Attention: Wet Paint
Or Thoughts from the Damp Side I love walking in the rain. It does bring back indelible memories of the paper route boy I was in elementary school - rain-spotted glasses and jeans clinging to thighs - and the farmer’s kid - wet through in calving season, drenched and...
My Imagined Country
Or Blurring Techniques Explained Firsthand Right off the bat, let me plead guilty to borrowing this title from the wonderful author Isabel Allende. While Canada and Chile have little in common, we voluntary exiles share the contradictory sentiments attached to land of...
Drawing Conclusions
Or Life & Lines I think I have it figured out. I should imagine those people with vocations occasionally sit down and say to themselves just why did I embark at that particualr port for a lifelong trip. (Usually like pondering comes in heavy seas, when you just...
Past Tense
Or What’s the Appropriate 15th-Century Term for “Weekend”? THE MIDDLE AGES I dearly love that term. What other historical term covers, in three easy-to-learn words, more or less one millenium of recent Western culture. What other term implies that the millenium in...
Working Week
Or All Work and No Play… This time, no amateur philosophizing, no more fooling around. Introducing the fully illustrated newsletter (which means I can substract nine thousand words and still get away with it). Started in the evening, after spending the day reworking...
Velvet Curtains and Scotch Tape
Or Vivacissimo Con Violenza We have a friend who sings at the opera. Whenever we can, we go to see him sing, so a few weeks ago we were in snowbound Besançon, to see Puccini’s Tosca. You know the end of the story. Tosca, after stabbing Scarpia, and wrenching...
Standing Stone and Talking Pictures
Or the View Over Imalogos Recently, I said (quite) a few words as a totally unqualified commentator about the recent cataloging of standing stones in the Neuchâtel region for a local radio. (No, I don’t know what I said, I never listen to broadcasts, preferring to...
Alan Lee’s Hands
Or Fan Letters and Flights of Fancy It seems like every time I go somewhere, I end up somewhere else. My mind is like a toddler in a mall, always wandering off and getting lost… I have an internal PA system constantly reminding me to come to the information booth to...
The Eyes Have It
Or George Washington’s Boots, Gandalf in the Back Seat, the Wings of Angels and a Workshop in Bristol. Just finished reading a book entitled “The World through Blunted Sight” by Patrick Trevor-Roper Despite a rather hokey foray into the symbolism of eyesight (I always...
When Looking Back…
Is Actually Looking Forward Any excuse is a good excuse to set a milestone here and there on the road. In a world where it’s easy to confuse well-being with monotony, every mark you can leave that fixes a moment in time is worth making. About two years ago, I wrote «...
Running on Empty
Or When No News is… Just No News Ever have that feeling that you might not make it to the next gas station? It seems like my engine has stuttered to a halt, but I’m at the top of a long slope, like those ones you get in the Southwest USA, where the road seems to drop...
Bruges and Back Again
Or a Long Story Short… Just back from Bruges. Hardly an abandoned city, even in December it is crammed to overflowing with tourists. The most fun was going through the city with The Abandoned City in hand, trying to figure out where everything was again. If Copenhagen...