When I was a child, I always thought of hills & mountains as barriers that hindered my family’s annual drive from the valley to the coast: They were obstacles to be gotten over – or more accurately, around – before we could begin our seaside...
My favorite scene in Mr. Turner, the 2014 biopic about the English artist, occurs during the run-up to a Royal Academy exhibition: Turner appears to have deliberately ruined one of his dark & dramatic seascapes by pressing a brush loaded with shiny red...
The Belgian writer Georges Simenon is most famous for his series of detective novels featuring Commissaire Maigret of the Police Judiciaire in Paris, but he also wrote other books that he called his romans durs or “hard novels.” ...
A few days ago, one of my students asked me if I had posted anything new to my blog lately. My answer was no, I hadn’t, because my 50th entry, written back in July, seemed like a good place to end. But these words were scarcely out of my...
Anticipating that this blog post would be my fiftieth, I recently printed out all of the previous ones & read them through. I placed them in categories as though they were in the chapters of a book & I wondered if, beyond the obvious one, there...
