by Peter Cates Composer Richard Wagner Composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was an egomaniac who, as my high school glee club director put it succinctly, knew he was great. His 16-hour Ring of the Niebelungen was premiered at Bayreuth, in Germany, in 1876 and has been produced many times since then. It is a mammoth quartet […]
by Peter Cates Winter poetry As winter’s balmy freeze approaches with increasingly grim urgency and inevitability for the next six to seven months, some brief depictions of the ice cold season are offered. Poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) gives a slightly humorous perspective in the following lines from Winter: My Secret: “Today’s a nipping day, a […]
by Peter Cates Abbie Huston Evans The 1989 anthology Maine Speaks has a poem from the Bristol native Abbie Huston Evans (1882-1983). Before sharing it, I offer the biographical details on her life provided in the above text, as they give a good maximum summation with minimum paragraphs: “As a teenager, Evans moved with her […]
by Peter Cates Scott Elledge Scott Elledge’s 1984 E. B. White: A Biography, was published when White was still living (he died in 1985) and is well worth dipping into for those, like myself, intrigued by the man who contributed to the success of the New Yorker magazine, wrote unsurpassed prose and raised ducks and […]
by Peter Cates Lansky Last night on Amazon prime, I watched the 2021 film Lansky and was quite impressed by one particular quality, the performance of 82-year-old actor Harvey Keitel as the mobster accountant and major Godfather for way too many decades, Meyer Lansky (1902-1983). The story does rehash a lot of info from the […]
by Peter Cates The Klansman by William Bradford Huie A 1965 novel The Klansman, by William Bradford Huie (1910-1986), depicted the exacerbated racial tensions in a Deep South town in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement. What particularly distinguished it from other novels was Huie’s ability to convey the attitude of the sheriff, himself a […]
by Peter Cates Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) , whom I hope to discuss more about at a later date, wrote the following about his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), another true original genius among American writers of the 19th century, when Melville visited him in Southport, England, during the older writer’s years as the American […]
by Peter Cates The Beast That Walks Like a Man The Beast That Walks Like Man is a 1955 history of the grizzly bear by author, naturalist and explorer Harold McCracken (1894-1983). He writes “I have never lost that deep fascination which Old Ephraim inspires, and in the matter of personal experiences with these marvelous […]
by Peter Cates The Haldeman Diaries The Haldeman Diaries, a massive book of almost 700 pages, was issued by Putnam a year after the death of H.R. Haldeman (1926-1993) who served as Chief of Staff for former President Richard Nixon for four years before being quietly pressured to resign by his boss in the spring […]
by Peter Cates Church steeples The Protestant church steeples still seen in The Town Line’s surrounding communities include the towering beauty at the China Village Baptist Church. Back during the decades of 80 or more years ago, some of these steeples summoned the citizens of the surrounding communities to Sunday morning assemblies to an extent […]