Category Archives: Cities
Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop: Boston Marathons
April 17, 2013 He writes only about the Civil War dead: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the soldiers from the all-black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, captured in bronze by August Saint-Gaudens. The sculpture isn’t all that close to the finish … Continue reading
The Global North: Alexander, Boo, Erdrich, Ferry
February 13, 2013 The blizzard this past weekend made me think of Argus, North Dakota. Louise Erdrich’s country. Love Medicine opens with a blizzard: “The snow feel deeper that Easter than it had for forty years, but June walked over … Continue reading
Jane Austen’s Philadelphia, Toni Morrison’s Denver
January 30, 2013 2013 is the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice, so I’ve been learning new things about Jane Austen — for instance, the fact that her aunt was named Philadelphia, Phila for short. Phila never saw Philadelphia; no, at … Continue reading
Ntozake Shange, Alice B. Toklas: What Cooks Know
January 23, 2013 “The first effable gazpacho was served to us in Malaga,” Alice notes. She and Gertrude Stein would also find “entirely different but equally exquisite” versions of the that soup in Seville and Cordoba, cities once under Islamic … Continue reading
Shankar, Coltrane, Whitman: Within You, Without You
December 12, 2012 2012 is full of deaths at the year’s end. Dave Brubeck last week; this week, Ravi Shankar. Shankar was half an American musician (the fractions don’t have to add up to a zero-sum game). Since 1970 he … Continue reading
Olaudah Equiano, Dave Brubeck: à la Turk
December 5, 2012 Equiano liked Turkey. He had gone there from Italy in 1769, and greatly admired the grapes and pomegranates in the ancient city of Smyrna, “the richest and largest I ever tasted.” He also liked the fact that … Continue reading
Louise Erdrich, Kurt Vonnegut: Germany’s Wars
November 21, 2012 There is a longer title to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel: “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too … Continue reading
Edward Weston, Walt Whitman: Grass
November 7, 2012 Whitman, poet of New Jersey and New York. Also poet of grass, the force of demographics, what comes up from the ground. He would have been unsurprised by Hurricane Sandy, or by the rising sea levels … Continue reading
Unending Katrina: Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun
October 31, 2012 I never made it to the World Humanities Forum, a small story in a big storm. New Orleans and New York: this is the tale of two cities that is now unfolding. I wish I could say: … Continue reading