Travel
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Twice as Nice: On Reading Books Again
I like to re-read my books. I mean, a lot. Once a year, some of them. This week I re-read an old favorite: 84 Charing Cross Road, along with its sequel (in the same book!), The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. This is a wonderfully funny and sweet true story, told in correspondence between a New York playwright-freelance writer, and a bookshop employee in London. 84 Charing Cross was the address of the bookstore, Marks & Co. They began their correspondence in 1949 and it ends after 20 years — I won’t tell you how. But it was made into a wonderful movie with Anthony Hopkins and Ann Bancroft. See it,…
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The Artist’s Way
A few years ago, I went to Europe to visit my eldest daughter, who was working in London for six months. We met up in Paris, and after some days there and in Belgium, we crossed the Channel to England and finished our sojourn by visiting a plethora of literary sites. People who know me realize that I am a Jane Austen aficionado and understand that a trip to her native land, and a walk through her very environs, is like a heroin hit to me: once is not enough, and I suspect I’ll anxiously pursue more of All Things Jane until I die. The literary trail began in Paris, with…
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What Would Jane Do? A Literary Pilgrimage
What Would Jane Do? A Literary Pilgrimage By Julia Park I’ve been to England twice before, and to the beautiful Georgian city of Bath in particular, because as a Jane Austen aficionado, a Janeite, if you will, that’s what we do. We follow in her footsteps, we look for the Jane connection, and we read each of her six novels (and the juvenilia, the marginalia, and the letters) as if they were travelogues. Some of them are travelogues of a sort. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Elizabeth Bennett and her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner plan a tour of the Lakes District, in part to forget about certain young men.…
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Big plans, big big plans
Busy days. (Note to self: why is “busy” spelled this way but sounds like “bizzy”?) I know, I’m addicted to busy, but life is full and there’s always a lot to do. Indulge me, will you? April and May were full of Tongues of Angels adventures, because Indie-Visible released the novel as a 10-year anniversary edition, and I was all over the place online, in several blog-carnations. It was good. It was busy, but it was good. That firmly under way, I turned to finishing off the second of the volumes of collected diaries, and all the proofing, indexing and final approvals needed. All to good ends, friends, because the…
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Portland pioneer
I had a very successful adventure in Portland, OR, the last week of March. I went with the sort of nebulous idea of “research,” thinking I’d spend a lot of time in the Multnomah County Library, and I did, and I learned a lot of great information. But that’s not all. Here are some of the exciting things that took place last week: 1. I went to Reed College, which is Doris’s alma mater, and gave a lengthy and detailed presentation to the Foster-Scholtz Club (an alumni group) about Doris’s four years there. It was a terrific group of people who were so interested that honestly, you could have heard…
