It is VE Day, and in honour I have reposted my uncle’s magnificent letter of May 7, 1944. Please have a look.
A Great Quotation…
It’s Depressing Because it’s True
Dunkirk
We got around to watching “Dunkirk” a few weeks ago, and while I thought it was good, what I did not appreciate was the quote used at the end:
This film is dedicated to all those whose lives were impacted by the events at Dunkirk.
Seriously? All those? Including Hitler? His life was certainly impacted. Goebbels? Goring? Speer? Seriously? Because their lives were impacted by it, to be sure. Also, please use “affected” rather than “impacted.” Please.
Paris in the Rain
Here it is, the song I referenced here.
Reading Beyond a Headline or Title
As a journalist, I am accustomed to receiving angry mail and such after an article is published. Another thing I’m accustomed to is how often the mail comes from people who have not read the article. What people often do is look at the headline or title and react. Or perhaps they skim the opening lines or a paragraph or two. I suspect this is what happened to poor Professor Bruce Gilley with his “The Case for Colonialism.” I’m a bit late with this, but I finally got around to reading it and am linking it here. If you read the whole thing, you will see there is nothing remotely racist/insensitive/every-other-name-you-can-imagine to be found about it. You might not agree with it all (or at all), but you’d be hard-pressed after reading it to understand the madness that followed its publication.
A Great Quotation…
Follow-up to my Poem
A couple of follow-ups to my poem, posted here: first, on my other website, I posted one of my uncle’s poems in honour of what would have been his 99th birthday, and second, my friend George Grosman sent me a demo of his song ‘Paris in the Rain’. It is beautiful, but unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to upload it here. However, I have linked to his website (see above) – go have a look!
Yom HaShoah
National Poetry Month
It is National Poetry Month – for the occasion, I wrote this poem. It isn’t very good – it doesn’t even rhyme. But it’s mine.
OLD-FASHIONED
I once lived in Paris
In an apartment with four other girls and four thousand cockroaches
My mother sent me letters about getting married
And books about getting married
And – in her tiny, precise script – advice about getting married
Advice hard come by; decades of marriage and few flowers behind her
She sent me articles about things that would kill me:
Date rape drugs
And certain vegetables
And taking strangers’ suitcases across borders
And unpasteurized cheese, of which I ate beaucoup with butter and baguette
Fears saved up from a lifetime of hurt, only occasionally dulled by her beloved Old-Fashioneds
I was dating, if you could call it that
And studying French poetry and such
At the Sorbonne
I read about roses and profiting from my youth
Allons voir si la rose and cueilliez vostre Jeunesse
A sort of French, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
Until a man who looked like the lead singer from A-ha
Fell in love with me and bought me roses
We saw ‘Goodfellas’ together
I laughed at the lowlifes
He was horrified by my laughter
He loved me so much I was sure I would shrivel up and fall
I sometimes look at his Facebook page
Half dreading I will see
“I’m so glad that girl wouldn’t marry me”
But I never do
I just see his big, splashy paintings, violet and red streaks like petals
And still the lead singer from A-ha, crinkle-eyed and bearded now
I became a journalist and wrote articles
about a German Shepherd who raised tiny baby kittens as her own
and about women over 40 getting pregnant at the sperm bank
gathering their rosebuds in a panic
which is something a friend of mine did and something I never contemplated
As I am old-fashioned