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Letter from France
For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.
Van Gogh’s Final Vision
Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.
The Self-Destruction of the CBC
The federal government recently announced it is reviewing the CBC’s mandate. This review is the latest chapter in a long story of questioning the value of the CBC since its inception seventy years ago. Clearly there are politics involved here; the CBC is an easy target for attack by parties of all stripes.
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Cat in the House
Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.
Fields of Time
With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.
Spot Fire
I am down in the cabin and Ross, who is eighty feet up in the fire tower, sees smoke. He tries to report it but his radio isn’t working and nobody can understand him. They phone him back on the cell: does he need the water bombers? He says no, it’s just a spot fire. In that moment a huge gust of wind blasts through the cabin, blows a towel off a rack, slaps it against the valve of the water cooler and turns on the water.
Images of Work
Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”
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A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
Any author who can attract a crowd to listen to explanations of changes in plate tectonics theory over several decades deserves applause, and the best-selling author Simon Winchester did just that, in a conversation with Hal Wake at the 18th Annual V
A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors
The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement. A Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, with a whopping 535 beautifully designed
Expecting Baby: 9 Months of Wonder, Reflection and Sweet Anticipation
Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
Everyday Stalinism—certainly a tide to conjure with—by Sheila Fitz-Patrick (Oxford) is subtitled Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and is proof that under certain circumstances the everyday is never normal. This is a h