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 Posted: Sat Dec 08, 2007 1:32 pm Post subject: |
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Paris 1919
Six Months that Changed the World
Paperback
By Frostback history champ Margaret Macmillan
| Quote: | Lloyd George like to talk of his origins in a humble cottage, but in fact he came from the educated artisan class. His father, who died when he was very young, was a schoolmaster; the uncle who brought him up was a master cobbler and lay preacher, a figure of stature in his small village. Wales was always important to Lloyd George as a reference point, if only to measure how far he had come, and also for sentimental reasons (although he grew quickly bored if he had to spend too much time there). He had early on seen himself on a larger stage. And what larger stage than the capital of the world's biggest empire? As he wrote to the local girl who became his wife, "My supreme idea is to get on."
He was fortunate in his uncle, who gave him unstinting devotion and support. When, as a boy, he discovered that he had lost his belief in God, the lay preacher forgave him. When he decided to go into the law, his uncle worked through a French grammar book one step ahead of him so that he could get the language qualification that he required. And when he decided to go into politics, a huge gamble for someone without money or connections, his uncle again supported him. The old man lived just long enough to see his nephew become prime minister. (footnotes omitted) (From Lloyd George and the British Empire Delegation, p. 39) |
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| Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 2:53 pm Post subject: |
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The Private Lives of the Impressionists
Hardcover
By Virginia Woolf scholar Sue Roe
| Quote: | In April, Monet was running from his creditors. He went to Sevres, where he rented a little house in the chemnin des Closeau, near the station of Ville d'Avray. Though he had sold a few paintings, he was still far from being able to pay off his accumulating debts. He had begun work on a new painting, Women in the Garden, which was to be even more ambitious than The Picnic. This time, although the figures would not be life-sized (thereby avoiding one set of problems), the picture was to be painted entirely in the open air, which would at least dispense with the need to transpose and scale up preliminary sketches. He had a special contraption built, to lower the canvas into a trench while he painted the upper portions. But he was still struggling with the relationship between his landscape and his figures, who looked posed no matter what he did with them. For his new picture, Camille again sat, this time for at least three of the four women. Their dresses were scintillating, shining out in white against the darkness of the foliage. But for some reason the figures were difficult to bring to life. This painting too would clearly demand months of work, and Monet was in dire financial straits. In Le Havre, Aunt Lecadre was threatening to cut off the allowance she still paid, despite the previous October's row. In fact, she relented...
By the time the Salon deadline began to loom, Monet had temporarily abandoned work on Women in the Garden. (He sent it the following year, when it was rejected.) Meanwhile, he submitted two works to the 1866 Salon, then returned to Normandy with Camille, where they were spotted gambling in the local casino. (From Cafe Life, pgs. 43-44) |
| Quote: | ... Sleeves were very short, worn with long, tight gloves, and necklines were cut wide and low. Berthe Morisot was photographed in one of the new dresses, looking haughty, sulky and very seductive.
Other businesses, however, were ruined by the war. Sisley's father's emporium was destroyed, and the Parisian branch of the De Gas family bank suffered significantly. But the changed economic climate created new opportunities for buying and selling art. As Renoir remarked later, 'the golden age of the middle man, the buyer and seller, the shrewd dealer, now began.' The big industrialists, who had replaced the nobility as the new, commercial aristocracy, were rapidly being joined by a proliferation of successful merchants. Picture dealers were refurbishing their shops, restyling them as 'galleries.' Durand-Ruel opened a second gallery in the rue Lafitte, a street adjacent to his first, in the rue le Peletier. Before long, the rue Lafitte was being nicknamed 'the alternative Salon': it seemed to consist more or less entirely of small galleries. Durand-Ruel and other enterprising dealers began to buy directly from artists, to build up their stocks by name, and to establish artists' reputations, rather than simply purchasing individual paintings as they had in the past. Durand-Ruel was keen to extend his network of artists and was already holding public exhibitions in his galleries. He was gambling his capital, prepared to take risks, on the lookout for new, avant-garde works, and using all the latest marketing tactics. (Recovery, p. 98) |
| Quote: | | ... 'Durand-Ruel was a missionary,' Renoir later told his son Jean. 'It is lucky for us that his religion was painting ... In 1885 he almost went under, and the rest of us with him.' Though he was a respectable bourgeois, an ardent royalist and a practising Catholic, Durand-Ruel was willing to take a gamble. Since 1865, when he inherited his business, he had been directly supporting radical artists and attempting to sell their work to the wealthy set of Americans in Paris. Neither strategy had brought him success. But in 1885, his networking paid off. He received an invitation from Janes Sutton, President of the American Art Association in New York, to mount an exhibition in the Association's rooms. Durand-Ruel accepted without hesitation. By March 1886, he was on his way to New York. (The Impressionist in New York, p. 254) |
Best tribute to painters:
La boheme
By the inimitable Charles Aznavour
Parole par Jacques Plante
From the 1965 musical, Monsieur Carnaval
A young Aznavour at Youtube.com
| Quote: | La bohème
Je vous parle d'un temps
Que les moins de vingt ans
Ne peuvent pas connaître
Montmartre en ce temps-là
Accrochait ses lilas
Jusque sous nos fenêtres
Et si l'humble garni
Qui nous servait de nid
Ne payait pas de mine
C'est là qu'on s'est connu
Moi qui criait famine
Et toi qui posais nue
La bohème, la bohème
Ça voulait dire on est heureux
La bohème, la bohème
Nous ne mangions qu'un jour sur deux
Dans les cafés voisins
Nous étions quelques-uns
Qui attendions la gloire
Et bien que miséreux
Avec le ventre creux
Nous ne cessions d'y croire
Et quand quelque bistro
Contre un bon repas chaud
Nous prenait une toile
Nous récitions des vers
Groupés autour du poêle
En oubliant l'hiver
La bohème, la bohème
Ça voulait dire tu es jolie
La bohème, la bohème
Et nous avions tous du génie
Souvent il m'arrivait
Devant mon chevalet
De passer des nuits blanches
Retouchant le dessin
De la ligne d'un sein
Du galbe d'une hanche
Et ce n'est qu'au matin
Qu'on s'asseyait enfin
Devant un café-crème
Epuisés mais ravis
Fallait-il que l'on s'aime
Et qu'on aime la vie
La bohème, la bohème
Ça voulait dire on a vingt ans
La bohème, la bohème
Et nous vivions de l'air du temps
Quand au hasard des jours
Je m'en vais faire un tour
A mon ancienne adresse
Je ne reconnais plus
Ni les murs, ni les rues
Qui ont vu ma jeunesse
En haut d'un escalier
Je cherche l'atelier
Dont plus rien ne subsiste
Dans son nouveau décor
Montmartre semble triste
Et les lilas sont morts
La bohème, la bohème
On était jeunes, on était fous
La bohème, la bohème
Ça ne veut plus rien dire du tout |
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| Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 2:09 pm Post subject: |
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A Fleeting Sorrow
Hardcover
By Francoise Sagan
Translated from the French by Arcade Publishing
President Richard Seaver
| Quote: | ... How could he be an adult when all he wanted was to be eleven years old again, to rush into the room of his parents - both dead, unfortunately - and beg for their help? They were the only ones who could tell him not to pay any attention to what the silly doctor had said, to reassure him that it was utter nonsense, that everything was going to be all right. They alone could have turned his world right side up again, sent him back to his bedroom completely reassured, that adolescent bedroom where nobody ever died. Later on, Paul would reproach himself for having first thought of his dear, departed parents rather than of the women in his life, who were alive and well. But when he thought about it, that instinctive choice did not really surprise him all that much. He had always known how strong his ties to childhood were, much stronger in fact than those he had forged as an adult.
And once again he had seen the proof of that basic truth: only his parents would have found it scandalous, totally unacceptable, that their son should die of cancer at age forty. The rest of the world would find it normal. The way of the world. The luck of the draw. His friends and relations were going to find sad, even very sad, a pity, most unfortunate, or stupid. But no one would think about his death the way he and his parents would: unthinkable. (From I, pgs. 6-7) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 4:46 pm Post subject: |
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La Belle France
A Short History
Hardcover
By Alistair Horne
| Quote: | | ... affluent Frenchmen found themselves able to indulge in the pursuit of leisure - and pleasure. Apart from the periodic grand spectacles that were guaranteed to engage and distract, there were games such as the jeu de paume - predecessor of our moder tennis, and greatly favoured by the King. It became immensely popular, with no fewer than 114 courts springing up i Paris alone. Under Louis, gambling (largely banned) became all the rage - notably at Versailles. Recorded Mme. de Sevigne, "one plays here for terrifying sums, and the gamblers are like madmen. One howls, another strikes the table with such a blow that it resounds round the whole room." On Christmas Day 1678, Mme. de Montespan lost 700,000 ecus, but, possibly with the connivance of the banker, the King's mistress was permitted to win it all back. Louis was all for gambling of every kind; the opiate of the nobles, it afforded one very simple means of domesticating them. (From The Age of Louis XIV, pg. 159) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 4:49 pm Post subject: |
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Passionate Minds
The great love affair of the Englightenment, featuring the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world
Hardcover
By David Bodanis
| Quote: | She (Émilie) and the great writer Voltaire were lovers for nearly a decade, though they certainly took their time settling down, having to delay for frantic gallopings across France, sword fights in front of besieged German fortresses, a wild affair (hers) with a gallant pirate's son, and a deadly burning of books (his) by the public executioner at the base of the grand stairwell of the Palais de Justice in Paris. There was also rigging the French national lottery to guarantee a multimillion-franc payout, and investing in North African grain futures with the proceeds.
... When they ran out of money, Emilie would sometimes resort to the gambling tables at Versailles - since she was so much quicker than anyone else at mathematics, she could often be counted on to win. Voltaire wrote proudly that "the court ladies, playing cards with her in the company of the queen, were far from suspecting that they were sitting next to Newton's commentator."
Voltaire wasn't much of a scientist, but Emilie was a skilled theoretician. Once, working secretly at night at the chateau over a single intense summer month, hush ing the servants not to spoil the surprise for Voltaire, she came up with insights on the nature of light that set the stage for the future discovery of photography, as well as of infrared radiation. Her later work was even more fundamental, for she played a key role in transforming Newton's thought for the modern era. The research she did on what later became termed the conservation of energy was crucial here, and the "squared" in Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 (squared) came, in fact, directly from her work. (From the Preface, pgs. 1-2) |
The lottery scam:
| Quote: | ... The city government had recently defaulted on its municipal bonds, which meant that there were a lot of wealthy individuals who owned valueless bonds. If the government left it at that, thos individuals whould be very wary of ever investing in future bond issues. To show good faith - and make up for some of the investors' losses - the city government now decided to offer a lottery, to which only owners of those now valueless bonds could apply. Since the angry bondholders wouldn't participate in an ordinary lottery (having been so misled before), the government decided to go further and add substantial extra funds to the total lottery amount. The government felt this was safe, since it expected only a few holders of the original bonds to invest, despite the sweetener of the increased payment per ticket.
What it didn't reckon with was Voltaire's ingenuity, aided by his new friend the mathematician La Condamine. Voltaire had been audacious and creative in leterature. Now he applied the same skills to finance. What if someone went around and bought all the valueless bonds that were in default? It was easy enough, for the owners of the bonds were still so upset at having lost all their money in the city's original default that they didn't really believe the promises the city gave that there would be extra money in the lottery.
In fact, though, these bonds weren't quite valueless, for Voltaire - and La Condamine, and a very few others he brought into his syndicate - weren't blinded by that recent experience of financial loss, and so understood that the bonds were "tickets" they could use to enter the city's lottery. And since the city genuinely had added extra funds to sweeten the lottery... (From Exile and Return, pgs. 59-60) |
The tax scam (foiling the Fontainebleu cheats into the bargain):
| Quote: | What she realized, after just a few weeks, was that there would be a great demand in France for some organization that could supply decent streams of cash at reasonable interest rates. Large workshops and trading companies needed that, but there was no stock market and no well-developed bond market to supply it.
Now she thought of another way. Taxes in France weren't collected directly by the government - as we saw, there was no civil service capable of that. Instead, the king let a few private individuals collect taxes, for a high fee. After those individuals had collected enough to pay that fee, they got to keep the rest.
She couldn't take over that role, for the individuals who had the rights to it wouldn't let go. But those tax collectors themselves often needed money to organize the large private bureaucracies they required to collect taxes from across the nation. What if she offered to pay them for the right to get some of that money they'd earn in the future? Since hardly anyone was aware of this opportunity, she could buy what they'd be earning in the future at a low price. Once she had the tax collectors signed up, she could then tell the court gamblers (whose money she'd "lost"), that she'd pay them back by giving them some of that future money when it arrived.
It was a modern form of derivatives, and she didn't even need to keep it running until she had the full 84,000 francs she owed. The Fontainebleau cheats knew they'd gone too far, since they of course had also been violating the royal honor by rigging the games played at the queen's table. In exchange for accepting partial payment as a settlement, Emilie quietly promised that she wouldn't use her family connections to start an embarrassing investigation into how they'd arranged their cheating. The whole maneuver didn't cost Emilie anything, for the tax collectors were so dim that they had accepted the promise of a fairly low amount of money for the right to their future earnings. When those earnings did start coming in, months or years later, Emilie would get a profit. (From the chapter, To Sceaux, pgs. 217-218) |
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| Posted: Sat Dec 29, 2007 5:37 pm Post subject: |
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Distant Relations
Hardcover
By Carlos Fuentes
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
| Quote: | My friend's pallor was not unusual. With the passing of the years his skin had become fused to his facial bones and his gesturing, slender hands had become translucent.
I had seen him shortly after his return from Mexico, which seemed to have somewhat dissipated his resemblance to a civilized phantom. Sun had given him density, fleshly presence. I almost didn't recognize him.
The return of his habitual pallor should have made him look entirely familiar, but there was something different about his manner. When I saw him alone at his table in the club dining room, I walked over to greet him and to suggest we have lunch together.
"Only if you join me here," he said, glancing toward the other tables, some distance from his.
His eyes were lost in depths far more profound than that of the vast shadowy dining room. The preferred tables, placed beside a large balcony overlooking the Place de la Concorde, escape the gloom. As these are the best in the club, it is only natural that they be allotted to the senior members. I accepted his invitation for what it was a courtesy to a younger friend.
"I haven't seen you since you returned from your trip," I said.
He continued studying his menu as if he hadn't heard me. He was leaning forward slightly, his back to the windows. The bluish light of that early afternoon in November illuminated his bald head and fringe of gray hair. Abruptly, he looked up, but not toward me. He turned and stared into the distance beyond the square, toward the bank of the river.
"Order for me," he asked me as the waiter approached. He spoke with the sense of urgency that now seemed characteristic of all his actions. I wondered if he had always behaved this way, and I had simply not noticed it before. His small, darting eyes measured the square, focusing for a long moment on the tree-lined promenade of the Tuileries.
"Well," he said finally, after we had been served our wine and his restless eyes had found repose in its depths. "I had made a wager with myself, wondering if anyone would come over to speak to me, if I would find anyone to tell my story to." (Opening paragraphs, pgs. 3-4) |
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| Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:11 pm Post subject: |
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Rififi
DVD
Classic French film noir
| Quote: | Opening scene: dark, dingy Paris cafe late at night with the heist crew hunched and scowling over cards in a game of five-card stud that would not easily tolerate four-flushers like us.
Uncredited gambler: Deux pour moi.
Another uncredited gambler: (lays out a full house)
Tony le Stéphanois: (choking over the requisite Gauloise) Paulo, stake me.
Paulo: (clearly uncomfortable saying no to a gangster of such obvious import) Impossible, Tony. Not during a game.
Tony: OK, I'll call for cash. (Makes a phone call, then returns to the table, where cards are dealt but not to him). How about me?
Paulo: We don't bet promises here. No cash, no cards. |
Heist scene is outdone only by the final car chase, one of the best ever!
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| Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 2:51 pm Post subject: |
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The Turk
The Life and Times of the Famous
Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing
Machine
Hardcover
By Tom Standage
| Quote: | On an autumn day in 1769, a Hungarian nobleman, Wolfgang von Kempelen, was summoned to witness a conjuring show at the imperial court of Maria Theresa, empress of Austria-Hungary. So unimpressed was Kempelen by what he saw that he impetuously declared that he could do better himself. Very well, said the empress, and gave him six months to deliver on his promise.
The following year Kempelen unveiled an extraordinary contraption: a mechanical man seated behind a wooden cabinet. The Turk, as it became known, was fashioned from wood, powered by clockwork, and dressed in a stylish Turkish costume. Most astonishing of all, it was capable of playing chess. But how did it work? A torrent of pamphlets, books and articles followed the Turk wherever it went. Was it controlled by a dwarf, a monkey, or a legless war veteran lurking in its innards? Was it an elaborate form of puppet, or controlled by magnets? Or had Kempelen succeeded in building a thinking machine? Even eminent scientists failed to fathom the Turk's secret.
Kempelen's machine was a huge success in Europe and America. The subject of numerous stories, legends and outright fabrications, the Turk became associated with a host of historical figures, including Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Babbage and Edgar Allan Poe. Along the way, this strange creation unwittingly helped to bring about the development of the power loom, the computer and the detective story.
Part historical mystery, part real-life fairy tale, the mystery of the Turk has assumed a new significance in the computer age, as scientists and philosophers continue to debate the possibility of machine intelligence. To modern eyes, the Turk now seems to have been a surprisingly far-sighted invention. This book tells the story of its remarkable and chequered career. (From the inside cover) |
| Quote: | | Even though he was generally recognized in England, France and elsewhere as the best chess player in Europe, (François-André Danican) Philidor regarded himself as a musician. Born in 1726, he came from a musical family, sang in the choir of the chapel royal in Versailles as a boy, and learned chess at the age of ten from one of the court musicians before going on to study with Legall. (The court musicians were forbidden from playing games of chance, such as gambling with cards or dice, but were allowed to play chess; they had a long table for the purpose, inlaid with six chessboards.) It was in 1745, while on a musical tour in Rotterdam that was canceled when the soloist fell ill, that Philidor had to fall back on his chess playing as a means of earning a living. He was a talented player, but what really made his name was the publication of his book, The Analysis of Chess, a detailed and comprehensive guide to chess strategy published in 1749 that was instantly recognized as a classic. (A Most Charming Contraption, pgs. 49-50) |
Analysis of the Game of Chess
Hardcover
By François-André Danican Philidor
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| Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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The Judgment of Paris
The Revolutionary Decade that
Gave the World Impressionism
Hardcover
By Ross King
| Quote: | | Courbet had soon been enchanted by the presence in Trouville of James McNeill Whistler and, even more agreeable to him, Whistler's copper-haired Irish mistress and model, Joanna Hiffernan. The daughter of an Irish immigrant to London, the beautiful Jo had met Whistler in 1860, when she was about seventeen, and had posed for various of his paintings and engravings. Her most famous appearance was in The White Girl, the seven-foot-high canvas that gave Whistler both public notoriety and a case of lead poisoning. She, Whistler and Courbet made a happy threesome in Trouville that October, eating shrimp salad, visiting the casino, and frolicking in the breakers. "This is a charming place," sighed Whistler in a letter to a friend in London. He and Courbet assembled their easels along the beach, and Whistler finished at least five canvases; one of them, Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville, pictured the stocky, bearded Courbet in the foreground. Whistler had long admired Courbet's work, while Courbet quickly came to appreciate the charms of Whistler's "superb, red-headed girl." Smitten with Jo's Celtic beauty, he painted her in a portrait, La Belle Irlandaise, in which her abundant red-gold tresses were prominantly featured. (Monet or Manet?, p. 180) |
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| Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:33 pm Post subject: |
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Travel & Leisure
Magazine Subscription
A French Revolution
Far from the klieg-lit wineries of Bordeaux and Burgundy, the growers of France's sleepy Langedoc-Roussillon were caught by surprise when the New World came knocking. Sarah Wildman looks at an industry
struggling to balance tradition and innovation.
November, 2007
| Quote: | | Crisis is the word whispered by everyone here who is connected to wine, and pretty much everyone in the region has his or her hands in the industry. The French share of the global wine market has fallen by one-third in the last 20 years. But that number is misleading - the Grand Cru wines, the top Bordeaux and the Burgundies, are doing fine. It is the small growers and the family vineyards churning out basic table wines that are in trouble. In response, Côtes de Thongue winemakers are gambling that New World techniques that produce creative, easy-to-drink wines will reverse two decades of economic slide. Planting a California cépage, or wine variety, would once have been unheard of in France - but then again, so would sending a son to New Zealand to learn about wines, and that's just what Louis-Marie did a few years ago. "Our only standard is diversity," the elder Teisserenc says, knowing that using a word like diversity is revolutionary in a country where continuity and tradition have long been valued over innovation. (-- p. 196) |
Yes, but get this:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
A Reporter at Large
Big Foot
In measuring carbon emissions, it's easy to confuse morality and science.
By Michael Specter
Feb. 25/08
| Quote: | | Many factors influence the carbon footprint of a product: water use, cultivation and harvesting methods, quantity and type of fertilizer, even the type of fuel used to make the package. Sea-freight emissions are less than a 60th of those associated with airplanes, and you don't have to build highways to berth a ship. Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that is actually more "green" for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that "the efficiencies of shipping drive a 'green line' all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity."(-- pgs. 44-52) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 2:04 pm Post subject: |
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Villa Air-Bel
World War II, Escape, and
a House in Marseille
Hardcover
By U of T English Professor Rosemary Sullivan
| Quote: | On the 10th of June, the French government, after announcing that it was leaving Paris in order to save France, began its ramshackle retreat to Tours, where its ministers were scattered among the chateaux in the Loire Valley. Before leaving, they declared Paris an open city - it would not be defended. The Germans could take it without firing a shot.
Hypnotized by the swiftness of the German advance, France had already accepted defeat. When the British prime minister Winston Churchill flew to the Loire Valley to meet Reynaud on June 11 to try to invigorate the French war effort, he spoke dramatically of defending Paris street by street. "The French perceptibly froze," he reported. The thought of mounting a fight in Paris was inconceivable to them.
Ignorant, like everyone else, of the goings-on in the corridors of power, (Victor) Serge also decided to abandon Paris that evening of June 10. With Laurette and his son, Vlady, he set out for the gare de Lyon, but immediately he sensed violence in the air. Restless crowds milled around the outside of the station. There was no more room inside, and in any case there were no more trains. By astonishing luck, he found an empty taxi for himself, Laurette, his son, and a Spanish friend who had joined them. The driver, also fleeing Paris, was willing to take them south, away from the German advance. "That's how salvation comes when it comes," he thought. "Simply." You have to "trust in chance, but with a rational tenacious till." (From The Fall of Paris, p. 135) |
| Quote: | | So far, most ordinary refugees seemed to able to travel without the safe-conduct passes. "The police don't seem to be paying much attention to them and the Gestapo don't seem to have gotten around to them either," (Frank) Bohn continued. "If they have overseas visas, they can get Portuguese and Spanish transit visas and once they have these they can go down to the frontier and cross on foot. Some of the commisaries at the frontier have been known to take pity on refugees without valid exit permits and let them through on the trains. It seems to be a question of luck." (From England is Ursula, France is Heinrich, p. 198) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 4:07 pm Post subject: |
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The Napoleon of Crime
The Life and Times of Adam Worth,
Master Thief
Hardcover
By Ben Macintyre
| Quote: | For three years the American Bar prospered and the peculiar manage a trois of the owners continued, amazingly enough without a hitch. Kitty Flynn, her telltale Irish brogue now quite evaporated, was becoming the gracious grande dame she had always hoped to be, even if half her admirers were thieves and con men. Bullard was happily consuming American cocktails in vast quantities, beginning his day when he opened his eyes in the late afternoon and ending it when he closed them, around dawn, usually face-down on the ivories of the club piano. "In the gay French capital he soon became a man of mark as a gambler and roue" - one pair of American detectives recorded - which was all Piano Charley had every really wanted to be. Worth was also contented enough yet strangely restless. Serving drinks was profitable, while the gambling den was a standing invitation to show his hold over fate. But the Paris operation was hardly the grand criminal adventure he saw as his destiny. The demomonde thronging his card tables were glittering and amusing, to be sure, but he had more ambitious plans for himself and Kitty than merely the life of an upscale croupier and a club hostess. ...
The upper floors of what was once Worth's gambling den are now the bedrooms of the Grand Hotel Intercontinental, one of the most expensive hotels in Paris. Still more appropriately, given the next phase of Worth's life, the door to number 2, rue Scribe now leads into "Old England," a chain of stores where one can still buy all the appurtenances, from monogrammed riding boots to top, of a pukka English gent. (From An American in Paris, p. 32, 57) |
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| Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 2:14 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Fighting and Writing
The loved and the unlovable in "Cyrano de Bergerac"
By John Lahr
Nov. 12/07
| Quote: | The word “panache” was adopted into English only after the phenomenal success of the French playwright Edmond Rostand’s 1897 “heroic comedy” “Cyrano de Bergerac,” whose flamboyant, big-nosed hero took revenge on his ugliness by making a legend of his physical and intellectual prowess. “I’m going to take the simplest approach to life of all. . . . I’ve decided to excel in everything,” Cyrano announces in the current superb revival of the play (at the Richard Rodgers, under the deft direction of David Leveaux). “Panache” means, literally, the tuft of feathers on Cyrano’s cap; figuratively, it refers to his sumptuous impertinence. The word is both Cyrano’s dying breath and the play’s last word—an epitaph, as well as an envoi, to his dandyism. ...
Just as a dandy wants it both ways—to rebel against society and to be accepted by it on his own terms—so does Rostand. In the last act, he jumps fifteen years ahead, to a monastery where Roxane has rusticated herself after Christian’s death and where Cyrano visits her every week, living out the old romantic formula of suffering without reward. Until Roxane susses that Cyrano is the author of Christian’s letters, he never confesses his love; like the autumn leaves that contrive to “go in grace” as they fall, he also hides, at first, his mortal wound. For Roxane, he musters a rueful little joke. “I’ve missed everything—even my death,” he says. But his loss is greater than that. By missing out on love, he has also missed out on life, or almost. “I never had much acquaintance with the sweetness of woman,” he tells Roxane, finally speaking his heart. “But—and, God bless you for this, for ever and ever I have had one friend different from the few others.” “I never loved but one man in my life,” Roxane tells him. “Now I must lose him twice.” Even in his dying, Cyrano, ever the dandy, dares with tact. “And make those tears which have been wholly his, / Mine too, just a little, mine,” he says. That sad, modest wish—to be kept in mind—strikes a resounding note of grief and gratitude that echoes down the ages. (-- pgs. 96-97) |
Cyrano
DVD
French with yellow sub-titles that sometimes work
... the role that made British actor Sir Derek Jacobi a Broadway heartthrob:
Cyrano de Bergerac
Translated by Anthony Burgess
Directed by Terry Hands
VHS only
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2008 9:04 am Post subject: |
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God Is Not Great
How Religion Poisons Everything
Hardcover
By Christoper Hitchens
| Quote: | ... Steven Hawking is not a believer, and when invited to Rome to meet the late Pope John Paul II asked to be shown the records of the trial of Galileo. But he does speak without embarrassment of the chance of physics "knowing the mind of God," and this now seems quite harmless as a metaphor, as for example when the Beach Boys sing, or I say, "God only knows ..."
Before Charles Darwin revolutionized our entire concept of our origins, and Albert Einstein did the same for the beginnings of our cosmos, many scientists and philosophers and mathematicians took what might be called the default position and professed one or another version of "deism," which held that the order and predictability of the universe seemed indeed to imply a designer, if not necessarily a designer who took any active part in human affairs. This compromise was a logical and rational one for its time and was especially influential among the Philadelphia and Virginia intellectuals, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who managed to seize a moment of crisis and use it to enshrine Englightenment values in the founding documents of the United States of America.
... It is not quite possible to locate the exact moment when men of learning stopped spinning the coin as between a creator and a long complex process, or ceased trying to split the "deistic" difference, but humanity began to grow up a little in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening decades of the nineteenth. ... If one had to ... come up with the exact date on which the conceptual coin came down solidly on one side, it would be the moment when Pierrre-Simon de Laplace was invited to meet Napoleon Bonaparte.
Laplace (1749-1827) was the brilliant French scientist who took the work of Newton a stage further and showed by means of mathematical calculus how the operations of the solar system were those of bodies revolving in a vacuum. ...
... in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he (Napoleon) wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace's mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty and considered response. "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse." Laplace was to become a marquis and could perhaps more modestly have said, "It works well enough without that idea, Your Majesty." But he simply sated that he didn't need it.
And neither do we. ... (From The Metaphysical Claims of Religion, pgs. 65-67) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 2:58 pm Post subject: |
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The Complete Essays of Mark Twain
Hardcover
Edited by Charles Neider
Aside from Letters from the Earth (see below), the literary charm of this much revered American eludes us, much as his dream to sail a riverboat up and down the mighty Mississippi eluded Sam Clements. Unlike his fiction, however, the essays have much to recommend them. Here is a sample on the subject of the gaming houses he visited while vacationing in Aix-les-Bains in the sunny south of France:
| Quote: | I was never in a fashionable gambling hell until I came here. I had read several millions of descriptions of such places, but the reality was new to me. I very much wanted to see this animal, especially the new historic game of baccarat, and this was a good place, for Aix ranks next to Monte Carlo for high play and plenty of it. But the result was what I might have expected - the interest of the looker-on perishes with the novelty of the spectacle; that is to say, in a few minutes. A permanent and intense interest is acquirable in baccarat, or in any other game, but you have to buy it. You don't get it by standing around and looking on...
The thing I chiefly missed was the haggard people with the intense eye, the haunted look, the desperate mien, candidates for suicide and the pauper's grave. They are in the description, as a rule, but they were off duty that night. All the gamnblers, male and female, old and young, looked abnormally cheerful and prosperous...
The etiquette of the place was difficult to master. In the brilliant and populous halls and corridors you don't smoke, and you wear your hat, no matter how many ladies are in the thick throng of drifting humanity, but the moment you cross the sacred threshold and enter the gambling hell, off the hat must come, and everybody lights his cigar and goes to suffocating the ladies. (at pgs. 53-54). |
Even better:
| Quote: | Letters from the Earth
Paperback
By Mark Twain
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