Category: Access

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Wednesday’s Child: The Pursuit of Convenience

  The story may be apocryphal, but a friend told me the other day that the inventor, for lack of a better word, of the cylindrical paper sachet by means of which coffee bars where cappuccinos cost $5 dispense granulated sugar–thus distinguishing themselves from ordinary coffee bars, where the said sachets are in the more traditional shape of rectangles–took his own life. The man killed himself because he had grown disillusioned, not with mankind generally, but with the small portion of it that was using his invention; apparently, he had envisioned coffee or tea drinkers breaking the sachets in half...

3

Wednesday’s Child: A Terminal Moraine

  Last week little brave Norway woke up to the news, sprung on her by the national TV2 channel, that Einar Gerhardsen, who had been her duly elected and much respected Prime Minister no less than three times–in 1945-51, then once more in 1955-63, and again in 1963-65–was, until his death in 1987, a KGB agent.  Recruited along with two members of his cabinet following a state visit to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, thenceforth the august statesman, affectionately known to his countrymen as the “Landsfaderen,” or father of modern Norway, would answer to the code name “Jan.”  In fact, Gerhardsen was...

2

Wednesday’s Child: Summing Up and Down

  I begin with house statistics since the day before New Year’s.  We’ve had five guests staying here, all Russian in varying degree, including a Viennese lady by the name of Inga who, even when the lighting is all wrong, looks like a film noir star of the 1940’s.  Suffice it to say that an admirer had given the diva a riding crop for Christmas, which she kindly brandished for us of an evening while wearing, in an effortlessly choreographed sequence, three wigs she had providently packed in her luggage, a blonde, a brunette, and I think a redhead. As...

0

Wednesday’s Child: Eating an Englishman

An extraordinary episode set Moscow’s beau monde on its ear last week–extraordinary in the sense that, if a cannibal, instead of boiling an Englishman in the nude, were to eat him together with his bowler hat, silk umbrella, and brogues by John Lobb of St. James’s Street, this might be considered outrageous cannibal behavior.  “What an extraordinary way to act at table,” other, more fastidious cannibals would be heard muttering. A veteran journalist by the name of Viktor Shenderovich was interviewed on “Moscow Echo”–supposedly the last oasis of dissent yet extant in the Russian media mainstream–and made some remarks about...

0

Wednesday’s Child: Planet of the Apes

  Gentle reader may remember that I was in London last week in aid of a friend charged with racism for calling a Negro cabdriver an ape.  Fine arguments marshaled by the defense came to naught once the female judge had had a good look at the defendant’s shoes. These were polished to a high shine, and clean shoes are, as the defendant ought to have known at his age, a telltale sign of racist attitudes in white males.  He was found guilty and fined. Lest my reader think I am being facetious, I draw his attention to this post’s...

0

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from London

  A funny story, this, but it also kind of makes you want to cry, a perfect combination for a Wednesday’s child broadside– especially in Advent, with its heritage of Dickensian, bittersweet tales of moral instruction. I am in London this week to help out a friend who got himself in trouble. A few months ago, returning from a dinner party in a state of more than slight inebriation, he hailed a black cab – you know the kind, the retro thingie with a doorframe high enough to accommodate a man wearing a top hat, the legendary vehicle that makes...

5

Wednesday’s Child: Man vs. SORM

You know me, folks. You know that when I hear the phrase “human rights” I release the safety catch of my Browning, or at least spit on the floor to register contempt.  Like “social diversity,” which is its opposite in real life–and like a thousand other weasel phrases too noxious to enumerate here–that neologism is not only not a synonym of individual liberty, but often its functional antonym.  So you will not think less of me if I mention something called the European Court of Human Rights in other than a derisory way. Some nine years ago a man in...

0

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Paris

  I realize that visual observation alone, whether at its focus is human illness or social mores, is rarely conclusive when it comes to diagnostics, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I’ve got.  Parting with $100 in a café here is a foregone conclusion, while in the food halls of the Galleries Lafayette two bucks will buy you a piece of chocolate measuring one cubic centimetre. And yet this city eats like Rome, with the diners, like Olympic swimmers in the final yards of the race, twisting their apoplectically speckled necks this way and that, as though coming up...

17

Wednesday’s Child: Music’s Autobiography

In this, my second communication from Munich, I solemnly promised myself to steer clear of politics, notwithstanding that history looms so large in my window – modern parlance for the computer screen – it nearly obliterates thought.  And so, as the president of France prepares to bend his knee to Moscow in a ludicrous pantomime of Henry IV’s Gang nach Canossa, I can only repeat Hamlet’s “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” The reason I came to Munich in the first place was to hear a recital that my wife was giving with the remarkable German...

0

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Munich

I am writing this from Munich, a place known universally since September 30, 1938, for democracy’s sacrifice of strategic interest — or honor, for that is what strategic interest is in the life of individual or nation — to tactical advantage. The advantage, during the next few weeks or months, would benefit a politician, Chamberlain, and his party; the sacrifice, in the course of the century, would mean the death of hundreds of millions and half of Europe in chains. Before going any further, however, I should like to apologize for this choice of subject.  I had been hoping that...