I have added a link to the UK Times on my TV page – a podcast with David Simon on The Wire — long and most interesting. You can listen or read.

Saw this today in the NY Times – A story about a loved home – the owner stenciled this on the wall in the living room:

There are good words  in the LA Times blog for the song U2 wrote for end credits for the new Sheridan film, Brothers. I thought the line – “Summer sang in me,”  was familiar, and so it is – See Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet below. I wonder if she will get credit at all…..

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain,
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

From The Writer’s Almanac Today:

On this day in 1912, George Bernard Shaw (books by this author) wrote the following letter to English actress Stella Campbell:

Stella, Stella
Shut your ears tight against this blarneying Irish liar and actor. Read no more of his letters. He will fill his fountain pen with your heart’s blood, and sell your most sacred emotions on the stage. … He is treacherous as only an Irishman can be: he adores you with one eye and sees you with the other as a calculated utility. He has been recklessly trying to please you, to delight you, to persuade you to carry him up to heaven for a moment (he is trying to do it now); and when you have done it, he will run away and give it all to the mob. … Oh dont, dont, DONT fall in love with him; but dont grudge him the joy he finds in being in love with you, and writing all sorts of wild but heartfelt exquisite lies — lies, lies, lies, lies — to you, his adoredest.
G.B.S.

In 1914, Stella Campbell played the role of Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play Pygmalion when it made its London debut. He’d written the play several years earlier — for her, specifically — but the London production was held up due to injuries she sustained in a car accident. So Pygmalion first opened in Vienna in 1913, in a German version that Shaw translated himself. When Campbell played Eliza Doolittle on opening night in London, she was 49 years old.

The correspondence between Stella (Mrs. Patrick Campbell) and Shaw lasted for 40 years, from 1899 to 1939.

Some of the most beautifully written words in the English language — The Dead – James Joyce:

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

I’ve updated the links page at my web site for my mother, Helen Burrey Brown. She served in France in WW1 as a Red Cross Nurse.

Daughter Mary Beth and son Paul at the World Series win

My favorite - Hideki Matsui

Yankees win!!! Yankees win!!!

Recommended: In the NY Times Sunday Magazine – On language page – Keats Speaks

After last night’s nail-biting game, my Yankees are one game away from winning the World Series. The Phillies are a tough team though, and this one might go to the whole 7 games.