I just finished the occasionally startling 1949 novel by Frederic Wakeman, The Wastrel. This obscure piece of fiction is about a man shipwrecked and trying to save his life and that of his young son, afloat together in the sea. Chapters alternate between the current survival-struggle and flashbacks to the man's past failures as a husband and human ( Read more... )

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I've been listening to Alfredo Catalani's 1890 opera Loreley. It is a variation on the love triangle, with a watery conclusion. Walther is engaged to marry Anna but falls in love with Loreley, a maiden of the Rhine river (as in Wagner's Das Rheingold). At his wedding the enticing Loreley appears, and Walther rushes out to follow her. Poor Anna ( Read more... )

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DROWNING
I was about seventeen years old when a neighborhood boy drowned. Ernie was my age. He went out on a nearby lake on a raft. It capsized. He drowned ( Read more... )