An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
A Certain Slant of Light In third grade, when I couldn’t see the board, I got glasses. Suddenly every hair, every whisker on our cat shone. I spied dust on the chalkboard erasers. My mother developed wrinkles. I needed a … Continued
From start to last, Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence reeks of love and sex and, in part, of privilege. Yet, underlying the main character’s obsession with Fushon, a young woman at least 15 years younger than he, is an … Continued
I know no one from Turkey, but some of my students practice an African version of Islam. They are Somali, have come here as refugees, often after spending years in Kenyan refugee camps. Thus I have acquired a small education … Continued
Of Turkey, not the bird but the country, I know almost nothing except its largest city Istanbul, curves around a beautiful harbor called the Golden Horn which leads to the Bosporus, that narrow pathway into the Black Sea. Yet listening … Continued
War fascinates me–maybe by studying it elsewhere, I hope to keep it away from here. Yet, there’s more to it: war with its upheaval, its extremes of fear, heroism, death, destruction, hope and camaraderie shows the human condition at its … Continued
Well, not really. Moby Dick was the whale chased by the Pequod out of Nantucket. I don’t mean Nantucket, though it figures in these notes, but the mainland town that in the 1830s, 40s, 50s, fitted out the most whaling … Continued
I vaguely remember when Venice’s historic opera house burned in 1996, but now listening to John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels, I find the story brought to life with all the shock, mess, and drama one would expect to … Continued
Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August about the first month of World War I is a truly magisterial work. “Magisterial,” suggesting pomp, command, wealth of resources, or in other words “magesty.” Not only is her English prose brilliantly crafted, rich … Continued
The more I listen to (well, read) about warfare, the more I’m learning about what makes a good general. Not a subject I’d ever have expected to fascinate me, but in the hands (well, voice) of a great historian, generalship … Continued
Most of the alliances that activated World War I were known to all the parties ahead of time: Britain’s crafting of Belgium neutrality and determination to protect it; France and Russia’s agreement to come to each other’s aid should Germany … Continued