Category: Correspondence

What Exile from himself can flee? To Zones, though more and more remote, Still, still pursues, where-e’er I be. The blight of life—the demon, Thought. —Lord Byron Thus a previous occupant of our palazzo. Romantic rubbish, you say? Venice not remote enough for him? Should have tried some other zone, freezing rain in October and...

What poses the greatest threat today to the Old Dominion—mother of Presidents, a state secure and renowned for precious memories and aspirations? No person or foreign power, but a vast impersonal force already despoiling cities and states around the globe, a force that I call “sploge”: unregulated, unchecked growth, fueled by the three G’s—Greed, Glitz,...

The sun had not yet risen when a crew of seven Makah Indians launched its hand-carved cedar canoe into the frigid waters around Neah Bay, Washington. The crew paddled west through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and rounded Cape Flattery—the westernmost point of the continental United States—before settling into the Pacific Ocean. The water...

In the southeast corner of Arizona, surrounded by the beautifully wild, mile high Sonoran Desert, lies the town of Douglas. I am writing from a booth in the coffee shop of the Gadsden Hotel, an ornate hotel rebuilt in the 1920’s with a gilded roof supported by smooth marble pillars. Thornton Wilder stayed here for...

“Prodi, the Italian Kerensky?” was the intriguing headline of a full-page ad by a Christian-inspired group, Centro Culturale Lepanto (CCL), in two major Italian dailies, Il Giornale and Il Tempo, on May 14, 1996. In that manifesto, CCL president Roberto de Mattei, professor of modern history at the University of Cassino and one of the...

When religion becomes a matter of personal opinion, culture—which by definition is public and corporate—no longer defines what is eternally at stake in man’s relationship to God. Ethics and morality give way to impulse and whim, and sentimentality rides. Private religion appeals to the feeling of the moment, and, under such conditions, learning and tradition...

Last spring, in one of my early letters from Venice, I promised that I would write in greater detail about Baron F—, who liberated me from Florentine bondage by letting me the attico at Corte Tron, with its lifesaving terrace looking over the courtyard of the Palazzo Volpi and beyond, to the motionless cranes over...

The Texas Aggies—well, let’s just say few other student bodies resemble them in unified outlook or devotion to tradition. That may well change. The hammer of conformity, of homogenization, has been heard banging on the Aggies’ door since the bonfire debacle. The debacle was bad enough: a dozen Aggies killed in the collapse of the...

A few years ago, my wife and I set off to spend a sabbatical year in Spain, but thought we would go via Turkey. The idea started with a new Swiss “motoring” map that laid out the highways in firm red lines. We also wanted to go to the Aegean islands of Greece. We’d been...

Maybe it’s the increasing need to find a replacement for what America once was, or just the plain joy of sports fishing, but whatever die real motive, I found myself headed for Costa Rica in October. I had most of a day free in San Jose before a little bush plane would fly me at...

        “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every hook has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless...

Speaking to a Labour Party conference in October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a vainglorious speech he may live to regret. His words heartened some of his more enthusiastic supporters, but shocked the shires and clarified the ideological battle lines. Even some naive neoconservatives, like Paul Johnson and Lady Thatcher, who had long maintained...

I have always disbelieved those who would argue that the topography of a country, that is to say its purely geophysical characteristics, is dominant in the shaping of the personality of its people. Stalin used to call them vulgarizers of Marxism and shoot them, but we in the West may simply murmur that they exaggerate...

        “And a few men talked of freedom, while England talked of ale.” —”The Secret People” G.K. Chesterton In 1136, Bishop Henri de Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror, founded the hospice of St. Cross, in Hampshire, to provide for “thirteen poor men, feeble and so reduced in strength that they can...

On my short list of Great Equalizers, I would jot “The Chainsaw,” “The Automobile,” and “The Internet” without hesitation. In a separate category dubbed Great Equalizing Experiences, I would begin with the axiomatic two: “Death” and “Taxes.” My next entry would be century-specific: “Bus Travel.” I’ve experienced bus travel in many places, primarily in countries...

Cultural bridges are sometimes made of unlikely materials. One, for instance, is the hoary Steppenwolf rocker-stomper “Born to Be Wild,” a favorite of the Western suds, studs, and leather crowd for three decades, and now, thanks to an accident of history, a fixture at the karaoke bar of Beijing’s Minzu Hotel. Although I protested my...

“Serbia delenda est,” declared our postmodern, post-civilized rulers in the spring of 1999. Most European countries went along with the verdict. Like Muscovites in 1938, they were thankful that the nocturnal knock was not on their door, and prayed that acquiescence would absolve them of the suspicion of disloyalty. The alternative is to get Serbianized,...

I must write something about the man from Los Angeles who has come to stay, which is awkward for two reasons. One problem is that bashing the Ugly American is a cliché of European journalism, only slightly less ugly than the idea that Europe—the United States of Europe, ideally—ought to emulate the United States in...

The Confederate battle flag still flies every day over the capitol building of South Carolina. Readers may remember that I have several times reported in these pages on the attempts to remove this lonely anti-imperial symbol from public view. One discussion a few years ago even elicited a complaint to Chronicles from then-Governor David Beasley....

York, Alabama, is a sad little Southern town. Though it is small, it lacks the typical charm of the South. Not much happens there, but what does happen happens in the typically Southern way. The wheels of justice grind not with something as tacky as money, but with the more genteel means of connections: It’s...

Quebec shows its patriotism every year on June 24, one week before Canada Day—not because the French-speaking province gets a head start on the rest of the country, but because June 24 is the feast day of Jean Baptiste, the patron saint of Quebec. By no means has the holiday become void of religious significance....

Say what you will, there is no dame like an Italian grande dame. Though based on my own experience, this claim is easily supported by any amount of independent observation as the number of subjects to whom it applies, given that the history of the aristocracy in this country resembles schematic representations of nuclear fission...

        “Jamaicas of Remembrance stir That send me reeling in.” —Emily Dickinson Most visitors to Jamaica fly to Montego Bay on the north coast and head straight for the resort compound. Fating and drinking at an “all-in” price, confined to their bit of beach, pool, and garden, they are happily protected from...

Perhaps one can forgive Vernon Taylor for indulging in a bit of self-aggrandizement. After all, as the Green Bay Press-Gazette‘s newest “diversity” columnist, he’s now a recognizable face, a household name, a minor celebrity in a fabled National Football League city. His opinions on race, culture, and politics are read by tens of thousands of...

Now that I think of it, I realize it was my own poor mother who told me that there is much too much food in these letters. Listen my only begotten, she complained by telephone from New York, what with all your extravagant food descriptions, delightful food tropes, and revealing food analogies, you probably don’t...

Eleven years ago, I moved to Northwest Wisconsin, a region called the Wisconsin Indianhead because it is shaped like the profile of an Indian chief I live just east of the nose. After a career of publishing magazines and editing newspapers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I decided to take a...

The sun was low as the luxurious chartered bus labored up the steep dirt track to the wedding reception in the hills above Madrid. We walked up the last of the slope from the buses to the lawn in front of the hunting lodge, where we looked down on the distant city. Middle-aged men and...

The paint is peeling on the exterior wall of the United Steelworkers Hall in Southgate, Michigan, a symbolic reminder of the dangerous times faced by America’s 700,000 steelworkers. Workforce downsizing; the emergence of mini-mills to complement the old integrated, hot- and cold-roll production process; and price deflation and multilateral trade agreements like NAITA have combined...

“Welcome to the world’s largest open-air prison.” That was how Tom Getman, the Israel country director for World Vision, introduced us to life in the Gaza Strip. Our pilgrimage tour bus motored away from the Erez security checkpoint, with its coils of barbed wire and walls of sandbags, and onto the highway to Gaza City....

So the anti-Confederate backlash comes to Dallas . . . but, then, maybe not. Maybe that isn’t fundamentally what happened when the Dallas school board, in June, voted to rename mostly black and Hispanic Jefferson Davis Elementary School for Barbara Jordan, the late Houston congresswoman. Here, likely, is what happened: Within the community at large,...

I am writing this from a cottage near Santa Maria di Leuca, on the southernmost tip of Italy in the Adriatic. As the luggage, including my maps and guidebooks, only arrived yesterday, I cannot really be expected to say anything worth believing about the land or the people. As for the curious inner workings of...

Reading over my last letter from Venice, I spot the word “improbable,” which has somehow slipped in through the barbed wire fence of watchful Russianness I have been building in order to keep all manner of tripe out of these monthly communications. I am sorry, and promise that nothing of the kind will ever happen...

This summer, Lagado University established itself as a major player at the cutting edge of American theater. Angels’ Hair for Rent in Calcutta, OH, written and directed by Jonathan Raspberry, LU Professor of English and Musicology, opened July 24 at the Galaxy Theater and Opera House in Bismarck, North Dakota. This was its first performance...

There have been so many e-mails and cell phones and taped messages and beepers and postcards and mash notes cluttering up my communications that I just haven’t been able to keep up with everything that has been happening because I have been so busy at so many gay bars and cigar bars and wine bars...

        ut vero aliquis libenter educationis taedium lahoremque suscipiat, non praemiis modo verum etiam exquisitis adhortationibus impetrandum est. —Pliny (I, 8) Those who read my “Letter From Banausia” in the June Chronicles will perhaps recall that it described the studied destruction of the tradition of learning in English schools and its replacement...

        “Here the people could stand it no longer, And complained of the long voyage.”—Christopher Columbus Vacations follow fashion, like everything else, and now cruising is back. Full employment, cheap oil, a flush Wall Street—the problem is what to spend it on. And think of the Titanic. Never mind that it sank....

(Editor’s note: The world, we are told, is shrinking, and all of us are coming to share the same global superculture. However, this brief report from a Slovakian college girl shows what happens to a commercial dance craze when it is taken up by an ancient community living on the fringe of Europe and transformed...

Holy Israel, the supernatural community that, in the theology of Judaism, takes shape at Sinai in accepting the Torah and so lives in God’s kingdom in the here and now, tells the story of its exile in the setting of that theology. By sin, Adam lost Eden; by rebellion against God’s commandments, holy Israel lost...

The other day I remembered how the Lebanese, by far the most quaintly European of all the social sets in London, used to play an after-dinner parlor game in which the guests won points by boasting of their innocence. For example, if a guest said, “I’ve never been on a private plane,” or “I’ve never...

“Into hell” read the headline in the tabloid Daily Mirror on February 24, 1999. The Mirror‘s reporter had “walked the streets where racism is a way of life—and death.” He had found “racism seeping from every pore,” and his photographer took shots of neo-Nazi graffiti, such as “Kill all coons at birth.” The “hellish” place...

By the time I arrived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the selection was over. About 200 people had won coveted bleacher seats to the red-carpet entrance of the 71st Academy Awards. Among celebrity-worshipers, sitting in the Academy Award bleachers is like taking communion from the pope. Reaching this pinnacle requires a fanatical...

It has been only a few weeks since I used my tears to moisten the mixed-fruit schiacciata cake of Florentine captivity, but from the chaise lounge on my terrace it seems that this was in another life. Here, at last, I know I am where I belong, a spark of cosmic indolence fortuitously restored to...

Lovers of Gilbert and Sullivan will not need to be reminded that the second act of The Gondoliers is set in “Barataria,” a fictional land which is ruled by “a monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” The opera satirizes the inflexible social order of Victorian society by turning it on its head and mocking the...

Martin is a Franciscan lay missionary whom I befriended early in my stay in Tuzla. Over beers at the Harley-Davidson, a bar popular with the international crowd, he explained, “A lot of organizations will be pulling out at the end of the year. This year is real important. If the democracy will hold, it has...

On April 1, the Litcritological Subcommittee of the multiracial, multicultural, multidisciplinary Re/Visioning Committee for a 21st-century Doctorate presented the English Department with a plan that will make Lagado University the first in the United States with a doctoral program fully adapted to the needs of the 21st-century American graduate student. The plan integrates our copyrighted...

I already sounded the alarm in last month’s letter. This really is an impossible city to get out of And so, having bid my farewells, I’m still here, despite the fact that the rent has been paid in advance on a perfectly adequate little aerie over the Grand Canal in Venice. The place even has...

This is probably my last letter from Florence, and I must say that it is with somewhat mixed feelings that I turn my back on the treasury of the Renaissance. Oh, sure, I tried to like living here. I tried it the way the French writer Andre Gide tried to like living in Stalin’s Moscow,...

When people in the academy study “Judaism,” they tend to pursue the history of the ethnic group, the Jews, rather than describe, analyze, and interpret the religion, Judaism. In the realm of high culture, the Judaic religious tradition, beginning with the revelation at Sinai, is deprived of its rightful presence alongside the world’s other great...

Every man has his Holy Grail. Mine was a racquet held in the hand of a truculent priest some four centuries ago. I had heard about the ball player of Yagul in southern Mexico from colleagues in archaeology, but it was only after several trips south of the border that I decided to flush him...

The Conservative Party still has not recovered from the disastrous general election of May 1997, when many Britons switched their allegiances to Labour and an even larger number of Conservatives stayed at home, unwilling to vote for either the Tweedledum that was John Major or the Tweedledee of Tony Blair. Two years after the debacle,...