Herewith some additional horrifying background material on how the Lone Star State tells the country’s supreme legal authority to kiss its Lone Star ass and insouciantly continues its self-legalized killings, including some prisoners awaiting appeal proceedings that could reverse their previous sentences.
From The New York Times on June 14th:
“Texas juries in capital cases must make [...]
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Let no one still mired out of date in world history of half a century or so ago come at me with “Hmphhh . . . they should talk!” I hope the word has finally got around that the Germany I’ve adopted as my own country today glories in one of the most vital [...]
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When I went over into eastern Berlin Sunday night to cover a premiere at the grand old State Opera on Berlin’s showpiece boulevard named Unter den Linden (because of the quadruple columns of trees marching down the center separator green strip, I had to take the subterranean U-Bahn because yesterday I got a call from [...]
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Volker Hagedorn, the music critic of our classy Hamburg-based weekly newspaper Die Zeit, visited Henze at his home above the Tiber valley in Italy, where he composed Phaedra, his newest opera, recently unveiled at Berlin’s Deutsche Staatsoper. Hagedorn reports:
Henze sat in the shade of the terrace gazing at the olive trees. He seems smaller than [...]
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As an eighteen-year-old student in the Music Department of the University of Texas College of Fine Arts in Austin, I attracted the overpowering attention of a Texas fireball named Jones who’d revised her given name from Margaret into Margo (in fact née Margaret Virginia Jones in little Livingston, Texas), whose dominant, in fact totally consuming [...]
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So nice to discover (in the latest issue of The Nation) this all-out tribute to my own greatest stateside television enthusiasm since I fled the country twelve years ago. I know him only thanks to occasional snippets that come my way via the Internet, but they’ve sufficed to make me an all-out fan; I [...]
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I can’t recall when I’ve read a recent news story quite so horrifying and disgusting as this one I found waiting from me when I came home from dinner this evening. Its headline says it all: “No Justice for El-Masri” - and that summation applies to a country constantly harping so piously on “freedom and [...]
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The innumerable cross-connections over the course of my eighty-three years sometimes take even me by surprise. The other evening here in Berlin I dined with a Swiss-born Californian and member of the Cal Tech faculty in Pasadena, Andreas Aebi, I’ve cherished as a friend for thirty-five years now - and my subsequent Skype-talking about that [...]
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I plan for the imminent future a little stroll down this particular geographic and psychological stretch of my personal Memory Lane derived from the first sixteen years of my life, spent in my birthplace El Paso (where you could walk across the international bridge over the sometimes totally dry “Silvery Rio Grande” into Los Estados [...]
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Thanks to a bit of virtuoso clipboardery I’ve whupped this philologically challenged provincial Californian software into replicating that pesky Danish/Norwegian fifth letter of Aksel Schiøtz’s surname, but in order to confuse and frustrate Googlers and surfers as little as possible I want, prophylactically, to zing in a version that’ll at least make this bloggery noticeable [...]
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