skip to main
|
skip to sidebar
...books, opera, Bollywood, and other indefensible obsessions
"...Italian opera, an exotick and irrational entertainment..."
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."
"[Mozart's music] is as good an excuse for mankind’s existence as we shall ever encounter."
—Samuel Johnson
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."
—Emma in Jane Austen's Emma
"[Mozart's music] is as good an excuse for mankind’s existence as we shall ever encounter."
—HC Robbins Landon
Licensed under Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Please respect its terms.
For better or worse, every word of every post on this blog is written by a human.
About me
- Pessimisissimo
- I'm a librarian who spends way too much time thinking about this stuff.
Subscribe
Please send a message to pessimisissimo [at] gmail.com with the word "Subscribe" in the subject line
Most popular posts this week
-
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (A Match Made in Heaven, 2008) is a film that divides people. At least it divides me from most other people, who hated ... -
Can a mediocre movie also be brilliant? After seeing Dil Hai Tumhaara (My Heart is Yours, 2002), I'm compelled to say "yes." ... -
The entrance of the Queen of Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute ( Die Zauberflöte ), designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1815. ... -
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947) is a classic of Technicolor cinematography. It's also a classic of c... -
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." The famous opening of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca (Doubleday, 1938)... -
Time and time again I knew what I was doing and Time and time again I just made things worse. —Richard Hell, "Time" For a... -
Emma Thompson (Elinor Dashwood), Kate Winslet (Marianne Dashwood), and Gemma Jones (Mrs. Dashwood) in Sense and Sensibility (1995) On Val... -
Cover of David Grann's The Wager (Doubleday, 2023), featuring "Ships in distress in a storm" (detail) by Peter Monamy (c. 17... -
George Sand by Alfred de Musset, 1833. Image: Wikimedia Commons The decade of the 1830s saw George Sand transformed from an anonymous ... -
Eleanor Marx As I wrote in "These long, sad years": Madame Bovary and Eleanor Marx , in 1886 Karl Marx's daughter Elean...
Blog archive
Labels
- art ( 6 )
- Bollywood and beyond ( 139 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Amrita Rao ( 6 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Deepika Padukone ( 17 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Hrishikesh Mukherjee ( 3 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Preity Zinta ( 11 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Satyajit Ray ( 10 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Shah Rukh Khan ( 21 )
- Bollywood and beyond - Shyam Benegal ( 3 )
- books ( 278 )
- books - Ada Leverson ( 6 )
- books - Alison Bechdel ( 4 )
- books - Angela Carter ( 6 )
- books - Anne Lister ( 7 )
- books - Anthony Trollope ( 12 )
- books - before Jane Austen ( 25 )
- books - Eleanor Marx and Madame Bovary ( 3 )
- books - Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning ( 6 )
- books - Emma Donoghue ( 5 )
- books - George Eliot ( 9 )
- books - George Sand ( 6 )
- books - Gustave Flaubert ( 3 )
- books - Haruki Murakami ( 10 )
- books - Jane Austen ( 45 )
- books - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ( 7 )
- books - lists ( 6 )
- books - Machado de Assis ( 8 )
- books - Maria Edgeworth ( 4 )
- books - Samuel Richardson ( 9 )
- books - Six months with Austen ( 12 )
- books - The Bronte sisters ( 8 )
- books - Zadie Smith ( 9 )
- dance ( 26 )
- dance - Mark Morris ( 8 )
- favorites ( 55 )
- favorites - Bollywood and beyond ( 16 )
- favorites - books ( 19 )
- favorites - dance ( 3 )
- favorites - movies ( 17 )
- favorites - music ( 28 )
- favorites - opera ( 28 )
- favorites - television ( 11 )
- following a train of thought ( 6 )
- In memoriam ( 17 )
- journalism ( 51 )
- movies ( 113 )
- movies - Barbara Stanwyck ( 12 )
- movies - film noir ( 12 )
- movies - Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ( 4 )
- movies - Hitchcock ( 7 )
- movies - Jean Arthur ( 4 )
- movies - Pre-Code ( 7 )
- movies - Preston Sturges ( 8 )
- movies - Rene Clair ( 6 )
- music ( 130 )
- music - Beethoven string quartets ( 7 )
- music - Berkeley Early Music Festival ( 7 )
- music - Boston Early Music Festival ( 13 )
- music - lieder ( 15 )
- music - punk rock ( 24 )
- opera ( 147 )
- opera - Ars Minerva ( 14 )
- opera - Glyndebourne ( 12 )
- opera - Handel ( 41 )
- opera - Lorraine Hunt ( 5 )
- opera - Mozart ( 25 )
- opera - Mozart - Cosi fan tutte ( 4 )
- opera - Mozart - Marriage of Figaro ( 9 )
- opera - Purcell - Dido and Aeneas ( 9 )
- opera - Salieri ( 5 )
- opera - Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier ( 6 )
- opera - Vittoria Tesi ( 7 )
- opera guide ( 6 )
- personal ( 15 )
- Six Victorian marriages ( 6 )
- Suggested reading ( 17 )
- television ( 33 )
- theater ( 7 )
- web issues ( 17 )
Works discussed on E & I
E & I blog favorites
-
-
My Favourites: Songs of 'Waking Dreams' - Here on the East Coast of the US, we are being pummelled by one storm after another. Recently, I’d posted a couple of photographs of being snowed in, and...1 week ago
-
Ten of my Favourite Ravi Duets - Another birth centenary, and another list of favourite songs from the 1950s and 60s. Today, March 3, 2026, marks the 100th birth anniversary of the compose...6 days ago
-
Admiring Our Heroes for International Women’s Day: Celebrating Women Who Have Received EFF Awards - For the last hundred years, women have had pivotal and far too often unsung roles in building and shaping the technology that we now use every day. Many ...2 days ago
-
Critic’s Notebook: The Quinteto Astor Piazzolla in Vienna - A. Piazzolla, "The Late Masterpieces", Quinteto Tango Nuevo (American Clavé, 3CDs, 1993) US | UK | DE A. Piazzolla, "Mi Buenos Aires Querido", Barenboim, ...2 weeks ago
-
Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with The Philadelphia Orchestra - This March, Joyce DiDonato joins Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra for Mahler’s sweeping “Resurrection” Symphony, with performances in Ph...3 weeks ago
-
Eight Kilos of Gas - For months, I had watched our pile of firewood shrink. We didn’t burn it to keep warm but reserved it for cooking. Smoke got into everything: our...3 days ago
-
Parwana (1971) - The tagline on the DVD cover caught my eye first: “A Murder Plan That Forced Indian Railways To Change Their Train Timing!” I am not sure that Indian Railw...8 years ago
-
Iran Transformed - On February 28 Israeli warplanes assassinated Ali Khamenei, Iran’s leader, by dropping thirty bombs on his compound in Tehran. It was the opening salvo of ...1 day ago
Other favorite sites
- American Bach Soloists
- Ars Minerva
- Boston Classical Review
- Chicago Classical Review
- Chicago Opera Theater
- Guardian UK | Classical music & opera
- Lieder Alive!
- London Review of Books
- New York Review of Books
- Notes on Indian popular cinema
- Open Magazine
- Opera News
- Opera Theater Unlimited
- Opera Today
- Paris Review
- Pocket Opera
- San Francisco Classical Voice
- Tehelka
- The Fantomas Website
- The Nation
- The New Yorker
- Washington Classical Review
- West Edge Opera