Most Recent. In Arts & Letters – Spirituality.

Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Florence Hazrat -A history of punctuation

How we came to represent (through inky marks) the vagaries of the mind, inflections of the voice, and intensity of feeling Punctuation is dead – or is it? If you’ve ever texted ‘im here’ or ‘its in the car’, you’re in good company. Most of us have, at some point since the dawn of texting, transgressed the boundaries of good grammar, and swallowed one apostrophe or another in the name...

Paul Kildea-It’s time to leave Chopin in peace

There’s a scene early on in A Song to Remember — Charles Vidor’s clunky Technicolor film of 1945 — in which the young Frédéric Chopin (Cornel Wilde) provides background music for a banquet hosted by Count Wyszynska in his Warsaw palace, plates of rubbery pig and candy-colored vegetables in heady supply. Chopin plays his own Fantaisie-Impromptu, five years or so before composing it, and then, having insulted the Russian governor of Poland...

Chantel Tattoli-Mark Twain’s Mind Waves

“human sympathies can stretch.” In February, in our family iMessage group, my brother asked our mother to indulge his craving for egg salad sandwiches. “That is so weird,” I replied. “I dreamt of mom’s egg salad two days ago.” It had been years since I had eaten it, but chewing in my dream, I realized the crunch of the celery that my mother added was the secret. “I had the same...

Tomas Weber – Believing in Literature

Literary texts, in Kahn’s view, offer a space not only for working out what we believe in and for coming to believe in new things, but also for reflecting on and altering the nature of belief itself. THE RELATION BETWEEN belief and making is a troubled one. Anybody who has ever banged their fists on the table in an angry appeal to the unimpeachable sovereignty of scientific facts in response...