intended as works of art, and shown in gallery exhibits and printed in books

The earlier ones are more clearly derivative, but gave me lots of practice printing in the darkroom, so that I became an excellent printer of silver images. The longer I kept working, the more individual my landscapes became.

Most of my photographic work has been in clear genres, such as portrait, nude, landscape and still life.

One subject that has remained as a visual source of amazement over 50 years of making images are trees. I have thousands of prints of various trees in various seasons and weathers.

And, because of when I grew up — in an era when Abstract Expressionism was king of the hill — I add to those genres a search for abstractions.

And even, non-camera work, where I played with the chemicals and papers to make my abstractions directly in the darkroom.

About 25 years ago, I began making photographs in series — collected in portfolios of between 10 and 20 prints each — made in various gardens, including public gardens and the back yards of friends and family. I must have made scores of these boxes, each with its title, and meant to be understood not as individual images, but as a kind of suite to be taken whole.

And with images made over the course of a few hours, tapping the shutter at whatever caught my eye as deserving its attention.

I expanded the series idea into images I found outside my airliner when flying around the country, a series I titled Window Seat.

And another using a cheap toy camera (a $2.98 Diana) at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona.

And another made from clouds on one particularly stormy afternoon from my back yard in Phoenix, collected in a book titled Monsoon.

Where does all this need to keep creating, keep producing come from? It is just my nature. I can’t help it: It keeps mind and hands busy, engaged, interested, alive.

I’ve made linocuts, drawn with pen and ink, played with graphic design, and even, when my wife needed a step-stool for the kitchen, I built one from birch wood in the shape of a jack rabbit.

None of this means I feel especially talented or important, but just that putting things into this world that hadn’t existed before I made them seems as if it is whatever purpose my life has been made for.

When I was newly minted and 20 years old, I thought I would be an artist or poet. It was a goal. But it didn’t take long to give up such an idea. Instead, I began writing and making images. The focus was no longer on my identity, who I thought I was, and more on engaging with the world. Looking outward rather than being stuck with self.

I’ve known plenty of genuine artists; I don’t count myself among them. But I am doing something analogous.

I didn’t care if I was an artist. I was more interested in understanding the world, either visually or conceptually. And not so much understanding as simply experiencing it. I can’t say that self evaporated — I have always had a strong sense of self, as anyone who knows me will admit under muffled giggles. But that it didn’t matter.

And so, a lifetime of making things was not spent in any ambitious attempt at public recognition. I certainly could have written books or sought more gallery shows, but, as comic Steven Wright once put it, “I have ambition, but without the drive.” But I have been driven to use my words and my camera to see better, to connect better, to make objective documents recording what I have seen or learned. Making pictures forces my attention.

So, when I question having spent my life making and producing, and what it was worth, the obvious answer is not in the rewards of having made, but in the immediate doing. The meaning is in the act.

I will stop when I no longer breathe.

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The sitcom situation

December 30, 2025

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I want to put in a good word for TV sitcoms. They don’t get much respect. And it is true that many of them are routine, uninspired and forgettable. “Chewing gum for the eyes.” But the genre as a whole has both a long history (longer than you may suspect), and a significant role to play in the arts. Yes, the arts.

What we call art is a lot of things, and serves many purposes, but one thing all art, whether painting, music, theater or literature, is asked to do is entertain. There are different levels of entertainment, but even Joyce’s Ulysses or Berg’s Lulu offer an underlying level of amusement.

Comedy players, Mosaic from Pompeii

Some offer much more, but the base line of keeping us interested has been there from the earliest times we have record of. And much of it even fills university courses. We study Plautus and Terrence — among the earliest sitcom writers (Rome, 6th century BC), with plays full of dirty old men, unfaithful wives, clever slaves, mistaken identities and love-struck young men.

There are few actual characters in such plays, and a great panoply of stock figures. These kinds of figures, stuck in difficult and comic situations, populate the works of Italian commedia dell’arte, the comedies of Molière, and the plays of Shakespeare (who would sometimes borrow from Plautus and Terrence). Victorian novels — by Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray — now treated as literature, were at the time serialized in popular magazines and thought of much the same as we now consume TV shows. And all now deemed worth of academic study and even reverence.

So, why not the same for All in the Family or The Honeymooners? Are they any “lower” an art form than The Twin Menaechmi? Or The Braggart Soldier?

Remember, Shakespeare’s audience included the uneducated groundlings; he wrote also for them. And he was not above the traditional fart joke. It ain’t all Seneca and Henry James.

I am roughly the same age as television, and have watched the sitcom from its earliest TV days. I was one year old when The Goldbergs switched from radio to television (“Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Bloom…”). There was The Aldrich Family from 1949 to 1953 (“Henry! Henry Aldrich!” “Coming, Mother.”), and the first season of The Life of Riley, with Jackie Gleason originally taking over the title role from William Bendix, who had played the part on radio (“What a revoltin’ development this is”). Bendix took back the role for the rest of the series run. I don’t know how old I might have been when I first started watching these series. Probably in my playpen watching the images wiggle on the 12-inch screen of a Dumont television.

The 1950s brought the onslaught and the sitcom became a staple of the boob tube. These series I remember quite well: Beulah; The Bob Cummings Show; The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (the first Postmodern show, where George could watch what Gracie was planning on his own TV screen and comment to the audience); December Bride; I Married Joan; Private Secretary; Mister Peepers.

I haven’t mentioned the three most important shows of the time. The Honeymooners emerged as a sometime skit on Cavalcade of Stars, the Jackie Gleason variety show on the Dumont network, sometimes taking up most of the run time. But in 1955, the skit was spun off into a half-hour sitcom for 39 episodes, still run in syndication on various cable channels. (“To the moon, Alice”).

I Love Lucy ran from 1951 to 1957 and pioneered the three-camera filmed sitcom with live audience and laugh track. For its entire run, it ranked No. 1, No. 2, or No. 3 in the ratings. (I have to confess, contrary to the majority opinion, I never found Lucy very funny. Watching reruns, I still don’t). Those reruns can still be found in syndication on cable.

Alvin Childress, Tim Moore, Spencer Williams

But you won’t find Amos ’n’ Andy. It was enormously popular from 1951 to 1953. But reaction to the racial stereotypes changed markedly during the rise of the Civil Rights movement. It would be hard to complain about the series cancellation. In the context of its times, it was deserved. It can be hard to watch nowadays. But I have seen all 78 episodes on bootleg DVDs and must admit we have lost some brilliant comic performances, especially by ex-vaudevillian Tim Moore as the Kingfish. Yes, there are some awful stereotypes, but not everyone was shufflin’ and grifting. Amos was an upright citizen and family man, and the series showed quite a few Black doctors and judges, all horrified at the shenanigans of the series stars.

And it should be pointed out that most sitcoms, Black, white or otherwise, focus on less-than-admirable characters. Let’s face it, bland Ward Cleaver does not support a TV series. You need Archie Bunker, Ralph Kramden, or Larry David. Something out of the norm, but exaggerated. Getting past the particulars of Amos ’n’ Andy, basically the same stereotypes come back later as George Jefferson or J.J. in Good Times (“Dyn-O-Mite”) or Redd Foxx in Sanford and Son. Same caricatures, different generation.

I’m not suggesting we forgive Amos ’n’ Andy, but rather to see it in context, and recognize the talent that went into it.

The fact that even Millennials know who Lucy Ricardo was, or Ralph Kramden or Rob and Laura Petrie, means that some of the hundreds of sitcoms that have aired, from the last century and this, have a cultural staying power, very like the classics we read at university.

The foundational stereotypes — or archetypes — have persisted, too. How many sitcoms feature bumbling husbands, from Chester A. Riley and Ozzie Nelson to Curb Your Enthusiasm and The King of Queens? Conversely, the trope of the ditzy wife, from Gracie Allen to Married … With Children to The Middle? Mothers-in-law are a perennial butt of jokes, as are clueless bosses and gay best friends. They each provide a predictable set of familiar and comfortable jokes. (Although the limits of comfort can and have changed over time: Blonde and Polish jokes haven’t worn as well).

And most of these are just modern changes rung on the characters of the commedia dell’arte. Harlequin, Colombina, Pantalone, Pulcinella, Zanni and the lot. We aren’t looking for fully rounded characters so much as familiar types to build plots and gags around — the “situations” in situation comedies.

So, the sitcom has a long history. And I have a long history with them. And I have divided them into four roughly defined groups. The borders of these groups may be squishy — you may parse them differently — but the categories are defensible.

First, there are those that have had an effect on culture broadly. They tend to be the best written and acted, but they have wormed their way into the general consciousness. Class A includes I Love Lucy (my qualms not withstanding), The Honeymooners, All In the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown, The Office (American version), Seinfeld, Roseanne, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Cosby Show (which now is hard to watch — both hard to find and hard to endure, knowing what we now know). And I would include both The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon. Class acts all the way.

But I would include also: Taxi, Barney Miller, Dick Van Dyke, Cheers, The Bob Newhart Show (the original one), and a few that I never warmed to, but still have a cultural significance, like Friends and Married… With Children. All are or have been in the national conversation.

I should also include a few British series that have had an impact, mainly Fawlty Towers, the British Office, and Absolutely Fabulous.

Class B includes all the quality shows that came and went, with funny characters and solid jokes, but never buried into the Zeitgeist in quite the same way. All solid entries. You can add quite a few to this list and it will depend on your taste and funny bone. I would include: 3rd Rock From the Sun; Black-ish; Brooklyn Nine-Nine; Frasier; Golden Girls; The Good Place (should be in Class A, but not enough people watched); Happy Days; Malcolm in the Middle; The Middle; Mike & Molly; Modern Family; The New Adventures of Old Christine; Parks and Recreation; Scrubs; Two and a Half Men; Veep; WKRP in Cincinnati; and your choice of others. Among my favorites are Mom, Night Court, Reno 911. Individual taste may vary. (I have not included many of the old shows from the ’50s and ’60s that few people have had a chance to see: My Little Margie, Private Secretary; Topper.)

The next rung down, in Class C are the workaday shows, sometimes OK time-wasters, but full of cliched characters and tired jokes — the kind that have the familiar form of jokes, but seldom the wit or laughs. Writing on autopilot. This is the vast majority of TV sitcom bulk. The roughage and fiber of the viewing diet.

When we watch these, it is often more out of habit than desire. The forms are familiar and the laugh track tells us when a joke has passed by. Did anyone ever think The Munsters was prime comedy? or Gilligan’s Island? McHale’s Navy? Saved by the Bell? Mediocrity incarnate. Hogan’s Heroes? I could name a hundred, propelled by laugh tracks and the need of writers to fill air time. Networks toss them on the screen, hoping they’ll stick. Some do, but only because they are gluey.

Wikipedia lists hundreds of sitcom titles and I would guess some 75 percent of them fall into Class C. At least half of those are gone in a single season, un-renewed, or cancelled after a few goes. The rest stick around because they are not overly offensive. They may feature actors we like, even if they have to spout insipid dialog.

Bewitched; The Brady Bunch; Chico and the Man; Community; Ellen; F Troop; The Facts of Life; The Flying Nun; I Dream of Jeannie; Last Man Standing; The Monkees; Perfect Strangers; That ’70s Show; Who’s the Boss? Go ahead: Make a case for any of them. Tube fodder.

Three’s Company is the epitome of Class C, although my son, deeply knowledgeable in the ways of film and media, assures me it is a classic. He loves it. De gustibus.

Then, there is the bottom feeding Class D, those shows so bad they have become legend. My Mother the Car is the type specimen for this class. A series only a studio executive high on cocaine and bourbon, and distracted by facing an expensive divorce and maybe a teenage son in jail could have green-lighted. Quite a few of these were meant to be vehicles for aging film stars given their own sitcom series. The Doris Day Show, The Debbie Reynolds Show, The Tammy Grimes Show, Mickey (with Mickey Rooney), The Paul Lynde Show (in which he is an attorney and family man), Wendy and Me (with George Burns and Connie Stevens), Shirley’s World (Shirley MacLaine as a photojournalist), and The Bing Crosby Show. Most of these didn’t make it past the first season.

Also at the dismal bottom: Hello Larry, New Monkees, She’s the Sheriff, The Trouble with Larry (“not just not funny, but actively depressing”), Cavemen, Homeboys in Outer Space, The Ropers. Most cancelled after one season.

In England, Heil, Honey, I’m Home with Adolf and Eva never made it past the first episode. (currently unavailable on streaming or disk. Too soon?).

Among the abject failures are most of the American remakes of popular British comedies. Many of them never made it past the pilot stage.

And so, you have four general classes of television sitcoms. The best worthy of saving for future generations, the worst best left for whatever is the digital version of the bottom of the canary cage.

The past wasn’t so different. What we remember of classical Roman comedy are what is extant. Much isn’t. A good deal of it was probably just as banal as most bad TV. We don’t know: It didn’t survive. The Victorian novel was largely a serial enterprise, like seasons of a sitcom, weekly chapters published. But for each Dickens or Trollope, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of lesser works now mostly forgotten. In time, we will no doubt continue winnowing the TV past, saving the Norman Lears and perhaps the Chuck Lorres and ranking them as our Plautus and Terrence. Perhaps.

The low arts can still be art.

Seeing things

December 12, 2025

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“Venice,” woodcut by Dürer

In 1494, at the age of 23, after years of apprenticeship as an artist in Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer left Germany to visit Venice and Italy and find out what all the Hoohah was about. He was amazed at what he saw and when he returned home to Germany, he brought the Italian Renaissance with him. He went back south for seconds in 1505 and stayed for over a year, soaking up the influences. It was what he had to do if he wanted to see what the Big Boys were doing.

If you wanted to see, you had to travel. There were no full-color coffeetable art books to thumb through. If you wanted to see the work of Bellini, you had to go to Venice; for Raphael, to Rome.

“Goethe in Italy” by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1786

In 1786, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then age 37, made the trip, this time to see the Roman and Greek sculpture that had been so highly praised in the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He stayed until 1788, studying more than the statues, including many statuesque young women, which he later wrote about in his book of poetry, Roman Elegies.

For most of history — until improvements in color printing in the middle of the 20th century — the only way to see famous art was to leave home and go there. Yes, there were engraved black and white copies published, and later monochrome halftones, but you could not really get a sense of Rembrandt or Titian without traveling.

It gave rise in 17th century to the practice of upper-class families sending their sons on the “Grand Tour” to become educated and cultured. From the 1600s to about the middle of the 19th century, it was common for well-off young men to take a “gap year” — or two — to visit the Continent and see the sights and become men of the world before taking up their roles in government or business. Of course, many of these youths were more attracted to the live demoiselles and regazze than to the canvas madonnas.

“Rose,” Philbert-Louis Debucourt 1788

It wasn’t just visual art. Before recordings, if you wanted to hear a Beethoven symphony, you had to attend a live concert. If you lived outside the city, you had to travel to get to the concert hall. Bach famously walked 280 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck in order to hear Buxtehude play the organ. Even to hear now-famous symphonies and concertos you likely had to wait years between programmed performances. You might be lucky to have heard Beethoven’s Fifth once or twice in your life. Now, it seems, you can’t get away from it.

Today, when you can own 30 different CDs of the Beethoven symphonies and have your choice from Furtwangler to Norrington; you can fill your bookshelves with illustrated volumes of any artist you want; and watch endless YouTube videos about the Mona Lisa, it is important to remember that they are not the actual experience of the art in question, but varyingly faithful simulacra. You still need the real thing. A three-inch color plate of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa cannot replicate the experience of seeing the real thing.

And so, we go to museums and galleries to get to know the art that is our cultural inheritance. Even today people travel across the world to see some of the world’s most famous art. The Grand Tour still exists, if only in ghost form, as a gap year or a summer abroad. My granddaughter had her high school summer in Italy. The traditions continue. Such travel affords an education that books just cannot give.

In the 1960s, I accompanied my grandmother when she went back to the Old Country for the first time since she was five years old. We went to the village where she was born, Mosby, in southern Norway, and as part of that trip, I was sent on a (literal) Cook’s tour of Western Europe, taking in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. I saw the Cologne cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, Ste. Chapelle and the Louvre, among other things. Mostly, it made suburban New Jersey seem even more banal.

Met; Guggenheim; Frick; Whitney; Cloisters; MoMA

But then, I tried to escape the Garden State as much as possible. I was lucky: I had my own Grand Tour just a few miles away. During my own high school years, living on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, I spent as much time as I could in Manhattan, going to concerts and visiting all the museums: The Met, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the Whitney, the Cloisters, the Asia Society, even the long-gone Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle.

And most of all — the Museum of Modern Art, where I felt most at home. I came to know many famous paintings as old friends. Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Matisse’s L’Atelier Rouge; Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon; Pollock’s One Number 31; Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie; Henri Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy; Dali’s Persistence of Memory — all proper blue-chip Modern Art landmarks.

After I went away to college, I frequently made the trip to Washington, D.C., to visit the National Gallery of Art, and later, the Hirschhorn and Corcoran. I ate up art like a starving man. It’s hardly surprising that I later made my career as an art critic.

And working for the newspaper, I was sent around the country for major exhibits in Boston, New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia. I was even sent to South Africa in 1989 to study the art scene there. And vacations brought me and my wife to France many times. Seeing as much as possible and finding troves of art in even small corners of the Continent.

There have been dozens of important artworks I have been grateful to have known, not just in reproduction, but live, in front of my own eyes. My inner life is infinitely enriched by the experiences. There are many I could name, from Rembrandt’s self portrait in DC to Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Art We? Where Are We Going? from Boston, but I need to pick out at least these six as central to my understanding of art, and of life.

When you know works from reproduction, you cannot feel their size, cannot know the precise colors and pigments used, cannot grasp their tactile surfaces. Some of the most famous art in the world is known to most people by their reproduction on coffee mugs, T-shirts or commemorative plates. What you think is art is really just iconography — the nameable subject matter. The actuality, the physicality of the work is irrelevant in such cases. Seeing the original can then be a revelation.

So here are the six works that have meant the most to me, that I am most grateful for having been able to know personally.

Picasso, Guernica — When I was growing up, this, perhaps the greatest painting of the 20th century, was sitting in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, and I visited it often. As a teenager, I knew it was “important,” because I had seen it in books and magazines. But I thought of it as “mine,” because I knew it would always be there for me. Alas, in 1981, it was repatriated to Spain, where, I have to admit, it belongs. An old friend moved away. It was the first important artwork that I had what felt like a personal relationship with.

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles — In reverse, Blue Poles is a painting that came to New York for me. Pollock’s 16-foot drip painting from 1952 was auctioned off from a private collection in 1973 and sent to Australia. I loved many of the great Pollocks from MoMA and the Met, but thought I had lost the chance forever to see perhaps his most famous work. But a retrospective Pollock exhibit in 1998 at MoMA brought it back temporarily to the Big Apple. I got to see it there, where it was the jewel-lit highlight of the last gallery.

Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece — The giant altarpiece comprises 10 paintings by Matthias Grünewald, including the pathos-laden crucifixion as its centerpiece, and a group of polychrome wood sculptures by Nikolaus Hagenauer, executed between 1512 and 1516. It sits in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, Alsace, France. The altarpiece was designed to be either closed or open, with various panels showing at different times in the Catholic calendar. I have no stake in the religious significance, I cannot help but be overwhelmed by the pathos and power of the work.

Lascaux II — The cave paintings at Lascaux, France, date from about 20,000 years ago. They were discovered in 1963 and include about 600 images of prehistoric animals. The caves have been closed since 1963 to protect them, but a copy has been made and open to the public. I never thought I would get to experience them, but I got to visit both the reproduced experience at Lascaux II, but also the genuine cave art at nearby Font-de-Gaume. Seeing the original art there threw my spine into a buzz of uncanny deep-time — a state not rational but limbic.

Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows — In 1999 the LA County Museum of Art mounted a 70-piece show of the paintings of Van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, including many of his most famous works. My job got me sent to cover the exhibit and I was blown over by the works (also, astonished at how amateurish and awful many of his early works were: It took a while for Van Gogh to become Van Gogh).

One of the last paintings in the last gallery was Wheatfield with Crows and up close you could see who wild and feverish the artist’s brushstrokes were, and what colors sat on his pallete, left largely unblended on the canvas.

North Rose Window, Chartres Cathedral — I have been back to Chartres many times, and each visit, I spend a half hour, at least, sitting in the transept staring at the North Rose Window. It is, as I have said many times, the single most beautiful man-made creation I have ever seen. It is transcendent, a glowing object of meditation, whose shapes seem to move, to dance around the centerpoint. I am awe blasted. It almost makes up of all the misery, suffering and death human beings cause to each other.

This is, of course, a limited selection. Before writing, I made a list of paintings, sculptures, plays, operas, architecture, poems, novels — I could just make a list of the types of art that would already be too long to include in a single blog entry. Narrowing down to visual arts still left me with too many things to write about — hence my squeezing it all into only six works. (It tried to make a conventional 5, but I already feel bad about only including six.)

Seeing all this art and lamenting all that I never had a chance to see, only reinforced my sense that art is not just what makes us human, but how it makes us human.

I was talking with my very Southern wife about how those brought up down here have a stronger connection to the land than us Yankees. Southerners have often lived on the same patch of land for generations and their sense of identity can course back through great-grandparents and beyond. Your sense of who you are includes the centuries before you were born. New Jersey never gave me that.

But I do have that same sense when looking at the paintings or hearing the music of the past. This all gave birth to me; it is who I am. We too often think of culture in terms of hoity-toity high culture. But really, culture is all the things that have accumulated over time to make the lives we now take for granted.

When I see or hear the so-called canonical works of Western culture, I have that sense of belonging to a long, continuous line. It speaks to me; it tells me who I am.

Naming names

November 29, 2025

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We’ve all heard of Alexander the Great, William the Conqueror, or Suleiman the Magnificent. Who wouldn’t want to be known to history by such flattering names? But among the many kings, princes, barons and otherwise leaders, there are a few names a bit less splendiferous.

Alexander the Great; William the Conqueror; Suleiman the Magnificent

Every literate English speaker has probably heard of Ethelred the Unready, but what about Ivar the Boneless? We think of the third Julian Roman emperor as Caligula, although his actual name was Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. “Caligula” was a less-than-laudatory nickname which actually means “little boots,” because when he was a boy, he tried wearing a real soldiers footware and the troopers made fun of him by calling him Little Boots, or “Bootsie.”

But the list of unflattering cognomens, sobriquets and nicknames is really quite long. Not everyone was the Sun King. There was also Sebastian the Asleep of Portugal, who reigned from 1554 to 1578. And Barefoot Magnus III of Norway (1073-1103). Or Johann Georg the Beer Jug, Elector of Saxony from 1611 to 1656. As you might have surmised, he loved to bend his elbow.

Alfonso the Leper; Ivaylo the Cabbage; Piero the Gouty

None of these men seem to have had press agents spinning their boss’ reputations. Richard I may have been Lion-Hearted, but the Third was Richard Crookback. Ivaylo the Cabbage ruled Bulgaria in the 13th century. The grandson of Barefoot Magnus ruled Norway from 1130 to 1135 as Magnus the Blind. Vasili Kosoi ruled Moscow in the 15th century as Vasili the Cross-eyed. And, of course, Charles the Bald, or Charles II of France, who apparently had a full head of hair.

Physical debility seems to have been popular. William the One-Eyed of Meissen; Peter the Stutterer of Portugal; Sverker the Clubfoot of Sweden; Piero the Gouty of Florence; Alfonso the Leper of Portugal. Eric XI of Sweden (1216-1250) was called Eric the Lisp and Lame.

The most famous was probably Timur the Lame, who conquered much of the world and best known as Tamerlane. And don’t forget Uros the Weak of Serbia. Or Wilfred the Hairy of Catalonia.

Wilfred the Hairy; Ethelred the Unready; Halfdan the Bad Entertainer

The 1100s featured Bolesłav the Curly in Poland, Conan the Fat in Brittany, and Ragnvald Roundhead in Sweden.

John the Posthumus was born in France in 1316 after his father’s death and so was born a king already. He lived only a few days, and so was king from birth to death.

In AD741 Constantine was born in Byzantium and when he was baptized, the infant defecated in the baptismal font and so became ever after Emperor Constantine the Dung Named.

Sancho the Populator was king of Portugal in the 13th century (that nation seems to get a lot of these names). He had 20 children, both legitimate and otherwise. But he is beat out by John the Babymaker of the Holy Roman Empire in the 16th century, who had 63 illegitimate kids. Something for Elon Musk to aim for, I guess.

On the other hand, there was Henry the Impotent of Castile in the 15th C. and nasty old King John of England was called John Soft-Sword.

Louis Do-Nothing; Louis the Unavoidable; James the Shit

England has had its share of names, some glorious, like Elizabeth I as Gloriana, but otherwise, there was George IV, known as the Prince of Whales because of his obesity, and George III, known as derisively as Farmer George for his less-than-regal interest in agriculture. And James II was known in Ireland as Seamus as Chaca or “James the Shit” for his treatment of that country.

I love encountering these historical names. Constantius the Pale was Roman emperor. Stupid Willy was Wilhelm I of Germany. Louis Do-Nothing was Louis V of France. Germany had Wenceslaus the Drunkard. And Portugal (again) had Manuel I, the Grocer-King.

Coloman the Bookish ruled Hungary in the 12th century and Ivan I of Russia was Ivan Moneybags. And King Ludwig of Bavaria was Mad King Ludwig. And while Vlad Tepec is remembered to history as “Vlad the Impaler” and the model for Dracula, Besarab IV gained the throne of Wallachia with Vlad’s help and was then known as Besarab Tepalus, or “The Little Impaler.”

Then, there’s Alfonso the Slobberer, King of Galicia from 1188-1230, who foamed at the mouth when angered. And Eystein Halfdansson, an 8th century Norwegian king known as Eystein the Fart. Eystein’s son was known as Halfdan the Bad Entertainer — couldn’t throw a decent party. Another Norwegian king, from the 13th century was Haakon the Crazy. King Harald I of Norway from 1454 to 1474 had several names. He was Harald Fairhair, but that may have been meant ironically, since he was also Harald Tanglehair, Harald Shockhead and Harald the Lousy.

Harald Tanglehair, aka Harald the Lousy

Finally, Eric II of Denmark was Eric the Memorable but doesn’t seem to have done anything of note in his short four-year reign, at least not that anyone can remember.

These are just a few epithets and sobriquets. Wikipedia lists more than 200 historical figures once named as “The Great,” From Abbas the Great of Iran (1587-1629) to Zayn al-Abadin the Great, Sultan of Kashmir (1418-1470). Alexander the Great wasn’t called that until the Roman playwright Plautus named him that in a play, Mostellaria, in the Third Century BCE. He was also known, in Persia as Iskander the Accursed.

A list of monarchs by nickname in Wikipedia contains a thousand entries, some quite familiar, like Ivan the Terrible, some more obscure, such as Piero the Gouty of Florence, Italy.

Constantine Dung-Named; Childeric the Idiot; Ferdinand the Bomb

Some have more than one alternate identity. Napoleon Bonaparte had at least 21, including L’Aiglon (The Eagle), Le Petit Caporal (The Little Corporal), The Corsican, The Gunner of Toulon, Little Boney, and more. Most of them authored by his enemies, who seemed hesitant to pronounce his actual name. And so: The Nightmare of Europe, the Corsican Ogre, The Devil’s Favorite, The Fiend of Europe (or just, The Fiend). The British seemed to hate and fear Nappy the most and never seemed to run out of insulting names for the man.

Superstition about saying certain names out loud have given us many of these. Avoiding the name of the Devil has given us a bunch of folktale cognomens: Old Scratch, Old Nick, The Evil One Split-Foot, Father of Lies, Green-horned Monster, Jimmy Square-Foot, Old Adam, Tail-N-Horns, the Wicked One, Rule of Demons.

Which brings us to Donald John Trump. No one recently has accrued so many alternate cognomens, epithets or sobriquets. One single website lists 409 of them. Nixon might have been Tricky Dick and Clinton was Slick Willy, but no one before has had them delivered by the truckload. I stopped looking after about 800 of them. (I’m not going to list them all — I haven’t the heart). Everyone has their favorites.

They fall into several vast categories: His lying; his heft; his thin skin; his greed and self-dealing; his tweeting; his name-calling; his business failures; his sexual predation; his fascism; his failing mental powers; his word salad — the list goes on. And let’s not forget his orange hue or his hair, or his too-long ties, his golf cheating, or his bragging or the garish bad taste of a tinpot dictator. He makes it easy.

In his first term I began calling him — Moose-a-Loony. It’s almost a party game to make up new to call him. It’s fun; try it. Orange Foolius. (Although younger readers might not know where that one comes from.) Large-mouth Ass. Keep it going. Your turn.

Among my favorites: Trumplethinskin: Trumpster Fire; Mango Mussolini; Cheat-O; Tangerine Palpatine; Mar-a-Lardo; Captain Bonespur; Hair Furor; Prima Donald; Assaulter-in-Chief; Boss Tweet; Deadbeat Donald; the Lyin’ King; The Man of Steal; Forrest Trump; Donny Dementia. Use these and no one needs to be told who you are referring to. The Creature from the Orange Lagoon.

Everyone who wants is free to invent more of them. Late night talk show hosts seem to come up with new ones each night for a good laugh.

Stephen Colbert called him the Orange Manatee; John Oliver said he was Rome Burning in Man Form; Seth Meyers dubbed him Creep Throat; Jon Stewart said he was a Decomposing Jack-O-Lantern. Samantha Bee called him a Screaming Carrot Demon, and also America’s Burst Appendix. Trevor Noah said he was a Pile of Old Garbage Covered in Vodka Sauce (although I would have thought “ketchup” more apt).

The characterization that seems to have gotten under the Tangerine-Tinted Trashcan Fire (S. Bee) more than any other was delivered almost 40 years ago in 1988 when Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter called him a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Carter said that he made the comment “just to drive him a little bit crazy.” And according to Carter, it still does.

“To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers,” Carter said. “I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”

But whether his fingers are abnormally short or not, there is no question he is a vulgarian. Every time DJT opens his pie-hole he demonstrates how little class he possesses. “Quiet, Piggy!”

And so, we keep renaming the Yam-colored Yammerer, as if we don’t want to have to say his name.

A linguist named Jenny Lederer said, “people feel like not repeating his name is [a way of] not speaking to the brand and the value system that goes along with his political ideology.”

Even a mention of his name is a problem, with a kind of folk-magic power, causing many of us to avoid it. Tweets will spell the name “Tr*mp,” like it’s a four-letter profanity, although that doesn’t really hide the name, but it does make the Tweet unsearchable by the keyword, “Trump,” and so limits its spread. And the asterisk implies that his name is vulgar, like the the dirty words censored in old books.

One is left to wonder what posterity (if there is posterity) will finally settle on as the epithet for “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

We have Old Hickory, Honest Abe, Silent Cal, the Gipper, Bubba and Dubya — but how will we ever choose from the superfluity of imprecations swirling around Trump as he circles the drain?

Trials of an English major

November 15, 2025

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I was an English major and I’m married to an English major and it’s hard being an English major and only getting harder. An English major feels genuine pain hearing the language abused, mal-used, corrupted and perverted.

I’m not talking here about outdated grammar rules and a fussy sort of prisspot pedantry. As a matter for fact, one of the most persistent pains a true English major suffers is such misplaced censure, especially when interrupting a casual speaker to let them know that “them” is plural and “speaker” is singular. In my book, this is merely rude. A caboose preposition is nothing to lose sleep over.

No, what I’m writing about here is are things that are genuinely ugly or purposely unclear, or overly trendy, to the point of losing all meaning. You know — politics. That and corporate language, or management speech — which I call “Manglish” — is a great corrupter of speech.

“We have assessed the unprecedented market shifts and have decided to pivot this company’s new normal to a deep-dive into a robust holistic approach to our core competency, circling back to a recalibrated synergy amid human capital in solidarity with unprecedented times.”

Committees try to make language sound profound and wind up writing piffle. I’m sure it was a committee that agreed in Iredell County, N.C., to make the county slogan, “Crossroads for the future.” I do not think that word means what you think it means.

I wrote for a daily newspaper and language was my bread and butter, but the higher you go up the corporate ladder, the worse your words become. I remember the day they posted a new “mission statement” on every other column in the office, filled with buzz-word verbiage that didn’t actually mean anything. I looked at my colleague and said, “If I wrote like that, I’d be out of a job.”

But it isn’t just Manglish. Ordinary people are becoming quite lax about words and meanings. Too often, if it sounds vaguely right, it must be so. And you get “For all intensive purposes,” “It’s a doggy-dog world,” being on “tender hooks,” or “no need to get your dandruff up.”

“I’ve seen ‘viscous attack’ too many times recently,” my wife says. “It gives me an interior pain like a gall bladder attack.”

And the online world is full of shortcuts, some of which are quite clever, but most of which are just barbarous. An essay about digital usage is a whole nother thing. Not room here to dive in.

But, there is a world of alternative usage that is not standard English, that any real English major will welcome as adding richness to the mother tongue. Regionalisms, for instance. Appalachian dialect: “I’m fixin’ to go to the store;”— actually, that is “stoe,” rhymes with “toe” — “I belong to have a duck;” “I have drank my share of Co-Cola.”

And Southern English has served to solve the historical problem of having lost the distinction between the singular “thee,” and the plural “you,” with the plural “you all,” or “y’all.” Although, more and more “y’all” is now being used also for the singular, and so is becoming replaced with “all y’all.” Keep up, folks.

Then, there’s African-American English, which has enriched the American tongue immensely, as has Yiddish: “Shtick,” “chutzpah,” “klutz,” “schmooze,” “tchotchke.”

Regionalisms and borrowings are like idioms. Sometimes they don’t really make sense, but they fall comfortably on the tongue. “Who’s there?” “It’s me.” Grammatically, it would be proper to say “It is I,” but no one not a pedant would ever say such a thing. The ear is a better arbiter than a rulebook.

George Orwell ended his list of rules for writing with the most important: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

English is a happily promiscuous tongue and so much of the richness of the language comes from borrowings. But there are still other problems: bad usage, misuse of homonyms, loss of distinctions. The English major’s ears sting with each onslaught.

What causes our ears to burn falls into three broad categories. Things that are just wrong; things that are changing; and things that offend taste. Each is likely to set off an alarm ping in our sensitive English major brains.

Every time I go to the grocery store I am hit with “10 items or less.” Few people even notice, but the English major notices; we don’t like it. “Comprised of” is a barbarism. “Comprises” includes all of a certain class, not some items in a list of choices. I feel slapped on the cheek every time I come across it mal-used.

And homonyms: a king’s “rein,” or a book “sited” by an article, or a school “principle” being fired. It happens all the time. It is endemic online. “Their,” “they’re,” “there” — do you know the difference? “You’re,” “your?” Most young’uns IM-ing on their iPhones don’t seem to care.

And fine distinctions of usage: I am always bothered when I see a murderer get “hung” in an old Western, when we know he was “hanged.”

Again, most Americans hardly even notice such things. They all get by just fine not caring about the distinction between “e.g.” and “i.e.” In fact, they can get all sniffy about it.

I know a former medical transcriptionist who typed up a doctor’s notes each day, and would correct his grammar and vocabulary. She corrected the man’s “We will keep you appraised of the outcome,” with “apprised,” and each time, he would “correct” that back to “appraised.” Eventually, she gave up on that one.

English majors know the difference between “imply” and “infer,” and it causes a hiccup when they are mixed up. “Disinterested” mean having no stake in the outcome; “uninterested” means you cannot be arsed. They are not interchangeable.

We EMs cringe when we hear “enormity” being used to mean “big,” when it actually means a “great evil.” And “unique” should remain unique, unqualifiable. Of course, “literally” is used figuratively literally all the time. Something is not “ironic” simply because it is coincidental.

I hear the phrase “begging the question” almost every day, and always misused. It refers to circular reasoning, not to “raising the question.” I hold my ears and yell “Nya-nya-nya” until it is over.

Some things, which used to be wrong, are slowly being folded into the language quietly, and our EM ears may still jump at hearing them. “Can” and “may” used to mean distinct things, but that difference was lost at least 100 years ago. We can give that one up. And “hopefully” used to be a pariah word, but we have to admit, it serves a grammatical function and we have to let it in, however grudgingly.

My wife is particularly sensitive to the non-word, “alot.” She absolutely hates it. I understand, although I recognize a need for it. “A lot” is a noun, and sometimes we use it as an adjective: “I like chocolate a lot.” Perhaps “alot” will eventually become an adjective. Not for Anne.

People are different and have differing talents. We seem to be born with them. Some people grasp mathematics in a way a humanities student will never be able to match. Some have artistic or musical talent. We can all learn to play the piano, but only certain people can squeeze actual music out of the notes.

And each of us can learn our native tongue, but some of us were born with a part of our brains attuned to linguistic subtlety. We soaked up vocabulary in grade school; we won spelling bees; we wrote better essays; we cringe at the coarseness of political speech. Language for the born English major is a scintillating art, with nuance and emotion, shadings and flavors. We savor it: It is not merely functional.

(I loved my vocabulary lessons in grade school, and when we were asked to write sentences using that week’s new words, I tried to use them all in a single sentence. People who show off like that often become writers.)

Just as my piano playing, even when I learned whole movements of Beethoven sonatas, was always the equivalent of speaking English as a second language, my best friend, Sandro, could sit at a piano and every key was fluent, natural, and expressive. It was a joy to hear him play; a trial for me just to hit the right notes.

I am saying that those of us who gravitate to speech, writing, and language in general, have something akin to that sort of talent. It is inherent, and it can be a curse. Bad language has the same effect on our ear as a wrong note on a piano.

We can feel the clunkiness of poorly expressed thoughts, even if they are grammatical. Graceful language is better. And so, we can rankle at awkward expressions.

I have a particular issue, which I share with most aging journalists, which is that I had AP style drummed into me — that is, the dicta of the Associated Press Stylebook, that coil-bound dictator of spelling, grammar and usage. One understands that AP style was never meant to be an ultimate arbiter of language, but rather a means of maintaining consistency of style in a newspaper, so that, for instance, on Page 1 we didn’t have a “gray” car and on Page 3 one that was “grey.”

And so, the rules I lived by meant that there was no such thing as 12 p.m. Is that noon or is that midnight? Noon was neither a.m. nor p.m. Same for midnight. They had their own descriptors. “Street” might be abbreviated in an address, but never “road.” Why? I never knew, but in my first week on the copy desk I had it beaten into me when I goofed.

“Back yard” was two words, but one word as an adjective, “backyard patio.” Always. “Air bag,” two words; “moviegoer, one word. “Last” and “past” mean different things, so, not “last week,” unless Armageddon is nigh, but “this past week.” Picky, picky.

I had to learn all the entries in the stylebook. The 55th edition of the AP Stylebook is 618 pages. And this current one differs from the one I had back in 1988; some things have changed. Back then, the hot pepper was a “chilli pepper,” and the Southwestern stew was “chili.” I lived and worked in Phoenix, Ariz., and we all understood this would get us laughed off the street, and so exceptions were made: yes, it’s a chile.

Here I am, nearly 40 years later, and retired for the past 12 years, and I still tend to follow AP style in this blog, with some few exceptions I choose out of rebellion. But I still italicize formal titles of books, music and art, while not italicizing chapter names or symphony numbers, per AP style. I still spell out “r-o-a-d.” It’s a hard habit to break.

The online world seems to care little for the niceties of English. We are even tending back to hieroglyphs, where emojis or acronyms take the place of words and phrases. LMAO, and as a card-carrying alte kaker, I often have to Google these alphabet agglutinations just to know what my granddaughters are e-mailing me. Their seam to be new 1s each wk.

And don’t get me started on punctuation.

Piles on piles

October 29, 2025

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“Postmodernism” is a catchall word that seems to have lost all meaning, especially because it hardly seems “post-“ at all. In the popular mind — if it thinks about such art-historical buzzwords at all — it means paintings of “Donald Duck Crossing the Delaware,” a mashup of pop culture and the history of fine art.

But such things are hardly new. In fact, rejiggering the past has been a central tenet of Modernism for more than a century. Old wine in new bottles. It could be argued that remaking the old is central to all art for as long as it has existed. Virgil remade Homer and Milton remade them both, and Derek Walcott’s Omeros does it all over again. And even the Iliad is the result of its previous oral tellings and retellings. Churn and rechurn.

This is true in music, also. Not just the parody masses of the 15th century, or all those Baroque composers “borrowing” tunes from themselves or their contemporaries, or the many recomposings of La Folie, but more recently, Tchaikovsky rescoring Mozart and Glazunov turning Chopin into the ballet Les Sylphides.

Of course, all the arts build on previous, if not through quoting or re-use, but at the very least just by existing in a continuum of culture. You could not have had the Renaissance without Classical Rome, or Hedda Gabler without As You Like It. All one forward surge.

All art is, on one level, a conversation with the past. Even Jeff Koons’ sculptural portrait of Michael Jackson and Bubbles is a gloss on Pheidias’ statue of Dionysos from the east pediment of the Parthenon from the Fifth Century BCE.

Or, take Manet’s Olympia, which ironically quotes Titan’s Venus of Urbino. (I wrote an exhaustive essay in “Meme and Variations,” from this blog in 2014. Link Here)

Manet was tweaking his nose at the Renaissance painting, and in 1920, Igor Stravinsky was doing something similar to what he assumed was the music of Giovanni Pergolesi, in his ballet score, Pulcinella.

In 21 movements, he rebuilt and re-orchestrated the 18th-century music and made it sound utterly Stravinskian. “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine,” as Leonard Bernstein called it. Catchy tunes and astringent orchestration. (The fact that the source-music wasn’t Pergolesi but mostly keyboard music by Milanese composer Carlo Ignazio Monza and trio sonatas by Domenico Gallo, a lesser known Venetian composer, both of whose works were sometimes bootlegged under the more salable name of Pergolesi. A YouTube video with the original compositions is available. Link here)

It’s surprising how little Stravinsky changed his originals, except by a little nipping and tucking, and using brilliant and cheeky orchestration.

But this habit of updating ancient music was a frequent technique among composers, especially in the 20th century. Stravinsky himself applied the spice to Tchaikovsky in Le Baiser de la Fée (“The Fairy’s Kiss”) from 1928.

When I was a young recent college graduate, with little or no money in my pocket, I found a battered LP in a castaway bin of a local bookstore. It was on an Eastern European recording label, perhaps a Soviet one, lost to time and my ancient loss of memory. It cost 98 cents and contained William Walton’s The Wise Virgins on one side and Domenico Tomassini’s The Good Humored Ladies on the other. That LP’s fate is lost to 60 years of peregrination, and I only recently found a CD with these works on it. I was emotionally transported to another time and place.

The Walton was a re-orchestration and revamp of work by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Tomassini did the same with music by Domenico Scarlatti. Both were designed as ballet scores.

(Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas were first orchestrated in 1743 by English Baroque composer Charles Avison in 12 Concerti Grossi After Scarlatti, but Avison did the opposite of Stravinsky: He smoothed over Scarlatti’s pungent harmonies and expressive dissonances, to make them “pretty.” Avison did the same for a dozen violin sonatas by Francesco Geminiani.)

All this piqued my interest, and I spent the past week listening to recordings of all the refurbished music I could find, and there is a lot of it. Two people, in particular, are the source for a great deal of it.

The conductor Thomas Beecham performed the music of Handel back in the early 20th century when Baroque music was practically unheard, outside of the annual Messiah productions. But Beecham not only recorded whole Handel operas and oratorios, he brought excerpts of them into ballet scores he compiled, with his own modern re-orchestrations of them, but often played bits in his concerts.

The best known is probably Love in Bath, a ballet score made from arias, choruses and sinfonias from various Handel works, in rescorings much less snarky than Stravinsky’s, and entirely pleasant on the ear.

He began with The Gods Go a’Begging in 1928, then The Origin of Design (1932), The Faithful Shepherd (1940), Amaryllis (1944), The Great Elopement (1945) and finally, Love in Bath (1956). They often varied each time he presented them, changing suite movements according to his pleasure each time they were programmed.

The other popular champion of ancient music was Ottorino Respighi, who made popular hits out of Renaissance and Baroque lute and keyboard music, most famously in his three suites of Antiche danze ed arie (“Ancient Airs and Dances”) which he wrote from 1917 to 1931. They remain popular in concert and have often been recorded. It’s hard not to love them and whistle the tunes for the rest of the day.

Then, there’s Gli Uccelli (“The Birds”) from 1928, in which Respighi orchestrated keyboard pieces by early (mostly) Italian composers from the 17th and 18th centuries. And Vetrate di chiesa (“Church Windows”) from 1926, based on Gregorian chant and plainsong.

Richard Strauss wrote two suites updating and orchestrating keyboard music by François Couperin. First, Tanzsuite (“Dance Suite”) from 1923, consisting of eight movements, and then Divertimento, from 1942, with 25 keyboard pieces arranged in eight movements.

In 1935, Francis Poulenc wrote a suite for wind band, called Suite Français, using the tunes of 16th century composer Claude Gervaise.

And among the most popular pieces from the 20th century was a four-movement guitar concerto, based on six compositions by the 17th century Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz. It was written in 1954 by Joaquin Rodrigo and titled Fantasia para un Gentilhomo (“Fantasy for a Gentleman”) Dozens of guitarists have recorded it.

Rodrigo also put together an eight movement suite called Soleriana, orchestrating the harpsichord music of 18th century composer Antonio Soler. I had a hard time tracking down a recording, but I found one and have to say it was just as catchy and memorable as the Fantasia.

Finally, among works of this kind, I should mention Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite, built, according to the composer, on tunes in Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie, a manual of Renaissance dances.

But all this rewriting and modernized orchestration wasn’t only applied to antique music. There’s plenty of 19th century music that gets reworked, usually to accompany a ballet. And a lot of them get named some form of “ianna.” Like Mozartiana, Rossiniana, Paganiniana, Soleriana, and Offenbachiana. (Not to mention Bachianas Brasileiras, but that’s another thing.)

Gioachino Rossini wrote 39 hugely profitable operas by the age of 39. Then, in 1832, he retired to live comfortably for the next 40 years. But starting in or about 1857, he began writing short pieces, songs, piano works, choral works — some 150 of them — meant for friends and family and never intended for public performance. He called them his Péchés de vieillesse – “sins of old age.”

In 1918, Respighi orchestrated nine of these “sins” for a ballet, La Boutique Fantasque. It remains enormously popular with dozens of recordings. Later, in 1925, he dove back into the collection to “freely orchestrate” his Rossiniana.

Benjamin Britten used bits from Rossini’s late works for his Soirées Musicales from 1937, and later, his Matinées Musicales from 1941.

Strangely by default, French composer Manuel Rosenthal was tasked with selecting and orchestrating music by operetta champion Jacques Offenbach for a Massine ballet, Gaité Parisienne, in 1938. It remains popular in concert. Then, in 1953, he dipped once more into the well for Offenbachiana.

But let’s face it, this becomes a rabbit hole: There are endless workings and reworkings of music, turning piano pieces into orchestral showpieces, or chamber works into ballets. I should mention just a few of the most famous or popular.

Maurice Ravel took Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and did such a number on those short keyboard works, that some people are shocked to discover they weren’t originally written for the orchestra.

Leopold Stokowski made a career of turning Bach organ works into hyper-lush symphonic showpieces. (He was also not shy about changing around, cutting, or adding cymbals or tam-tam crashes to established symphonies.)

Arnold Schoenberg decided to orchestrate Brahms’ G-minor piano quartet because, he said, “1. I like the piece; 2. It is seldom played; and 3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.” He was also commissioned to do it by L.A. Phil conductor Otto Klemperer, where it was first played in 1937.

And finally, I should mention Duke Ellington, who recorded his jazz-orchestra versions of both Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, and Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Both hugely fun.

It never ends. Kismet, a broadway musical with songs borrowing tunes by Borodin. A nearly infinite number of variations by a nearly infinite number of composers on Paganini’s 24th Caprice for solo violin. All those “Reminiscences” of various operas for solo piano by Franz Liszt. Charles Gounod’s Ave Maria built on top of Bach’s C-major prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier. Franz Waxman’s Carmen Fantasie. Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Weber.

And let’s not leave out Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which was on a theme Haydn had borrowed in the first place. He didn’t write it.

A quick check of Wikipedia lists hundreds, perhaps thousands (too many for me to count and still have a life) of “variations on” or “hommage to” or quotations from or transcriptions of orchestral music for home piano, or vice versa, piano music turned orchestral. No Haydn, no Beethoven, no Beethoven no Wagner, no Wagner, no Schoenberg, no Schoenberg, no Lutosławski. Piles on piles.

So, this idea that anything Postmodern is new needs to be chucked out the window. Postmodernism is a catchall phrase, with rather more meaning in architecture than in art or music. After all, we’ve been feeding on the past since the beginning.

—Richard Nilsen

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