Culture

‘We must be still and still moving …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich


     Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
 
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.—T.S. Eliot, the conclusion of “East Coker”

Just a few weeks ago, he and I were talking about his daughter, my girlfriend. I do not remember every syllable of the conversation, and I wish I did remember each syllable right now, but I declared, “All I know is that it took me an awful long time to find The One for me, and I’m lucky I waited for someone so …”

“Passionate.” He finished the sentence. He chose that word. “She’s full of life,” he added. It was a happy surprise to hear Jen’s father say it himself. He was smiling.
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Statistics and Other Things

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Our newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. And now you know it, too.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested with every ad sales phone call. This is because if we told an advertiser the (correct) 2000-per-week number, that advertiser might have asked us to pay them for the honor of placing their ads; thus, our ad sales manager gave them a number 10 times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in a laudable effort at a specificity that would grant our numbers legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”
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A Thank-You Note to Pete Seeger

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In 1996, in my then-job of assistant editor at a weekly newspaper, I awarded myself the title of music reviewer for a single issue and attended a concert given at a local high school by Pete Seeger, who died two years ago today at age 94. (Our newspaper’s actual music reviewer was only interested in attending and writing about rock concerts. That was a stroke of luck for me.) I wrote a review, knowing full well that a review is not what one writes regarding a Pete Seeger concert. An appreciation. A thank-you note. But not a mere review judging aesthetic merits.

It was a great concert, by the way.
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