“Franta remained standing alone in front of the building, and because his legs ached from his all-night vigil he sat down on a bench from which he could keep an eye on the entrance.”
—The Farewell Party, Fifth Day, pp. 169, Knopf, 1976.
Category Archives: Blog
Ernest Hemingway
We can think more and better, or worse or even, perhaps, differently, if not a bit sadly today about Ernest Hemingway.
If we think of him at all.
It was on this day in 1961 that Hemingway committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.
“Dear Anonymous,”
It’s not every day you write an email that starts “Dear Anonymous” and I am honored to have done so today. Continuing to report more on local responses to the groundbreaking new documentary, The Act of Killing. To follow is my note to Anonymous, the silent co-director who worked alongside Joshua Oppenheimer.
Last question: Are you okay? So simple yet so serious.
Anonymous
I am currently reporting a story on the Indonesian response to the astonishing new film, The Act of Killing. Director Joshua Oppenheimer worked on the film for nearly a decade and has called this work, “a documentary of the imagination.”
The Teacher is Present
My first job out of college, more or less, was teaching English at a University in Beijing. Even though I had galloped into town astride the great horse that is Princeton in Asia, I was way off course.
The Cold War Within
“It wasn’t just the strange chance this expat took, which could have just as easily been seen as a weird or deranged little lie a man a bit too far from home might feel at liberty to tell. No.”
James Merrill
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, who was born on this day in New York in 1926. Merrill was the son of financier Charles Merrill, founder of the brokerage Merrill-Lynch.
Dinner in Iran
Tonight my Iranian father-in-law is over cooking a classic feast, blasting our kitchen with wonderful Persian scents and telling little stories about his childhood. I’m waiting for things to come together. Our kitchen is small– too many cooks in there and it’s no good at all!
Of Earnest, Lovely Efforts
Remember that super, super jejune time when you were fresh out of wherever or whatever it was you came from and you were newly ready to Take It On and Go For It because Now Is The Time? Yeah, that. Oooohhh. I love that. Because the world is Here but it needs to Change? So beautifully cringing now. But I want more of that!
So in an earnest, lovely effort to get more of that I am reminding myself today to please don’t beat the earnest heart from out the thrush only to leave it to die– pounded and bloody, so multiveined– in the driveway. No! Start a blogette, you see, and mount it on cyber wall for all ethered eternity. Yes!
I find on a clear morning you can hear the past quite well.
What it is: an addendum to this Washington Post piece produced in 2005 (the most earnest of all possible years, already eight years ago now) this for Scotland’s Radio Magnetic, which had a Beijing Bureau until, one day, it didn’t.
Poof. I turned in the keys!
Ps– do you also love that your 20s notebooks might just yield up a few still thriving poems that your heart can yet pick up from the driveway and you find it is all beating? You must keep these notebooks and their many treasures forever and always even if it is just to hold up the short end of the table and to remind you, yes, you! daily, of all awkward efforts and their many stern-faced attempts, however ongoing. Go on!
Subtle Ways
I still love this piece from a former student of my journalism class at Tsinghua University who went by the name Patrick.
Caroline M Cooper 