“It’s in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear,” writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman’s insightful memoir Hogs, Mules and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm . “Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they […]
Month: April 2012
ON THE ROAD WITH ANN – Who said, “A picture is worth a thousand words”?
I don’t know about you, but I was surprised to find that that commonplace expression originates with Napoleon Bonaparte. It refers to the notion that a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image. It also aptly characterizes one of the main goals of visualization, namely making it possible […]
TRAVEL PURSUITS – A gentleman on the Mekong River
A chance encounter (at a local meeting of Camino aficianados) resulted in an extended conversation about the ways and means and the whys of travel. David Levin has been a serious and life-long traveller. When he learned that Classical Pursuits will be going to Vietnam and Cambodia this fall, his […]
TRAVEL PURSUITS – Why a new book for Vietnam?
Here was the headline in the book review section of the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper that caused me to stop and take notice. “Vincent Lam’s first novel, about Vietnam, has makings of a masterpiece.” Vincent Lam is an emergency physician Toronto who also writes – very well. His […]
TRAVEL PURSUITS – So why don’t the Vietnamese hate the Americans?
Just last night, during intermission at a concert, I overheard a conversation between two people, one asking the other if she planned to join the fall Classical Pursuits trip Vietnam Voices: A Balanced Opposition. Over the din, I heard her response: “Oh, no, I could never go to Vietnam. I […]
ON THE ROAD WITH ANN – Mystery & Manners in Savannah, April 2012
It seems I was barely back from India before I was heading back to the airport en route to Savannah to discuss Flannery O’Connor – for the fourth time. You might think that this would be a rather hum drum same old, same old experience for discussion leader Nancy Carr […]