“A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”
Sophia Loren : Secrets Of Rome
I think that’s the power of vintage style. It makes people smile
It is believed to depict her son, Titus Carvilius Gemello, who passed away at age 18. The ring was removed off Quarta’s finger. Her remains (along with her son) were found in a Flavio-Trajanic tomb known as Hypogeum of Garlands, at Grottaferrata necropolis, near Rome.
The Last Spies of Paris; unlike porters in London or doormen in New York, Paris’s omnipresent gardiennes—the eyes and ears of Haussmann buildings—are fast disappearing. A great read on Air Mail.
No matter how famous he became, he was still the ‘embarrassing little creep’ who, when he first arrived in New York, had harassed Truman Capote with daily fan letters, phone calls, and camped out on his doorstep; he was still the balding twenty-something sitting every day at the counter of Chock full o’Nuts, eating the same cream-cheese sandwich on date-nut bread; someone who founded his art on boredom, repetition, because only unvarying sameness could soothe his raging anxiety.
I told Andy the first time we met that this was something we had in common – that although, as he put it in his Diaries, I was a ‘beautiful girl’, a banker’s granddaughter, I was also a freak like him, a person who in some way would rather stand outside staring up at the Factory windows than be invited in.
Full article found on Granta.
From cabbage green to course meal, medieval manuscripts exhibit a spectrum of colours and consistencies when describing urine. Katherine Harvey examines the complex practices of uroscopy: how physicians could divine sexual history, disease, and impending death by studying the body’s liquid excretions.
Full article found on the Public Domain Review.
New Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša: ‘This is not fast food — it’s a slow-cooking process’
The Czech conductor, Hrusa, is only the fourth person in the job in 54 years, and he aims to keep the house ‘harmonious’
Isaac Asimov had an amazing way of looking at things directly, tangentially, retrospectively and speculatively all at once.
Old News Flutters From a Bottom Drawer'
Like most family history, it started as a rumor, a titillating story without context, myth-like. My mother had four brothers, three of whom were older. The oldest were Kenneth and Clifford. We never met the latter. Uncle Ken lived in Tampa, Fla., and we visited him in 1968, annus horribilis. He often went shirtless and we noticed the scars on his throat and upper chest but asked no questions. A fragment of story said they were the result of an accident involving a gun – a detail sure to grab a boy’s attention.
What May Save Us Is Conversation'
A friend tells me he and three other men have for a decade met monthly for lunch and conversation. All work or worked in the past for the same government agency in Washington, D.C. Conversation tended toward the traditionally male – politics, sports, health. Inevitably, opinions differed but relations remained amicable until recently. One of the four failed to show up two months in a row. Why? It turns out he was boycotting the lunches because of politics. In a word, Trump. I suspect the same thing is happening all over the country, even within families. As I wrote to my friend:
“I hate what politics does to people. Or, rather, what people do with politics, making it divisive, using it as a weapon. It could, of course, just as well be religion or baseball. It's beyond my understanding.”
The Decline of Conversation Albert Jay Nock (On Doing the Right Thing, 1928)
Clive James has a poem titled “To Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of Sydney University: A Report on My Discipline, on the Eve of My Receiving an Honorary Degree, 1999.” James is defining what he does as a literary journalist, a major minor writer, a writerly jack-of-all-trades, not a narrowly defined academic – the usual recipient of an honorary degree. Here are stanzas ten and eleven:
“The only problem is, no other kind
Of writer except great’s thought worth attention.
This attitude, in matters of the mind,
To my mind robs us of a whole dimension.
Intelligence just isn’t that refined:
It’s less a distillate than a suspension,
An absinthe we’d knock back in half a minute
Without the cloud of particles within it.
“Just so, a living culture is a swarm
Of moments that provide its tang and tingle:
Unless it’s fuelled by every minor form
From dirty joke to advertising jingle
It ends up like Dame Edna’s husband, Norm,
Stiff as a post. I think John Douglas Pringle
Was first to spot our language, at its core,
Owed its élan to how a wharfie swore.”
In 1728, Bishop White Kennet reports of Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “I have heard that nothing could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford and hearing the Barge-men scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his Sides, and laugh most profusely.”
