Genius Is As Genius Does

Old Fashioned Thanksgiving

Frank Zappa In The Reagan Era

More Great Americana

Fr. William K. Hubbell Centenary

Today I celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of an old friend, Fr. Bill Hubbell of Lexington, Kentucky. I met Bill in August of 1978 and he and I became and remained friends until his passing in 2004. I cannot begin to explain our friendship--how it began or how it endured, mostly at a distance (I lived in Lexington only during the academic year 1978-1979); I can only say that despite distance in space and time and relative age (he was in his early sixties when we met, I was all of 18) we made some sort of connection--of sympathetic hearts and minds--that (though occasionally strained) would never break. I love him to this day, remember him frequently, miss him like a father or a brother--for, in many ways, he was both to me.

We come from Him/Her/It and we return to Him/Her/It. Rest in peace my friend.

Great Americana

Emmylou Harris.

T. S. Eliot Reading Ash Wednesday

WWFD?

There comes a time in every sane life when the question simply must be asked:
What Would Falstaff Do?

T.S. Eliot Reads

Dignity

Eliotic Religion

Although he was to be embraced by the ecclesiastical establishment, and in manner often seemed more priestly than the priests, he was not himself of that establishment. His central position was an orthodox one, but his stance within the English Church was critical and combative--his Thoughts After Lambeth...is marked by what is in places an ironic polemic against the fatuities of ecclesiastical utterance. His characteristic position remained the same: to adopt the tone and coloration of his surroundings, while at the same time preserving a skeptical detachment from them. In any case, he knew too much to be impressed by the conventional formulations which he attacked in his pamphlet, just as his own religion was so haunted by private obsessions that he could not accede to a conventional piety.

--Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984), p. 181.

Great Americana

Kent Williams

American painter.