Monday, May 25, 2015
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Whether you realize it or not, names are a part of language, and a by no means unimportant one. I am not even referring to such a somewhat esoteric phenomenon as a proper noun becoming a com…
SOURCE: John Simon at 03:50PMSaturday, May 2, 2015
With Gunter Grass, who just died at age 87, I had a brief friendship. I translated for him on a popular radio show, and I introduced him at his reading at the Y. I also met his charming firs…
SOURCE: John Simon at 05:43PMFriday, April 10, 2015
Stupidity, I am sorry to say, is no joke, as it is portrayed on stage, screen and TV. It is the second worst crime against humanity and a very close runner-up to evil. It is neither necessar…
SOURCE: John Simon at 09:46AMSunday, March 15, 2015
Pity the poor necktie, hanging on for dear life. Consider that male attire, unlike female, is, unless completely wacko, basically standardized. The lapel may get narrower or wider, the inden…
SOURCE: John Simon at 10:22AMTuesday, February 24, 2015
One of our greatest quandaries concerns illusion. Is it treacherous, undesirable, even harmful; or optimistic, consolatory, even life-sustaining? Is it near-synonymous with hope, and thus a …
SOURCE: John Simon at 03:36PMMonday, January 19, 2015
The question of whether pets go to heaven seems these days to be getting ever greater attention, almost as much as in long ago days the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin…
SOURCE: John Simon at 10:13AMThursday, January 1, 2015
To the question “What is poetry?” there is, let’s face it, no definitive answer. A bad novel is still a novel, a poor story still a story. But an unworthy poem is doggerel or, at best,…
SOURCE: John Simon at 11:01AMSunday, November 30, 2014
A slow reader myself, I have always envied speedreaders. Come to think of it, are speedreaders and speedreading single words, or should they be two each? Note that a single word confers stat…
SOURCE: John Simon at 06:19PMThursday, November 13, 2014
First, some errata from the last time round. The film director who bought flowers for my date was Francesco, not Franco, Rosi. (There was another film director, Franco Rossi, causing confusi…
SOURCE: John Simon at 06:21PMSaturday, October 25, 2014
I note now, with mild surprise, that in Part One all my famous people were part-time or full-time poets. Here now are others of a different sort. Take. for example, that fine actor and genui…
SOURCE: John Simon at 12:49AMSaturday, October 11, 2014
Having been during my long life a teacher of Humanities and critic of most of the arts, it would be a reasonable assumption that as their reviewer, as well as an occasionally published poet,…
SOURCE: John Simon at 11:00AMI have mentioned some of the Linky story before, but here follows the final, complete, definitive account. With it told, I can put the whole matter behind me and move on.As I was reading for…
SOURCE: John Simon at 10:00AMTuesday, August 19, 2014
Names matter. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but if it were called buzzfunk we might think twice before sticking our nose into it, and all that sweetness would go to waste. I d…
SOURCE: John Simon at 03:18PMSunday, July 20, 2014
One of the worst things a person can be is stupid. Stupidity is one of the greatest conceivable evils. Yet it isn’t a sin at all. It is something no-one, with the exception of noveli…
SOURCE: John Simon at 01:11AMSunday, June 29, 2014
Repeatedly I have written and spoken about exhaustion in the arts. Think how easy it was for the possibly pseudonymous Longus to write the immortal pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe in the …
SOURCE: John Simon at 04:32PMSunday, May 25, 2014
Students have become arrogant of late. I noticed that during my last years of professorship, and I find it confirmed by what I hear and read these days. When I say that in my days we were no…
SOURCE: John Simon at 10:56AMSunday, May 4, 2014
A good many people are content to be part of the ordinary multitude. A good many others are not thus content. There is the not infrequent desire to be special, outstanding, even unique. This…
SOURCE: John Simon at 11:01AMWednesday, April 23, 2014
Concreteness, compactness, concision--put it any way you like--is something that good writing is based on. Or you may call it, as Jacques Barzun did in the title and content of an important …
SOURCE: John Simon at 12:02PMThursday, April 3, 2014
What is religion really about, and do we truly need it? An atheist wonders and asks these fundamental questions.Obviously, a thinking person has to wonder why the universe exists, and, conco…
SOURCE: John Simon at 12:55AMTuesday, March 18, 2014
I admire champions of lost causes: the beautiful losers, to borrow the title of an early Leonard Cohen opus, by far his best. The Japanese, apparently, have great respect for them; the Japan…
SOURCE: John Simon at 04:39PMSaturday, March 1, 2014
Will we ever be able to communicate with our friends—hold that—our kinfolk, the animals? It seems highly unlikely, but that does not mean that they don’t have some sort of language amo…
SOURCE: John Simon at 12:36AMTuesday, January 14, 2014
What could be more pointless at this late date than protesting against abstract art? As soon complain about the ballpoint for dislodging the fine fountain pen. Not, by the way, that earlier …
SOURCE: John Simon at 09:03AMMonday, December 23, 2013
There are in my view both real sequels and quasi sequels. A real sequel is when the author of a book, say, Margaret Mitchell, or someone else writes a novel about what happened to Scarlett O…
SOURCE: John Simon at 04:37PMThursday, December 5, 2013
If we are going to deal with epigrams, we must first distinguish between wit and humor. Humor makes you laugh, as with every good joke that someone tells you. Like the loony in the bin telli…
SOURCE: John Simon at 01:50PMSunday, November 24, 2013
One of the great gifts of mankind is our memory. Without it, we could be greatly impoverished, though, as gifts go, it is a double-edged sword: a donor as well as a tormentor—sometimes a p…
SOURCE: John Simon at 07:05PMThursday, November 7, 2013
When Irwin Edman of Columbia University’s Philosophy Department was guest professor at Harvard, I took his course in aesthetics. What I still remember from it is his quoting William …
SOURCE: John Simon at 12:55PMFriday, October 18, 2013
It is unquestionably a good thing that prizes in the arts exist. By and large, artists of all types are underpaid—if paid at all!—and monetary awards help them create or, in many cases, …
SOURCE: John Simon at 10:09PMSaturday, September 28, 2013
I recall a conversation with a minor conductor. MC: Do you like Bach? JS: Not at all. MC: How about Mozart? JS: Ditto. MC: Beethoven? JS: Hardly. MC (exasperated): Do you like music? JS: Abs…
SOURCE: John Simon at 08:03PM 
