06/29
The City Sojourner #3: Venice at Gaucho – Summary: How do I save money in Venice? You don’t.
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June 27, 2010 Culture, Travel
Still astonishing for the engineering fete of persistence that keeps a city built on mud flats standing after 1500 years. Piazza San Marco floods with a rising tide every twelve hours but what’s a little water in the foyer? A true Venetian would never abandon his city to a fickle tide.
If anything the ground is giving way to the centuries of history that saturate the buildings and streets above it. Yet it’s sad to see such a marvel, once ‘the liquid frontier between the east and the west’ transformed into a tourist attraction. Although it’s probably been that way since long before my time, each year more citizens are forced to relocate to affordable suburbs away from their beloved canals and bridges. Tourists we come and spend and drive up prices, we leave trash and take away photographs and silly souvenirs, but we don’t keep the city standing; the citizens do and they’re the ones tourism forces out. After a while we’re bored and we leave and the citizens that are left go about their business. They work on renovations funded in part by our lavish pleasure-spending and do their best to keep their city standing, flooded or dry, infested by tourists or not. A simple task to master the fickle tides! The true engineering fete of persistence for Venice would be not to abandon the city to the flood of tourists, either.
“The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”
François René de Chateubriand (1768-1848)
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06/5
‘… [L]ife just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.’ The Pleasures of Imagination by Paul Bloom at the Chronicle Review
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June 4, 2010 Culture, Review
I’ve been on pub tours before, but never one that fired my imagination like this.
Twelve of us were led through the cobbled streets of the Old and New Town’s of Edinburgh on a Literary Pub Tour. It began at the Beehive Inn, a large pub with an appropriately aged appearance, just off the Royal Mile.
Read on »
June 1, 2010 Books
These three novels helped get me through the rainy month of May:
(1) In Hearts in Atlantis, Stephen King takes us on a journey from the tumultuous days of the late 1960’s to the beginning of the modern age, from the cruelty of children to gambling addictions, from protests against the war in Vietnam to the lives of war veterans after the fighting is over.
The first part of the novel explains how Ted, a strange old man that likes root beer and literature, takes refuge in a Connecticut suburb from the “low men.” The story is told from Bobby’s point of view, and when it begins he is only eleven years old. Bobby becomes friends with Ted and they talk about books and time and life, and one of the books that Ted gives Bobby to read is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Read on »
“Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.”
Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923)
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May 27, 2010 Excerpt, Writing Elsewhere
Short fiction by Matt Herron:
“I’ll probably never know whether he left his gun in the car on accident or just didn’t wanna kill them. He told me he wanted a burger. What was I gonna say? MacLeary’s makes good burgers.
He must have held his own in there, whatever happened. The pub was wrecked. Shattered mugs, pool balls, and beer littered the floor between the remnants of a half dozen once-sturdy wooden bar stools. A splintered pool cue stuck out of the wall through an ancient, faded Cubs poster. And Marty, except for a few bruised knuckles, he walked out unscathed, burger in hand, with a big ‘ol shit-eating grin on his face. I knew there was something wrong when I saw that smile. Marty only smiles for one reason.”
Click here to read the whole story, published by Is Greater Than.
“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846-1912)
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05/24
The War of Art: An Interview with Steven Pressfield “… it never gets easier. You still have to slay the dragon every morning.”
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