Researching Marienbad and the Savoy led me to Erika Mann and all the gossip, scandal, politics, and drama of her family. I wanted to read her account of life in pre-war Germany The Lights Go Down in part of my preparation for the 1940 Club and here. I couldn’t track down a copy so I read School for Barbarians: Education…
Here’s a treat for those who relish fiction with off-the-wall cognitive mayhem – The Hearing Trumpet Suddenly it seemed as if everyone in my online book world had read it (see here and here for here examples). It’s a short novel by Leonora Carrington, better known for her wildly idiosyncratic art. It was written in 1950, first published in 1974,…
In Our Flag Stays Red (1948) Phil Piratin – the Communist Party MP for Mile End – wrote an account of the 1940 occupation of the Savoy Hotel. This is just one of the many stories I came across in the research for the Marienbad – my post about Fritz Stingl and his escape from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Fritz was…
The third destination of our Met Museum art extravaganza was Beyond the Light – Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish art. Plenty of light and lots of water. Plus wonderful drawings and paintings of Denmark, ancient ruins, lonely figures on beaches, ships, harbors, woodlands, portraits, and empty rooms. The exhibit overview includes the following background information: Denmark in the nineteenth…
A wander crosstown to the Met with a destination. Or rather three. The first – Water Memories – explores water’s significance to Indigenous peoples and Nations in the United States through historical, modern, and contemporary artworks. The second – right next door – Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection rotation honors the diversity of Native life with…
So much gloom, doom, and disaster that it’s important to find counterbalances. Here are a few recent bright spots. Glasgow and Bristol and the USA By all accounts, the Standing For Women event in Glasgow went extremely well. The videos show that the turnout was strong and many women were able to tell their stories. The opposition to women speaking…
I do remember the trial of Dr. Bodkin Adams. My family took The Daily Herald back in 1957 and I was old enough to pay attention. I recall being fascinated by the name Bodkin and who could not be interested in the sensational trial of a doctor accused of drugging and murdering his patient in order to profit from a…
Poems by Charles Simic (1938-2023) January Children’s fingerprints On a frozen window Of a small schoolhouse. An empire, I read somewhere, Maintains itself through The cruelty of its prisons. The Election They promised us free lunch And all we got Edna Is wind and rain And these broken umbrellas To wield angrily At cars and buses Eager to run us…
I follow the art historian Richard Morris on Twitter and his tweets are a daily delight – each one providing a insight into a painter, a period, a life, or work of art. This week he referenced the Guardian obituary of the wonderful writer Ronald Blythe who has just died at the age of 100. Here’s the tweet: ‘Winter Evening,…
Every Christmas growing up my family received a greeting card from the Stingl family. I knew that my grandmother, mother, and aunt had known Fritz Stingl in the 1930s. He was Czech and he had arrived at Croydon airport as a refugee and been turned back even though they were at the barrier waiting to sponsor him. And then there…
Cats and Dogs Dogs have owners; cats have staff. That’s now a familiar saying but just as accurate nonetheless And while dogs can be trained to follow orders, sit up and beg, it is the rare cat that will even give such attempts the time of day. Which is as it should be. Dogs are very good companions and serve…
This is a review of a book I have not read that does not actually exist. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this dive into the golden age of crime and detective fiction. An isolated country house in winter and a cast of quirky characters none of whom are quite what they seem. There are family secrets, unrequited love and…
I’ve been thinking about how we need to stop using the word “gender” to refer to people and why we should not use it for anything other than linguistics. Meanwhile, as I contemplate world improvement, Scotland has just passed an ill-conceived law that will have the effect of tossing women and children under the bus. All this in order to…
We like lists because we don’t want to die Back, book, casualty, honors, naughty and nice, shopping, spelling, top-ten, and all the rest – how we love our lists and cataloging, inventorying, ordering, and sorting our lives with lists. The list is the origin of culture, and lists exist to make infinity comprehensible. And those bold statements are from the…
On a daily neighborhood soodle a while back I saw this single golden sandal on a stoop on W112th Street. I wondered about the backstory. Was it lost or abandoned and was it missed? And I took a photograph. Sue did the same. Sometime later that child’s shoe was transformed. You can check out Sue’s additional transformations at Prufrock’sDilemma and …