The Real Giovanni

Ok I’ve been bad. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written, but again, there was a lot of traveling going on. I just got back from Prague where I spent the weekend. It’s only 4 hours from Berlin on a relatively cheap train, so it seemed silly not to go, and as I’m [...]

Reading Update

 Fanny Kemble, the new hope of one of London’s most important theatrical families, was at the height of her acting career when she retired to wed a Georgia planter, “the second largest slave owner in Georgia”, as Catherine Clinton ceaselessly repeats in her lucklaster and superficial biography of Kemble, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars. I am not sure [...]

Every bird is sacred!

The Greek Art Theatre (“Theatron Technis”) production of Aristophanes’ The Birds which I saw at the Koureion Theatre, in Cyprus, is being promoted as a faithful re-re-re-incarnation of the 1959 production directed by Karolos Koun. That production went on to win the first prize at the Theatre of Nations festival in Paris three years later. [...]

Reading update #4

It’s a few days since I finished Thomas Kessner’s The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880-1915 so I hope I can still do the book justice. I usually try to write reviews soon after I’m done reading.
The book is a few (three) decades old now, and it’s hard to [...]

Nice Work If You Can Get It

I had a rather interesting flight from Prague to Larnaca yesterday, sitting next to a 19yo member of one of Harvard’s a capella choirs. The boys are on a 3 month of tour of most of Europe, Asia, and Mexico. You can get an idea of what they do in the [...]

Something to remember

Florence Foster Jenkins was perhaps the most self-confident woman who ever lived. She thought herself to be God’s greatest gift to music, and she demonstrated her talent in solo concerts in New York City in the 1930s. She even made some recordings, which you can now find on YouTube. If you have never heard the [...]

Leiden’s Claim to Fame

I thought I should honor the city which hosted the conference which took me to the Netherlands with a post:

Besides having the older University in the Netherlands, Leiden was also the host of the “pilgrims” – yes, the Mayflower departed from the Netherlands, not England. Who knew? Apparently they stayed for about 10 years before [...]

Our Lord in the Attic

I’ve been very slow in delivering the updates I promised about Amsterdam – I also have a book I finished that I will be writing about soon. I’ve been very busy since coming back to Berlin with the last week of my language class and a lot of German writing I have to do. Which [...]

They like bike!

I mentioned how impressed I was with the bicycling in Amsterdam. Here’s some evidence. There’s so many bikes people chain them to each other, because there’s not enough railing left in the city. (Incidentally most of the canals don’t have any railing). The most impressive assortment was in front of a movie theatre, where everybody [...]

MESEA Conference 2008: “Immigration Matters”

I’m not going to cover the entire conference – it was 4 days long, with simultaneous panels. So I’ll briefly describe the whole experience and my impression of the organization, and then the two keynotes I attended that were both fascinating and well worth the travel to Amsterdam/Leiden.
The organization seems pretty young and relatively small [...]