“How Much Land a Man Needs” is a story by Tolstoy wherein the grim graybeard hints that a man needs but six feet of it for his grave, and there I take my inspiration this Wednesday. My son was visiting here last week, and for a lark we set off to Polizzi Generosa, a town of some 3000 inhabitants in the verdant hills of the Madonie.
The news from my alma mater… Ah, but the gentle reader may not know that as a young man I spent many years in litigation with Yale University, which sought to shut down the literary magazine I edited for publishing poems that rhymed and, more generally, for airing views unsuitable to a modern place of learning.
Some years ago I knew a lady, gainfully divorced from a Russian oligarch, who turned to me with the plea to find her an honest lawyer in London. This made me privy to the substance of her predicament, which was basically that the fortune she kept in a famously named Swiss bank had been pilfered
Zaatar, as the gentle reader may recall from his travels, is a blend of herbs and seeds popular for centuries throughout the Middle East. Sprinkle it on toasted flatbread with a spray of olive oil and, even if you aren’t wearing a checkerboard towel round your head, a delicious breakfast awaits you
I set this conundrum once before, in another forum over which our founder was then presiding. It bears being repeated, however, all the more so as it is to do with the intertwining of friendship and family ties which has been my subject here of late. But permit me to start from a little farther afield.
In describing my jeweler friend from London last week I neglected to mention that he is one of four siblings. A common enough occurrence, the gentle reader may reflect, but as an only child I discover many things about large families rather late in life.
Last week’s post, its shabby ambience notwithstanding, has opened up a path – if not to the gentle reader’s heart, at least out of potential writer’s block – and so I tread it once more. This week I reveal myself as a feminist sympathizer, admittedly in a rather particular sense.
A friend sent me a book by an acquaintance of my father’s and the late dean of American radio talk shows, Barry Farber. It’s called Cocktails with Molotov and is the kind of memoir that’s difficult not to like, because in this day and age the simple and truthful voice of a person who has no agenda except to amuse the reader is a rarity.
Just as there is the irony of fate, there are ironies of nomenclature. One such is writ large in the name of Alexei Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation.” As I pointed out in this space on a recent occasion, corruption in Russia is largely what stands between the Kremlin and world domination, as villains preoccupied with plundering the nation’s wealth have little time left for villainy.
“O, reason not the need,” the king tells his daughter, who has just added a cancelled security detail to the lengthening list of her father’s humiliations at the hands of his perfidious progeny. Her sister has just asked him, rhetorically, why he ever needed to have those rowdy men in the house.
