I just finished watching, for about the eighth time, Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, based on Thackeray's novel. It's Kubrick's masterpiece, if not Thackeray's; I found the novel dry and second-rate, but the film deepens and seems more beautiful every time I watch it. It's the finest picaresque epic in film, better--more melancholy, lovelier to look at--even than Tom Jones. And Kubrick's genius for matching music to image is well-known; just think of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange. But in Barry Lyndon he surpassed himself, with Handel's stately, grim Sarabande and Schubert's utterly haunting Trio Opus 100. This is Art, across the board.

And, of course, there's also the traditional Irish ballad "Women of Ireland" (Ta Bann Na hEireann) on the soundtrack, played by The Chieftains. Further memories assault me here. Sometime in the late '60s I attended a performance at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin by the great bandleader and folk-music revivalist Sean O Riada and his band Ceoltóirí Chualann, at which event a young gal whose name I forget (but she had long black hair) sang this ballad, and several others. A wonderful recording called, logically, Sean O Riada at the Gaiety (Sean O Riada Sa Gaiety), resulted from that concert. I owned it until recently. (Shut up now, Memory.)