Thick snow is falling hard and heavy, muffling sounds and turning the village from picturesque into postcard-beautiful. I am lying in bed listening to a Mozart version of “Ave Maria,” with a heavenly soprano almost bringing tears to my eyes with the loveliness of it. This is the civilization of our ancestors, one that gave us Mozart and Schubert and Beethoven and built cathedrals all over the most wondrous continent in the ...
I had a short chat with BBC Radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the 70s and 80s. Alas, it had to do with age, his and mine, 77 and 78 respectively. No, the man on the other side of the telephone did not ask me anything embarrassing. All he wanted to know was: Do women still come on to an oldie, or are they, as Jack Nicholson claims, a thing of the past? Well, for starters, I do not believe ...
This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to the stoic discipline with which the Japanese bore hardship and the death of 15,000 people in March 2011 following a 9-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to have hit Japan. I can remember the TV coverage as if it were yesterday. Very young and very old Japanese forming a long orderly line for disaster supplies. No ...
Although an acknowledged sinner for most of my adult life " I chase women non-stop, drink to excess, smoke and gamble " I have never left the easy foothills of faith, a Catholic faith imbued in me by my father, raised a Jesuit. Now, you"re not going to find many Greek ship owners brought up Jesuits, but my old man came from the Ionian Islands, a part of Greece that was never conquered by the loathsome Turks, but by ...
Welcome to 2015, the year that speaking and writing freely had to stop. Anything that might cause trauma to anyone of any race except the white one will be expunged, and the perpetrators of politically incorrect speech or written words will be airbrushed forever. "Trauma" derives from the Greek and means "wound." The literary canon will be the first to bite the dust, as it's one big trauma, especially for ...
Political correctness. The dreariest, most depressing and dismal words in the English language, almost as depraved as the word "hype." The apostles of P.C. claim to teach tolerance and diversity, but heaven help anyone with thoughts sufficiently independent and diverse to disagree with them. There is nothing more venomous than the hate-hype vipers, slithering far and wide, thus posing a danger nearly everywhere. Any ...
If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I"d be reveling in the fact that a black American former basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media. Charles Barkley doesn"t mince his words. Many of his fellow blacks were not best pleased when he told young African-Americans a while ago to forget about basketball and stay in school. After ...
Here is my Christmas gift to Takimag readers, one that applies mostly to unmarried males, but it’s also available to married ones who might wish to test whether that old magic still works. (Female readers of the best magazine in the whole wide world may also pick up a few hints.) This is not to be confused with the amateurish, vulgar, and embarrassing inventory of the Swiss-American Julien Blanc on how to pick up women. His ...
When I was young I lived an idyllic life. I played sports, chased girls, and read novels. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John O"Hara, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, you get the picture. No James Joyce, under the penalty of boredom and masturbation. The reading habit began early, with the Greek myths and Homer. It got really bad ...
Except for sickness in one’s family or the loss of a life, is there anything sadder than to see a bookstore shut its doors? I used to live in a street that had three bookstores within 50 yards. All three are now boutiques selling expensive bric-a-brac, or whatever the junk that tarts wear is called. Browsing in a bookstore has to be every bibliophile’s wet dream, a perfect way to stand upright and, in a correct posture, ...
I was not surprised Chuck Hagel had to go. After all, he was among the very few in governments of late who had ever seen combat, not to mention to have been wounded. Men of his ilk do not draw their swords at the drop of a hat, unlike neocons, who demand bloody solutions to every problem, others" blood. Hagel did not want escalation in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. He was selected for his willingness to challenge the war hawks of ...
The leaves are falling nonstop, like names dropped in Hollywood, and it has suddenly turned colder than the look I got from a very pretty girl in a downtown restaurant. I had gone outside for a cigarette while dining with Gay Talese, the writer, when two men and a lady came out looking for a cab. The scene was straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story: “I love you, I’ll take you home,” said one of the young men. “I ...
To the grand Herrera house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for lunch in honor of Lord and Lady Linley. David Linley is over here to receive an award for his designs, which even rubes like myself where furniture is concerned find wonderful. Princess Margaret’s son is talented, but he’s also a very nice man. His parents must have done something right because he’s lived a scandal-free life—as has his sister—something ...
Aleko Goulandris is my oldest and closest friend. We met in the summer of 1945, at the Semiramis Hotel in a northern Athenian resort. The Allied bombing and the ensuing communist uprising of 1944 had not been kind to ritzy houses, nor to glitzy hotels. The Semiramis was the only one still operating during the hot months of July and August. Aleko and his twin brother Leonidas befriended me, aged nine, and as they say, it was the ...
To Newport, Rhode Island: smallest state in the Union but one of the most beautiful. Driving northeast from the Bagel there’s Long Island Sound on one’s right, and beautifully foliaged farms and towns on the left. The colors are spectacular, golden browns, brick reds, and lemon greens. New England is the most beautiful area of America, except for parts of Virginia, where they build warships rather than sailing boats. The ...
Opera has been in the news lately, in Paris and New York, that is. And no, this doesn"t mean things are culturally looking up; on the contrary, I"m afraid. Let's start with the City of Light, where millions of Muslims surround the capital (most of them in the suburbs) waiting for the day they can sweep away the fuzz, burn down the cathedrals, and establish Sharia law. Mind you, it's an Islamic dream that won"t ...
