For some reason this afternoon I got thinking about the Gulistan, the revered Persian poem by Sa’di. As fate would have it, I had the chance to visit the mausoleum of Sa’di in Shiraz Iran in 2000, a wonderful garden / memorial for this great poet of gardens. Gulistan means […]
Books
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Having only moved to Liguria a couple of years ago, I have also only recently become aware of the great Ligurian artists, so many of whom come from Genoa, the most underrated city in all of Italy. These include the violinist Niccolò Paganini, the Nobel Prize winning poet Eugenio Montale […]
And after one week of rain, constant and incessant, the sun came shining out late this afternoon. For people who live at a seaside locale, it was like God himself was shining out at us, giving us a brief blessing and reminding us that sooner or later, the rain would […]
Somewhere in the pages of Kerouac’s great On the Road, (or maybe in one of the other works, sometimes all Kerouac runs together for me) as they are headed down the Western side of the Continental Divide somewhere in the Rockies, Jack and Neal decide to cut the engine on […]
On October 11th, I promised that I’d be writing an update on my reading habits as soon as I finished the mammoth Bleak House by Charles Dickens. On that day, I hypothesized that I probably wouldn’t be finishing it anytime before the summer, given my slow-poke reading pace and the […]
A few years ago, while visiting Ireland, we stopped at the home of my wife’s close friend Dave. He’s got an amazing place near the coast in County Sligo, where he lives with his twin daughters. Among his activities, he fishes for food, has started participating in old-fashioned bartering fairs, […]
I just finished reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a classic weighing in at a relatively modest 682 pages. I don’t remember when I started it, though at best guess it was sometime around April or May. That’s a good 5 plus months, though I must subtract from those the six weeks […]