Giving Deep Thanks for My Courageous German Great Grandmother

"Mareichtag and I are speaking nothing but English now. So we should feel at home when we get to America." "To America!" [Watch the wonderful scene.] I am a life-long fan of Casablanca, and as the years have gone by, I have discovered more and more cosmic connections to it. Ten years after I...

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 Mapeel     11/22/2017     family, Film, Travel   

Thomas Hardy's Guy Fawkes Bonfire & the Lessons of Eustacia Vye

While the men and lads were building the pile, a change took place in the mass of shade which denoted the distant landscape. Red suns and tufts of fire one by one began to arise, flecking the whole country round. They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets that were engaged in the same sort...

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 Mapeel     11/04/2017     current events, poetry, Thomas Hardy   

Twin Peaks The Return: The Day After

This is not another recap of Twin Peaks: The Return, just some observations I offer as part of the wonderfully participatory arena the whole TWR has provided. I enjoyed the whole series, and loved both parts of the finale. I also loved reading all the intellectual interpretations about the huge subtleties...

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 Mapeel     9/04/2017   

Two Women for the Ages: Princess Diana & Mother Teresa, 20 Years in Heaven

 Time marches on. It is twenty years now since these two extraordinary women died 6 days apart in 1997. They had met just two months earlier that year, June 18, 1997, when Diana visited one of the Missionaries of Charity in the Bronx.  How oddly fitting that Princess Diana and Mother Teresa,...

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 Mapeel     8/31/2017     current events   

Mother's Day: My debt to my maternal grandmother, Rena Caroline Waldis Brown

Rena Waldis Brown at the Forest Lake Country Club circa 1918 Thinking of my maternal grandmother on this Mother's Day, whom I affectionately called Grammy Whammy because she was a pip. She died in 1993 at the age of 93, born when the 19th century became the 20th century. I have several of her belongings,...

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 Mapeel     5/14/2017     family   

Massive MTA Failure: Sadly, Nothing New.

The MTA has been failing its costumers on an epic scale lately.  Yesterday's commuting nightmare also had Con Edison pitching in: NY Times "Why a Midtown Power Failure Snarled Your Morning Commute."  Snarled is a pretty cozy word for soul-sapping mess.   Funny thing, when I was googling...

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 Mapeel     4/22/2017     blogs, current events   

The Leftovers: I’m All in for the Final Season of Exasperations and Magic

I am all in for the niche ruminating about The Leftovers after the premiere of its 3rd and final season last Sunday because there is so much fun to be had. The series is a triumph of imagination, combined with the highest arts of TV writing, directing, and acting. It is pure enjoyment to be pulled...

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 Mapeel     4/19/2017     Film, literature, television   

Mystical Connections This Weekend: Our Titanic Catharsis, Lincoln’s Assassination, and My Dad’s Easter Memorial

The wheels of history have turned to align us today to the same days to dates as 1865. In Daniel Mendelsohn's excellent 2012 New Yorker article "Unsinkable, why we can't let go of the Titanic" he noted an historian once quipped that "three most written about subjects of all time...

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 Mapeel     4/14/2017     current events, Film   

100 Years Ago Today the Americans Enter WW 1, to "Oh, were the Americans in the Great War?"

An American Doughboy receives a medal from King George V, World War 1 Updating this post on April 6, 2017, commemorating one hundred years ago today we entered World War 1. An odd occurrence connects my recent trips to Italy and England. It concerns two conversations with Englishmen of a certain...

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 Mapeel     4/06/2017     current events   

My Editions of the Romantics: That Which Connects

"It has been estimated that at the time of Keats' death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies."  Andrew Motion, The Guardian January 23, 2010 Yet here we are, two hundred years later, and the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association is running...

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 Mapeel     3/25/2017     literature, national poetry month, poetry   

Going Their Way. Attention Must Be Paid.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. . . . His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the...

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 Mapeel     1/07/2017     Bing Crosby, blogs, movies