Existential angst, jazz cats, cheap hotels, smoke-filled basements … while Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood is now filled with luxury boutiques, in the 1950s it was a different story. As the city emerged from Nazi occupation, Saint-Germain reclaimed its place as a centre of new ideas and daring new works of art, […]
Author: Melanie Blake
Extraordinary Everyday Souvenirs
I had a lot of fun reading the recent New York Times article on the joy of small, everyday souvenirs: “Want a Vacation Souvenir? Buy Toothpaste.” Like author Joshua Hunt, I love visiting drugstores when travelling abroad. Along with supermarkets, bodegas and corner stores, stationers, and secondhand shops. This is […]
Life Distilled in Japanese Poetry
Tanka are a form of Japanese poetry that date back more than 1,000 years. Meaning “short song” in Japanese, tanka are 31 on long, written on a single line—an on is similar to a syllable. Tanka remain very popular in Japan, and these poems have captured every facet of the […]
Toronto Pursuits 2023: A Week of Discovery, Friendship and Culture
Nearly 80 book, music and culture lovers gathered this past July for our annual “salon in the sun,” Toronto Pursuits. At our longtime oasis, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, we read and looked and listened, ate and drank, laughed and debated, greeted friends old and new. Most of […]
There’s Always a There There
Gertrude Stein’s famous quote, “There is no there there” is often understood as a slight, a pronouncement that a place has no substance. Nothing to see here. Stein was writing about returning to her childhood home in Oakland, California, in her 1937 book Everybody’s Autobiography. One reason her observation has […]
Japan Top Five
I just came back from my first trip to Japan but still have yet to come back down to earth. Wow! My husband Ben and I spent two weeks visiting my sister Carolyn in lush, laid-back Okinawa. She’s in the Navy and has been living in Okinawa for almost two […]
Blood, Sex and Money, Second Empire–Style
He’s been described as the most famous author of his day, as “literature’s greatest whistleblower.” His influence on French, American, and world literature is undisputedly huge. And his books, as the title of this post suggests, are full of three things people love to read about, even if they don’t […]
Somehow understood, somehow forgiven: Reading three great Italian novels with Nella Cotrupi
[Editor’s note: Nella Cotrupi talks about the very special seminar she has planned on three women Italian novelists. The first, Elena Ferrante, needs no introduction. Grazia Deledda and Elsa Morante, both important influences on Ferrante, also write with keen psychological insight about their characters’ interior and exterior lives. This is […]
In Sicily’s Wondrous Valley of the Temples
Daedalus could not have picked a better spot. As I walked the path leading up to the temple, I stopped to bask in the warm November sun that gilded the valley below and transformed the sea into a thin strip of silver. I was in Agrigento on the south coast […]
What We’re Reading and Watching on Election Day
To mark Election Day in the US, we asked Classical Pursuits leaders to name some of their favourite novels, biographies, films, essays, TV shows and more where the focus is on politics and the political process. What would you recommend? Let us know! From Don Spandier: One of my favorite […]