Don’t just stand there! Eat it!
So, call it a midlife crisis: I recently got out my old guitar, its case covered with political slogans and names of punk bands, and tried my hand at a couple songs by Georges Brassens and Nick Drake. The crooning is okay, but the strumming is halting and clumsy, after years of not playing. It…
L’apprentissage du patrimoine…
A great day at the Musée d’Orsay!
n Tomorrow I’m going to the Louvre, so please indulge me the cheap rhyme in the title of this post: April is, after all, National Poetry Month and rest assured, nothing rhymes with “Louvre” in English (it’s now 2:42 a.m. and I’ve been lying in bed trying to think of something). n Today was the…
Carla versus moi…
n My friend Karen and I have been entertaining ourselves lately by trading Carla Bruni ‘isms (they are even funnier when you say them with a fake French accent): in one of them the beautiful, former top-model confesses that she doesn’t need make-up to look good. Duh. We like sing to each other too, in…
This is me…
n This is me in the room where we read, where the kids do their homework, and where we put up the Christmas tree. This is the room where I phoned my dad a year or so before he died: we were both catheterized, me following an operation for postpartum incontinence and him because the…
This was her…
n This is what we know about her: she lived in Egypt, probably in the Fayoum region, though she may have lived in Antinooupolis, Memphis, or Thebes. She spoke Egyptian and possibly Greek as a second language. She was alive in the second century of the Common Era. Apart from her beauty and apparent wealth…
“I’m sending you my dirty laundry…”
n I’m sending you my dirty laundry writes Courbet to his parents in 1839. Courbet is only twenty years old, a student at Besançon, and looks like the self-assured young man in this self-portrait (not the larger-than-life painter who once bragged that he drank two bottles of Burgundy, three bottles of Bordeaux, one bottle of…
Food porn
n I’ve been on sabbatical from teaching Middle School for six months now. I’ve done a lot of reading, quite a bit of writing, I’ve come up with a plan for my book and…my middle has expanded considerably. Teachers! You don’t realize how many calories you burn in a single day running down the hallway…
Baudelaire, portraits, and crowds
n I recently finished a book by Michel Butor called Histoire Extraordinaire; an essay on a dream of Baudelaire. It begins with a dream that Baudelaire recorded at five o’clock in the morning, when it was nice and warm, for his friend Charles Asselineau. (I love the idea of calling a dream nice and warm;…
Recent Articles
“To Shoot or Not to Shoot” or “How I Learned to Stop Judging and Love the Camera”
Yesterday I returned to the Musée d’Orsay. The first thing I did was to take the five floors up to the Post-Impressionist collection to Douanier Rousseau’s painting War. Last year I regretted not having taken a picture of it to use in the classes I teach at the Lab School because there is no reproduction…
