A Little Christmas Music, Part II

So Christmas came and went--I am spending it with the Jewish family of my Jewish girlfriend in the very Patrician city of Philadelphia--and yet still the seasonal music pours forth from the speakers in Redding Terminal, mostly jazzed- or popped-up versions of the best (or worst). I wonder why nobody plays Samuel Barber's hidden masterpiece Die Natali or Schutz's Christmas Vespers--I'd even prefer the "how are your children and how are your sheep" bit from Amahl and the Night Visitors.

And I won't even get started about the Hudson News Stand at Penn Station, where once--not terribly long ago--I bought copies of Commentary and the New York Review of Books for trips out to Princeton, whose rack proudly proclaims the word "Literary" yet whose magazine content ran to weapons and wrestlers. We asked; they averred. It is just too depressing.