During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? The ornithopter man was accompanied by a well-dressed woman who never stopped smiling.
Anita slept with a tourist named Hans. He was a German gymnast who had trained for the Olympics for eleven years and gave it up. Now he was driving a vw van across Canada. St. John’s was his starting point.
When I first left home at the age of twenty and embarked on what turned out to be a largely nomadic existence, my grandmother gave me a small jar containing a packet of salt and a piece of bread. There was, she told me, an old Jewish folk tale about a traveller who is given such a gift by an angel so that he will never go hungry; and so that I too would never lack food, she wanted me to carry the jar wherever luck might take me.
i know hate, its line- mates. believe me. you kids have, i’m sure, wasted—all early morning anxious and weak-ankled—their first impatient shuffle-kicks and curses on me.
Hollywood has had its share of success adapting other media to its own needs: books, plays, comics, even journalism. The DVD Under the Tuscan Sun (Buena Vista) has little in common with Frances Mayes’ memoir, except Tuscany, a character named Frances Mayes and an aging villa in need of some restoration work.
By way of contrast, Asterix the Gaul (Orion), another comic book classic recently reprinted, tramples over all sorts of contemporary niceties. Working in early-1960s France, Rene Goscinny (writer) and Albert Uderzo (artist) created a band of ancient Gaulish heroes whose greatest joys were hunting, brawling, quaffing “magic potion” and scoffing at the strange ways of foreign types.
Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (Viking), a lovingly detailed account of the creation of John Coltrane’s classic album of the same name, is a cause for celebration. Following the same format he used for a book on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Kahn documents the gestation, birth and life of Coltrane’s signature album.
The promise of exotic and sensuous experience has lured many a European man to go abroad as an explorer, businessman, soldier or bureaucrat, as Robert Aldrich demonstrates in Colonialism and Homosexuality (Routledge). He analyzes the lives and writings of such historical figures as E.
