The Eastside View

S O, THEN, NOTHING COMPLICATED : A can of sardines; a nice red onion quartered and sliced thin, a little olive oil on the bread, then the fi...

I ' VE WRITTEN HERE about the books of Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist-historian who's produced an important sequence of studies of s...

B OOKS RECENTLY READ , and awaiting notes here: Geert Mak: In Europe: travels through the twentieth century Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise: li...

T O S AN F RANCISCO THE OTHER NIGHT , there to see, for the first time in just short of fifty years, Tennessee Williams's play Camin...

Originally published, in a slightly different form, in The Open Hand Celebration Cookbook (New York: Pocket Books, 1991) F OR NEARLY FIFTEE...

V AS YOU DER, SHARLIE ? If I heard that once from my dad, by the time I was ten years old, I must have heard it a million times. Only this m...

letter to Whiting "C ULTURE," OF COURSE , is etymologically as well as (or indeed therefore) intimately related to terroir . ...

W ENT TO A TALK last night in town. Christopher O'Sullivan, a historian, spoke easily and interestingly about the presidential candidac...

T HE OTHER MORNING the woman who was cutting my hair mentioned that she was thinking of moving to Oregon, because she has kids in school, a...

Forcados line up to taunt a bull in Newman O NE LIKES ONE'S RECREATION out of doors and varied, and so it was that we took in a perfor...

T HERE'S A PROBLEMATIC DIALECTIC in poetry (I associate it with Ron Silliman) between language poetry and the "School of Quietude....

so i'm sitting in the car in the parkinglot lindsey having gone into tj's to get some selenium the radio's listening to a callin...

R ENEWABLE MUSIC, Daniel Wolf's admirable blog , continues to stimulate me every time I tune in. Most recently: One of the qualities I...

A DAY AT THE BALL PARK , even if your team loses, is better than a day away from the park; only a day of tramping in the countryside can be...

A NOTHER ONE OF THOSE nice dreams: sitting at a piano with a couple of teenaged students who were picking out tunes. I suggested the pickup...

The decor and tensility of Couperin The pomp and glory of Rameau. The bourgeois masterly Bach. The worldly resourceful Handel. The wit and c...

Lindsey among the Matisses T HOUGHTS OF MORTALITY crowd the aging mind; I'm sorry; I can't help it. Not even an unusually distracti...

T HE COUNTRY'S SECOND-FAVORITE PLAY This year? Moliere's Tartuffe , they say. Second most frequently produced, That is, and now its ...

photo: Rome, January 2004 A H, FERNET BRANCA . The first time we traveled in Europe, in 1974, we traveled with another couple, who we met in...

Y ES, IT'S ONE of the couple hundred books in the case of Books Waiting To Be Read: Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence . Lou H...