Orts #997
Leroy Anderson
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/arts/music/leroy-anderson.html
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Nearly two centuries ago, Melville showed us how easy it is to welcome as our own the touches of others, their equivalent colors, customs and beliefs; their journeys, their transitions. And to remember those who, unwelcomed, suffered. How much could have been avoided, and embraced, had we heeded.
— Carl Safina, Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed, NYT, May 2, 2020
- a remarkable essay which relates Moby-Dick to the crises of racism and ecological disaster we face -
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/books/review/herman-melville-moby-dick.html
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A clause set off by em dashes is like dropping underwater while swimming breaststroke — just a quick dip before popping back to the sentence’s surface. A parenthetical clause is more like diving down to the pool bottom to pick up a coin. And a footnote is a full-blown scuba dive — you have strapped on equipment and left the surface behind and you had better, after going to all that trouble, see something interesting down there.
Our whole lives are a parentheses! You think you’ll be dancing out of the doctor’s office, vaccine freshly administered, free of all dread and torpor? Of course you won’t! You think there’s more to your life than the morsel of experience — this bite of sandwich, this knee pain, this worry — that happens to be before you? Ha!
-- both, Ben Dolnick, (Let Us Out of This Clause), NYT July 6, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/opinion/parentheses-coronavirus-writing.html
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My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, . . .
-- V. Nabokov, Lolita