"Fireplace"—few nouns are so melodious. A phrase such as "Come and sit by the fireplace" evokes the magical sense that one of barbaric earth’s elements can have a genteel, eminently approachable home. All right, so if the mere idea of a fireplace can make me swoon, why don’t I live in a house that has […]
The London-based company, Rolls-Royce, which no longer makes cars that only 99 percent of the population can afford, has announced plans to build a jet engine manufacturing plant in Prince George County, southeast of Richmond.
I'm all in favor of complex phrases that, as Wallace Stevens said, "resist the intelligence almost successfully."
That holidays—especially the fall and winter type—can be fraught with anxiety, loneliness or other nasty concepts has become a staple of modern American consciousness. On the loneliness front, I’ve been lucky to have plenty of family support when it comes to major holidays, though, like a lot of people, I’ve experienced at least one exception. […]
Here's an idea: The Virginia Film Festival, now in its 20th star-studded, "talented unknown-studded," vibrant year, would be a great subject for a film.
words While many North Americans are familiar with South America through traveling or lineage or other means, the majority, it seems, view it as nothing more than a reflection of a surface name. And it’s not only the complex history of that distant continent that feels so, well, distant. What is its current identity? What […]
I like my kitchen—just not for the same reason most people like their kitchens.Let me explain. My first memory is of being hoisted onto a kitchen counter and sitting there with my legs dangling while my mother’s arm, like a bar on a ski lift, kept me from falling. I think she was talking on […]
As far as I know, the theater lexicon doesn’t contain a word comparable to “chick flick,” so I guess that’s what I have to call Sarah Ruhl’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play, The Clean House.
music With all the excitement surrounding the return of Bob Dylan to Charlottesville, it’s easy to forget that his foundation—straight-ahead folk music—has been largely banished to the shadows. New folk singer-songwriters, awash not in Dylan’s resplendent history, must scrape together bits of acclaim here and there. Lord, they might as well be poets or intellectual […]
UVA students, faculty and staff, excluding the health system, are beginning the academic year with new ID cards, and a conundrum. Brad Sayler is concerned that UVA is now taking driver’s license info for the new IDs—another bit of personal data that could be compromised. The cards, according to Shirley Payne, director for security coordination […]