Tom Simard

Poetry, Music, and Prose

Wednesday’s Choice

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17 thoughts on “Wednesday’s Choice

  1. What a treat Tom. She was unique in every way even in the rendition of this song. Just nobody sings it like her. In my wild days I loved her. Still do. Such a tragic figure, yet she was so alive.

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  2. Aww, geez…I love this.

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  3. Great song! I cited this song as an epigraph (“Freedom’s Just Another Word…”) for a paper I wrote on Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle” back in college. It was a good paper, and the quote was a nice little cherry on top.

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    • Isn’t it just.

      Wonderful.

      I haven’t read that though I really thought highly of Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life…, and The Gulag Archipelago. I’ll put it down on my list of books to get.

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      • One of the things about “The First Circle” that really grabs me is the title. If you already know the title’s inspiration, please ignore what follows with my apologies, but it’s really cool, I think.

        Apparently in Dante’s Inferno (which, in full disclosure, I have not read) he depicted various circles of hell, so that various enlightened (but decidedly un-Christian) greats like Plato wouldn’t be consigned with the ranks of the merely debauched & depraved. They were in hell, but they were in a higher circle.

        Like so many of Solzhenitsyn books (or, more properly, the two I have read), Circle takes place in a gulag. But this is a special gulag for engineers and smart dudes. They eat decently and don’t break rocks in Siberia. They may have beachfront property on the Lake of Fire, but they’re still in Hell.

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      • Interesting.

        “They may have beachfront property on the Lake of Fire, but they’re still in Hell.”

        Great line!

        I’ve just ordered the book. It’ll be the next thing I start up once I finish with Robert Hughes’ Rome, which I’m reading now, and enjoying immensely.

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    • By the way, last night I began the book. Quite pleased to see at the beginning list of characters (and true to the Russians, there are a lot of them), Nicholas Marr. In grad school I came across him (I think while doing a paper on Vygotsky.) and has always been the case I started reading about things that were not in any way related to the paper but really interested me. Actually, he was the inspiration for the character of Paul Boulard in Jean Desjardins.

      This is going to be one good read.

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      • That’s really cool. It’s been a long time since I read that novel (probably just a little less than 20 years), and I didn’t realize there were any true-life characters in it. Except of course, the Man of Steel (by which I don’t mean Superman).

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      • The Man of Steel!

        Uncle Joe was the kind of guy you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of.

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  4. Brings back memories. She was truly unique.

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  5. Tom I can’t get in to your latest post – “Tomorrow” – Thought I’d let you know. Not sure whether others are having the same problem.

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