Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

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.
I [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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