Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, People on Jun 10th, 2007 1 Comment »
Berlin’s mercury stands at 88 degrees (F.) for the second of three forecast days, so I’ll make this little Sunday supplement short and (I hope) sweet. The almost innumerable reasons this wonderful Berlin has long since become my all-time favorite city in the entire world (after leisurely samplings of such other inferior burgs as New [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memories, People on Jun 7th, 2007 1 Comment »
Coincidence has brought this great (British-born) American poet into my consciousness twice in recent days. On June 3d I attended one of the Berlin Philharmonic’s most enjoyable concerts in quite a while: with its regular conductor Sir Simon Rattle on the podium, Daniel Barenboim (who ordinarily presides as Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutsche Staatsoper over in [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Memories, People on Jun 5th, 2007 3 Comments »
A coincidental message this morning touched off this new stroll down my own personal Memory Lane. It came from an email buddy in San Francisco (apropos of a recent flap down in Astraya over Albee’s quasi-bestiality play “The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?”) and reported: “I saw this play when it was produced here by [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Memories, People on Jun 1st, 2007 2 Comments »
I first encountered the term “Commonplace Book” when W. H. Auden published a book under that name as a kind of catch-all for bits and pieces of writing he’d found sufficiently meritorious over the years for him to want to save them. I’ve decided to turn this freshly baked blog into my own Commonplace Book. [...]
In the summer of 1948, an invitation from Yaddo, the foundation and artists’ colony outside Saratoga Springs, brought me two months of heaven-sent respite from steaming, suppurating New York. Yaddo’s other guests that summer included Patricia Highsmith, then at work on her first novel, “Strangers on a Train”, which Alfred Hitchcock would subsequently turn into [...]
Posted in Memories, People on May 31st, 2007 5 Comments »
As soon as I watched – in awe – this champion juggler, I thought immediately of the wildly unconventional Swiss psychoanalyst and all-round Renaissance man Fritz Morgenthaler, M.D., who died in 1984. Gay but largely closeted in the years when the international psychoanalytic movement maintained an almost totally homophobic standpoint, he did pioneer work in [...]
Alexander Waugh’s new biography of his illustrious family clan, “Fathers and Sons”, with a focus upon its most illustrious member of all, the great satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh (Alexander Waugh’s grandfather), has recalled to my mind an avalanche of eternally fresh memories of my first weekend in Europe, a mere 58 years ago. It would [...]
Posted in Memories, Music, People on May 4th, 2007 1 Comment »
My first two personal meetings with Rostropovich took place in Moscow (1958) and around that same time here in Berlin, where I attended his local début at a time when virtually nobody here had ever even heard his name. I had originally discovered him purely by accident, during my first visit to Prague, which had [...]
Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner
Life, people, and Kultur
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