BOUILLABAISSE AND THE DEFIANCE OF CODIFICATION PART 2
SEVERAL OF MY other cookbooks offer bouillabaisse recipes of one sort or another, but its most entertaining description comes from Alan Davidson’s Mediterranean Seafood. This is the one that led … Continue reading
BOUILLABAISSE AND DEFIANCE OF CODIFICATION PART 1
ONE THING leads to another. And, seemingly, to two-part items here recently at SimanaitisSays. There I was, reading a London Review of Books article by Inigo Thomas on Maison Empereur, … Continue reading
THE NAPOLEON DUPORT CAPER PART 2
WHEN LAST we encountered the cello of Jean-Louis Duport, indeed only yesterday, it had been manhandled by the overly enthusiastic as well as musically inept Napoleon Bonaparte. Today, the caper … Continue reading
THE NAPOLEON DUPORT CAPER PART 1
IT WAS 1812, destined to be the year about which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky would later compose an Overture. You know the one, with cannons and bells, celebrating Russia’s defense against … Continue reading
SOME THOUGHTS ON URBANIZATION
I’VE JUST READ Ben Rogers’ “The Great Sorting,” a London Review of Books review of Richard Florida’s The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequalities and What We Can … Continue reading
HOLMES AND THE PONTIFF PART 2
WHAT WITH the Vatican’s trove of second-century cameos not exactly qualifying as religious art, Pope Leo XIII was in a fine pickle. Fortunately, Sherlock Holmes had a reputation that extended … Continue reading
HOLMES AND THE PONTIFF PART 1
“I WAS EXCEEDINGLY preoccupied by that little affair of the Vatican cameos,” Sherlock Holmes said, “and in my anxiety to oblige the Pope I lost touch with several interesting English … Continue reading
THE CONFIDENCE-MAN, COMPLETE WITH HYPHEN PART 2
THERE WAS literary justice in the first appearance of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade being on April Fool’s Day, 1857: This Melville novel recounts the happenings on that very … Continue reading
THE CONFIDENCE-MAN, COMPLETE WITH HYPHEN PART 1
WHAT FOLLOWS is a meta-review. That is, a review of reviews, in this case of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, one of only a few books coming to mind that have … Continue reading
AUTOMOTIVE MUSCLE—PUT IN PERSPCTIVE
A BRIEF recollection of automotive muscle confirms the current idiocy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Scott Pruitt wanting to dial back the auto industries’ hard-earned, if occasionally grudging, advances … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 