In an earlier essay I (half) joked that American tourists to Paris often return home—usually to some very un–Paris-like town in the American “heartland” of Iowa or Missouri—grousing and grumbling…
Category:
PERSONAL HISTORY
Years ago, when In worked as a writer with film director Denis Sanders we had a modus operandi wherein I would sit across a table from him and lecture out…
Recently, when the accountant who prepares my tax returns remarked that I don’t really seem to be making a lot of money with royalties from my books I didn’t really…
Phissssssssssscht! The tour coach’s front door popped open like an airlock in a Star Wars spaceship. An assault of superheated exterior air immediately scorched my sinuses. Egypt air! Air that had…
Precisely a decade ago I posted the following announcement: 1.1: Jim’s New Website Posted: Mon – October 20, 2003 at 02:33 PM This is being sent to you because you…
We have a tendency—perhaps because we are around only so briefly—to characterize history in “ages”; time Before Christ, or the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, The Modern Era. There were indeed,…
I am a realist. I don’t mean that in a personal sense, because I realize that I am also in many respects also a “romantic.” But, since I define being…
“My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time, because I had been sick with asthma since I was three years old and I…
On the morning of August 17, 1918, Private Vito Vitelli, of the American 21st company of the 151st Depot Brigade was lying in a foxhole in the Argonne Forest when…
In 1989 I lived in Paris while teaching at the University of Paris VII. I had to arrange my own housing and at first lived with an elderly Englishwoman in…