About my daily life, because I’m so backed up in things to do that I’m just picking little stuff out of a hat. (The incidental good news is that my lab tests were very pleasingly improved, and I’m now starting, eek, a very slow withdrawal from prednisone; think good thoughts about woolly mammoths for me.)
Meanwhile, I took an early break in my sleep last night, to search, I don’t really know why, for material on the dog books of my childhood.
I did indeed speed-read (and barely comprehend, though I got Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear for life) all of Shakespeare at the age if 9, of my own volition, but I also adored imaginative fiction for kids. Dr. Doolittle, Freddy the Pig, every Oz book there was. And books about noble dogs. My West Lawn PA companion for several years was a sweet mutt dog (part terrier, the rest mystery). Spot / Spotty (not an imaginative name, but fitting).
Out of this I will produce soon a posting on what we all called at the time LadADog (three syllables rushed into a ball). And Albert Payson Terhune. But that’s not what this posting is about. This posting is about the music that Apple was playing for me when I went on my computer dog search around 9:15 pm last night.
That music was a performance of the two-piano arrangement of the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 459. I identified all that information explicitly, and starting running along with the solo part in my head, making little mental notes about the musicality of the performance, all those little choices that turn the playing of a score from technically faithful reproduction of what’s on the page into a a garden of delights.
The movement drew to an end, after a spirited cadenza. There was then an unexpected sprinkling of applause, and suddenly we were into another favorite piano piece of mine, the charming little Three Marias by Heitor Villa-Lobos.
And then I knew.
The performer was Arnold Zwicky, in recital in the spring of 1957, when he was 16. And this was at least the third time that I’d foxed myself this way on K. 459 from my Apple. Well, the concerto really is delicious, and the kid playing it did a good job. (In auditions, he always got high marks for musicality.)
Yes, I went other ways. Not very long after that I was writing reviews of concerts I had once performed in, as a reporter for the local evening-and-Sunday newspaper The Reading Eagle. Rather a lot has happened since then.
(Meanwhile, you might be thinking that I’m just annoyingly trying to spin gold out of straw.)
August 26, 2026 at 5:59 pm |
Freddy and Dr Doolittle were among my favorites when I was of an appropriate age. I never got into Oz beyond the first book (which I loved); I now don’t know why. There was also a book which I probably chose by it’s title sitting on the library shelf, “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be” by Farley Mowat, a naturalist and conservationist of some note of whom I had never heard. I obtained it a couple years ago in an attack of nostalgia, but I find I didn’t care for it as much as I remembered; but it fits your category.
I also remember “Lad, a Dog” but only having seen it on the shelves, not having read it.
Weird or intriguing titles on library shelves caught my attention when I was very young, e.g. “Magic Ball from Mars”. I was often fooled, though the most egregious case was a rebound book called “Blackboard [something]”, maybe “Magic”, which I thought might be an interesting classroom or learning story. But it turned out the binders screwed up; it was really called “Backboard [whatever]” and it was really about a high school basketball team. I still enjoyed it, though.
August 27, 2026 at 6:33 am |
I too read all the Dr. Dolittle and Freddy the Pig books (and can still remember bits and pieces of most of them), and also only ever read the first Oz book (for some reason, I don’t think I knew about the others as a kid). I read “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be” as an adult, at a time when I was reading anything by Mowat that I could get my hands on.
My only association with “Lad, A Dog” is that it was produced by Max Rosenberg (M. J. Rosenberg professionally), who was a friend of my parents.
August 27, 2026 at 10:48 am
Type in haste, repent at leisure: Of course, I meant that Max produced a film adaptation of the book.
August 26, 2026 at 7:48 pm |
(to RC) I think the earnest idealism of the Oz books appealed to me. I do wonder about the racioethnic and sexual stereotypes in some of the other kids’ books. Terhune was pretty appalling.
But Mowat, yes yes. I’d like to go back to it now.