Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.

                        P. G. Wodehouse

        We had the fat years, and then Dad’s hubris caught up with him and we had the lean ones. And exactly what does the hubris of an itinerant electronic-bell salesman consist of? Well, I’ll tell you. It consists of not being satisfied with a job that takes you one week to Trondheim and the next to Venic...

To have the clarity of mind and wit of Voltaire, along with his wealth, and to live where and how he did, would be heaven enough for me.

After youth comes old age; after happiness, unhappiness, and vice versa; nobody can be healthy and cheerful all their lives... you have to be ready for anything. You just have to do your duty as best as you can.

                                                        Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Bruges la Morte, or Bruges the Dead, a novel published in 1892 by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898; photo above), is the story of a grief-stricken widower, Hugues Viane, who travels to the then-decaying Belgian inland port city of Bruges (now a flourishing tourist attraction) and develops an obsession there with a local danseuse who is, he thinks, the spitting image of his dead wife. The narrative culminates in a deranged murder. Sound a bit familiar, Hitchcock fans? Well,...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         By way of contrast to Russia, it was two years later, in the sands of the Sahara, or at least in that desert’s gravelly outcroppings, where, as previously noted, I caught one of my periodic glimpses of true wilderness. I was traveling in the south of Tunisia with another school group, friends from Geneva. We were on a malodorous bus on a narrowing ill-paved road south of the dusty and dreary town of Sousse. The bus stopped for refueling ...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.    

Travels and friends were inextricably linked, in those early years. With Paul I took another trip, a few years later, when he was old enough to be driving his dad’s Citroen GS: we went to Zurich for a dirty weekend (yes! Zurich!!), but the less said about that the better. Paul went on to become a beacon and pundit, whereas my light has remained firmly hidden under many bushels.

     Around the same time, as a star member of the Ecolint Rus...

The Indian author G. V. Desani may be a footnote in the annals of world literature, but what a footnote! He was the author of All About H. Hatterr, one of the most original, rambunctious, incandescent, and just plain bizarre novels ever written, a delirious and startling debut–but his debut was his end, for he never again produced a novel. Salman Rushdie said of him, "If Narayan is India's [Samuel] Richardson, then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose ...

Among British Prime Ministers, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), who was also a novelist (Sybil, or The Two Nations; Vivian Grey; Tancred, or The New Crusade; etc.), ranks second only to Winston Churchill in the quality and variety of his wit. When ordered in the House [of Commons] to withdraw his declaration that half of the cabinet were asses, Disraeli replied, `Mr. Speaker, I withdraw. Half the cabinet are not asses.'" Assiduous in his attendance to the business of the House, he commented, ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

My first journey unsupervised by adults took place when I was 14, and it came about quite spontaneously. Early one ordinary Saturday morning I met Paul,[1] an Ecolint schoolmate, in downtown Geneva. We wandered about a bit, then took the F bus across the French border to Ferney-Voltaire, quondam home town of the eponymous philosophe, and wandered about there for awhile, enjoying the French-small-town feeling and having a tartine or thé citron. Then, after...

When Beethoven was in a bad mood and no one could go near him, a little girl named Katherina Fröhlich used to be sent to him with his favorite newspaper, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. Cheerful by name ("fröhlich" = "cheerful"), cheerful by nature, young Kathie usually succeeded in placating the irascible genius. She later became quite prominent as the founder of the Schwestern-Fröhlich-Stiftung, an organization whose aim was to advance the arts and sciences (in those days, consider...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.        

    It occurred to me the other day while watching a TV program about the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic wilderness that I’d never actually been in the wilderness—now that, then, was true wilderness, as Franklin and those poor bastards found out soon enough—but that I’d been near it a few times: in Crete, in Canada, in Tunisia, in northern Scotland, and in Iceland. I then went to on to reflect, in my egotistical fashion, ho...

I always enjoy the bold, perceptive, and humorous ruminations of John Derbyshire, Anglo-American philosopher, novelist, essayist, and mathematician, affectionately known throughout the blogosphere as "Derb." Brought up in the dying light of once-great England and her once-great education system, undeterred by convention or political correctness, but inspired by the examples set by the likes of Dr. Johnson, Baruch Spinoza, and George Orwell, he looks at things sub specie aeternitatis, which ...

As Toyota stumbles through its worst patch ever, with new setbacks popping up every day–yesterday it was the brakes on the Prius, today it's the steering on Camrys–it's worth a look back at the early days of the Japanese giant's conquest of America's hearts, minds, and car lots, courtesy of John Updike's Rabbit is Rich (hat tip: Nigeness):

"Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Spring Motors display room watching the traffic go ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Alone with M. Achkar in the sparsely-populated Ecolint Pantheon of Teaching Excellence we find my history teacher, Mr. McKean-Taylor, an Anglicized Scot. McKean-Taylor was no teacher, actually, but masqueraded as one. He was a raconteur who enjoyed the diversions of history and was stimulated by young minds, white Valais wine, and being on the Continent instead of at some damp comprehensive back home in Blighty. He was plump, and he dra...

Hans Koning, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam in 1921, was a sergeant in the British Army during World War II. In 1951 he came to the United States from the chaos of ex-Dutch Indonesia and became an outstanding novelist and reporter. I reviewed one of his best novels, Zeeland, in 2002. Koning was always quirky, humorous, and observant, and he spent his life on that margin of respectability where a writer must dwell. He wrote me a courteous letter thanking me for my review, and hoped, ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         And so back to school, realm of bullies and the bullied and of me, who was neither.

         I spent thirteen years at the International School of Geneva, through all its grades and forms, in two languages, English and French, with smatterings of four others, German, Russian, Spanish, and Italian; doing well in some classes, badly in others, and making a few friends along the way. The school’s great virtue was its heterogeneity...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. 

Benjamin Disraeli

    Now I am ten. It is a summer dawn, forty-five years ago.  I lie half-awake in my small bed at the Hotel Regina, Trieste, listening to the early-morning sounds of an Italian city: Vespas; Fiats; electric trolleycars; buses; shouts of “Ao” and “ciao”; a radio playing (what else?) an aria (Puccini?). Light dribbles...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

That house on Chemin Bonvent (Goodwind Lane) was my home for fifteen years and remains a beacon in my misty land of memories. Like Rebecca, last night I dreamed I went to Manderley—only instead of Manderley it was No. 42, Chemin Bonvent that I found myself sweeping up to, in my dream-Bentley. But, unlike Rebecca, my house-dreams are banal affairs, usually just replays of reality. Nothing much happens, except an upsurge of obscure longing, or the gentle n...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

I retrospectively detect the first squirming of eroticism in Ancient Greece. I read D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths at age ten or so. I couldn’t get enough of my fantasy Hellas, and Eros was one of the gods lurking in those Arcadian glades. The pictures of flimsily-clad Aphrodite lit a surly flame. I had a crush on Athena, too, and half-nude naiads and nymphs flitted in and out of my banal fantasy world, giving me ideas (mostly the wrong ones, but st...