ON SPEAKING M.L.E.
REBECCA MEAD WRITES “Schoolchildren in the British capital have developed a dialect, Multicultural London English—and my American-born son is learning it.” This, from The New Yorker, February 6, 2022. It’s … Continue reading
Cartoline da Collezione
TRUE, THE FOLLOWING are “collectible postcards,” but they’re also little pieces of art. Here are tidbits associated with these cartoline and their subjects. Hotel Eden, Rome. Located at Via Ludovisi, … Continue reading
EARLY CALIFORNIA COOKERY
CALIFORNIA’S CULTURAL DIVERSITY has given it a rich variety of cuisines. Helen Walker Linsenmeyer’s From Fingers to Finger Bowls offers tidbits of this from the earliest days to 1900. Linsenmeyer … Continue reading
HOW PARIS AMUSES ITSELF, 1903
HOW COULD I NOT read a book from 1903 with the title How Paris Amuses Itself? The book is one of those available new “selected by scholars as being culturally … Continue reading
LE MANS AND TARASCON, 1907
I BOUGHT THE BOOK A Spring Fortnight in France some years ago because its first chapter is about Le Mans and its last one about Tarascon. I know of Le … Continue reading
TRAVELS WITH ZENOBIA PART 2
TWO AMERICAN WOMEN, foot-loose after World War I adventures, decide to buy a Ford Model T in Paris and drive it to Albania. Their journal was transformed into the book … Continue reading
TRAVELS WITH ZENOBIA PART 1
WHENEVER I CONSIDER giving a book away, I leaf through it to recall why I bought it in the first place. And then I wonder if I really want to … Continue reading
夫を連れて行って, ください
A JAPANESE COMEDIENNE might use the line above, Google Translate’s rendering of “Take my husband, please.” But until relatively recently she wouldn’t be performing rakugo, the classical form of Japanese … Continue reading
MOUNT RUSHMORE TIDBITS
DAUGHTER SUZ AND I recently enjoyed Alfred Hitchcock’s famed North by Northwest, everything from this director’s cameo missing a bus in its opening moments, to the oft-cited line “We laugh … Continue reading
AMERICANS IN JAPAN—1965
JUST AS THE 1853–1854 Perry Expedition to Japan led to the Meiji Era’s assimilation of Western ways, the 1964 Summer Olympics, the first Olympiad held in Asia, enhanced Tokyo’s standing … Continue reading
