by Witold | Feb 15, 2022 | Architects, Architecture, Modern life
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a German writer of the turn of the nineteenth century; today we would call him a sci-fi author. In 1914 he wrote a novel with the unwieldily title The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent of White. The protagonist is an architect, more...
by Witold | Dec 30, 2021 | Modern life
Shortly after my wife died, a friend emailed me a quote from Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, which deals in part with the death of his wife of twenty-nine years. “This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand,” Barnes wrote, “the...
by Witold | Nov 20, 2021 | Modern life
Years ago, when Shirley and I lived in Quebec, we regularly took a few days off during the winter to stay at a country inn in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. It was run by a German family, and the hearty food—schnitzel and kartoffelklöße—was a big part of the...
by Witold | Oct 15, 2021 | Design, Modern life
Home: A Celebration, just published by Rizzoli, is a beautiful book in a good cause; it’s a fundraiser for No Kid Hungry. The interior decorator Charlotte Moss has brought together essays, poems, sketches, and photographs by a variety of authors, including Joyce...
by Witold | Aug 31, 2021 | Modern life
It is eight weeks since Shirley died. I still can’t get used to saying “I” and “mine” rather than “we” and “our.” I look at old photographs a lot. This is one when she was a student in a convent school with the sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Montreal....
by Witold | Jul 10, 2021 | Modern life
A friend sent me these lines from Auden’s “Funeral Blues”: . . . my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, Yes.
