Walking down a tree-lined block in the East 80s the other day I passed a brownstone with a pretty patio fronting the street. There on a small table someone had left an open book. Always curious about what others are reading, I looked through the wrought iron gate to see the title — it was Beryl Markham’s 1942 memoir, West with the Night. You may know of Markham, the British-born Kenyan aviator who in 1936 became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. A free...
Like many New Yorkers, I don’t take in the local sights unless out-of-towners are in town! So recently when Chinese friends were visiting, we decided to take them to the Statue of Liberty where I probably hadn’t been since I was a school kid. Tickets to tour the pedestal or climb the crown were sold out, apparently it’s always tourist season in New York and you have to book well in advance. But we were able to get tickets for a recorded, self- guided tour around the...
Epiphany My last blog post about my literary adventures in Dublin seems to have struck a chord with several friends who asked to hear more about my love affair with James Joyce. (See HAPPY BLOOMSDAY, MR JOYCE!, June 16, 2014). So here’s the story. In the late 1960s I was spending a summer in Denver, and decided to take that fateful course, innocently entitled Three Great Novels, where I read Ulysses for the first time. Every morning I drove to the University of Colorado...
Happy Bloomsday, Mr Joyce! Many years ago just for fun I took a course called Three Great Novels, but I only remember one of them – James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. It may sound like hyperbole but reading Ulysses in that class changed my life, at least my reading life, as I now measure every work of fiction I read against that great book. Since then I’ve reread Ulysses several times and every June 16th for years I’d celebrate Bloomsday at Symphony Space in New...
A dozen or so years ago my cousin Kathy called from DC and asked me to join her the following month for a Jewish women’s weekend retreat. Because geography had always kept us apart, spending a weekend with my cousin was wonderfully appealing and a women’s retreat would be a new experience for us both. Kathy and I arrived on the beautiful grounds of the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Maryland on a Friday afternoon and met the 16 other participants and the female rabbi and young cantorial...
Welcome to my blog World Thru Brown Eyes! Enjoy the read and please leave a comment and tell me how this old world looks thru YOUR eyes!
