Posts Tagged ‘Spinoza’
Oscar Fingal Wilde, the last of the great and hopelessly flamboyant, whose full name was Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, is, perhaps because of his flamboyance and his fame — a fame which ended in scandal and tragedy — frequently misrepresented and misconceived. He died 119 years ago this month. I offer here three of […]
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A sonorous body produced by periodic vibrations. Hermann von Helmholtz defined music as. Without music, life would be a mistake. Said Nietzsche, a chronic insomniac whose eyesight was dire. Music is neither good or bad — to the deaf. Said Spinoza. Henriette Sontag, the soprano at the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, turned Beethoven around […]
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Charles Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed. When Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin Virginia, he was twenty-seven, and she was thirteen. And consumptive. The genius poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wanted to change his name to Pook Tunks. Robert Frost had only five poems accepted in his first seventeen years of writing and […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011