The Eastside View

Venice, May 31, 2011— A S MENTIONED THE OTHER day, we were at first not allowed to go out the second gate from our apartment here, which wa...

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 30, 2011— A MONG THE OTHER changes in this town, changes to be expected given human mortality and the...

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 27, 2011— B ECAUSE OF WRESTLING with Italian, French is momentarily away from my brain, and I can...

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 26, 2011— T HERE'S A LOT of stuff in this town: bricks, stones, tiles, glass, more trees than you...

Campiella della Pazienza, Venice, May 25, 2011— Y OU MAY HAVE NOTICED , though probably not since it's such a trivial matter, a change i...

Rio della Crea, Venice, May 24, 2011— N OT THAT MANY changes here in Venice, apart from that Calatrava bridge mentioned yesterday. There i...

Rio della Crea, Venice, May 23, 2011— A N EASY FLIGHT on EasyJet from London across the dramatic Alps, a gentle descent to Marco Polo airpo...

Sibiu, June 1983: A nice band, too: alto sax, guitar, organ (!), bass, drums; and decent food, the best I had in Romania, I think. Curious p...

An excellent test: Bring everything to silence In the midst of noise.

W E'VE BEEN TO SO MANY places with this couple, old friends, dear friends: Hans and Anneke, who live in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, but tra...

P IERRE B OULEZ IS only one of many enthusiasms I lost track of over the years. In the late 1950s and throughout most of the 1960s I kept up...

I AM NOT WRITING the blog I want to write: a report on the three nights of performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company we saw last we...

M Y POSITION ON THE MUSIC of Philip Glass is odd: when I'm not actively hearing it I tend to reject interest in it on grounds of princi...

Spoon Fed (Riverhead Books, 2010), by Kim Severson: enjoyable. A breezy memoir in nine chapters, each centered on one or another well-know...

S LAVIC LANGUAGES LACK the definite article , as anyone with a Czech in the family can attest. So Libby Appel's version of Anton Chekhov...

" W HAT IS IT FOR ?", Ann asked, as we sat in her small comfortable small living room after the concert. We'd been reflecting ...