January 2013
-
When I saw Ingmar Bergman's Persona in 1967, I was pretty much baffled. Oh, I understood the translated dialogue, and I understood the general idea that the two women were similar and possiby melding into one, whatever that might mean, but I didn't understand what it all signified, or how the "plot" was related to…
-
Before there were dikes there were terpen. I was disgracefully ignorant of terpen until I read Robert Van de Noort's North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC to AD 1500 (Oxford, 2011). Van de Noort devotes many pages to terpen, which are artificial islands constructed between 500 BC and 1000 AD in parts of…
-
Mountain lions frequently wander from the foothills right into the heart of town. It's routine for them to "take" a pet cat or dog. A full-grown mountain lion can jump over the 8-foot chain link fence behind which you've sequestered your golden retriever, kill it, and then grab it with its mouth and bound back…
-
I listened to an interview with Markwayne Mullin, a new member of the House of Representatives, and had a hard time believing my ears. It wasn't that he was inarticulate or stupid. It was that he was so utterly smug, so absolutely and entirely certain of himself. He has no doubts. He knows exactly what…
-
Edward Thomas died at the battle of Arras, in France, in April of 1917. He was thirty-nine years old. In this picture, he looks intense, suspicious, soulful, possibly even poetic, — but not the suffering-soul-kind of poet. When he joined the military, he transformed himself into the stereotype of an officer. The new "look"…
-
I did not know that Edward Thomas sometimes made use of the entries in his journal as the raw material for his poetry. His practice is not unique. Ben Jonson boasted that he wrote all his poems in prose first, then re-wrote them into verse. So I decided to try an experiment. I took a…
-
I've just finished a genuinely wonderful new biography by Matthew Hollis called Now All Roads Lead to France, a Life of Edward Thomas. I'm dazzled, and glad to be so. The book is carefully and comprehensively researched, literate, sensible, and compassionate. Its author is confident enough not to overwhelm the poor reader with pounds of extraneous…
-
From a mosquito bite to his lip. Rupert Brooke was an immensely talented young poet, best known today for the hyper-nationalistic World War I sonnet, "The Soldier." He lived for just twenty-eight years and his death was a tragedy for letters. It's easy to be skeptical about the mosquito. I've been in the company of…
-
My lifetime tobacco consumption consists of one cigarette. Actually, half of one cigarette. I believe it was a Lucky Strike. Or perhaps an Old Gold. It was certainly one of these: It was 1952. My older brother came home from a summer job in the Poconos with a cigarette tucked into the sleeve, like this.…
-
There can't be a disease in fiction that demands more vigorous suspension of disbelief than movie amnesia. And Now, Ladies and Gentleman, a latter production of the great Claud Lelouch, pushes the disbelievery to the breaking point. It asks us to accept not one but two identical and fanciful cases of the affliction. Both Valentin…