Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

The January Muse


Edward Lowinsky -photo by Nikki Arai 

Every January I’m visited by my father’s ghost. It’s the month he was born. I remember his death date—October 11, 1985—but I’ve forgotten his exact birth date. There was no World Wide Web in my father’s day. But he loved word play and puns and found English, his adopted language, very amusing. I can hear him laugh as I announce that I will Google him. Wikipedia says his birth date is January 12, 1908.
“Wikipedia, what in heaven’s name is that?” the ghost of my father wonders? What happened to the Encyclopedia Britannica I gave you and Dan when you married?”

(I don’t want to go there with the ghost of my father. I protected that Encyclopedia for years, wouldn’t let Dan move it out of the garage, though I never consulted it. I looked at Wikipedia. Finally Dan prevailed.)

“The Britannica doesn’t know your birthdate, but Wikipedia does. Look Dad, it says ‘Lowinsky was one of the most prominent and influential musicologists in post-World War II America. His 1946 work on the "secret chromatic art" of Renaissance motets was hotly debated in its time.’”