Wednesday, July 30, 2008

From Variety: Fashionistas Goes Hollywood

Just a little personal note here to say—-WOO HOOOO-—to an old friend, Lynn Messina, on the news that her debut novel, Fashionistas, is being made into a major motion picture!!!Lynn is a model of perseverance, the one in 1,000 writers who does not rest until they have found themselves a literary agent,...
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Monday, July 28, 2008

The Mystery of Our Bright Ideas

What can we reason but from what we know? Alexander PopeThe brain. The final frontier. While we go about our daily lives, there are teams of neuroscientists trying to learn how the brain does what it does. It is comforting to know that these people are out there toiling on our behalf.A recent dispatch...
              

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Mad Men: The Dawning of Those Who Think Young

When last we saw the enigmatic Don Draper, he was sitting on the bottom of his living room steps on Thanksgiving, 1960; his wife and children have gone to her Dad’s for the holiday. He didn’t want to go, since he’s not really participating in his marriage or his fatherhood. But he was affected by his...
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Monday, July 21, 2008

Dust and Lust in Roma e Magna Graecia

The summer wanderings took me to Rome for a few days, before some friends and I headed to Sicily, where we had rented a beach house. My friends hadn’t been to Rome before, so it was a great excuse to revisit some of its top attractions—the Colosseum, the Forum, the Palatine, and the Vatican.It was...
              

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Jo Stafford: She's "Home Again" Now

Jo Stafford died on Wednesday. May she rest in peace in a heaven of beautiful, sultry music. My parents had a compilation album of "songs from the fifties" that had her “You Belong to Me,” and it was the first adult song that I learned all the words to when I was very young.She had that agile, clear, distinctive voice, dripping with depth and expression. Her commanding downbeat to "Seeeeeee" those...
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008

A Modest Explanation

“I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the US should help the...
              

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Adrift in the Wine-Dark Sea

The idea is so enticing for a vacation, both the adriftness and the ancient, ancient allusion to both the Illiad and the Odyssey, where "the wine-dark sea" first appears.Scatter, now, some glory on this island, which the lord of Olympus,Zeus, gave Persephone and bowed his head to assent, the pride of...
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