God placed danger and the abyss in the sea. But he also made it heaven's mirror Fernando Pessoa Twelve months this past summer we returned to Veni Mange. Alas this time, no Nadela. Nonetheless it was another memorable evening. Joe joined us before going to watch…
Literature
Country visit
This particular afternoon we went with L to visit M and her husband R who live at K Heights. They've lived there for 20 years doing up a house but the house building was still in progress after 2 decades. It was not the nicest day to be visiting anyone. It was grey, miserable and…
Hemingway’s Paris
In Paris, we usually stay at Hotel RASPAIL, on Bd Raspail. It is next door to Restaurant Haute Mer, an excellent seafood place at the corner of Bd Raspail and Bd Montparnasse. It is a thriving area that boasts Le Dome, another seafood place, La Coupole, La Rotonde, etc. We have been staying at Hotel…
Congo Square
Congo Square. Just north of the French Quarter in New Orleans, on the other side of Rampart Street, within the Louis Armstrong Park, in the Trème district, is this sacred space that the American Indians had used for centuries for their religious gatherings but taken over by Africans on Sundays during slavery. It remains…
Heroism in Hombre: Elmore Leonard
The hero of Elmore Leonard’s Hombre John Russell is a resolute figure who passes from mortality to legendary status in no time at all. When we first meet John Russell we learn that he is at least a quarter Indian and that he has the ways of the Apache. For some one so young,…
Invisible cities
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Malecón (in Dirty Havana Trilogy) is a place of sin! It takes its inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Gutiérrez…
Prayer and melancholia
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence…
Kafka’s Body
I have been in Venice this past weekend, at the Warwick Poetry in Medicine symposium. Even if you've been in Venice before, when the vaporetto comes from the Piazzale Roma onto the Grand Canal, in the bright morning sunlight, everything hangs like a Canaletto (1697-1768) canvas that is three dimensional, vast and alive. On either…
St Lucia: Walcott’s Island
The crickets here at Rodney Bay sound all night like an unoiled iron gate swivelling back and forth, on its hinges, in the wind. There is the occasional cricket with a bell in its throat and another that rasps and wheezes. What is absent is the bullfrog, croaking, calling with the kind of zest that…
Melancholia
Our sixth combat is with what the Greeks call ακηδια, which we may term weariness or distress of heart. This is akin to dejection, and is especially trying to solitaries, and dangerous and frequent foe to the dwellers in the desert… (Cassian circa 416 CE) Ajax, in Sophocles’ play, after slaughtering cattle…
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