Monthly Archives: August 2006

Tiny Backstory

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Bob Metcalfe | Leave a comment

for those of us "outside" the media, it is always fascinating to see inside, even if only
though a tiny peephole darkly—our correspondent in Washington files this—

Perhaps you have heard that Virginia Republican senator George
Allen called a kid from India working for the democratic candidate a
"macacah" or something like that. Although no one appears to know what
Allen meant by that term, today’s Washington Post roundly condemns
Allen for using a term that the Post believes was obviously intended
to mock foreigners.

But there is more to this story.

Yesterday afternoon, I got a call from a Washington Post
reporter. As head of Friends of Tunisia did I know if "macacah" was a
slanderous term used in Tunisia for blacks or dark skinned people?
Well, my Arabic is pretty sketchy so I referred the reporter to a
Tunisian-American for an explanation of the term. I also asked if he
was writing an article about Tunisia. "No," he said, "just about this
term, macacah." Since I hadn’t heard of the Allen incident, I thought
that strange.

This morning I read the Post’s editorial about this incident. Aha!

Yet you may ask: Why Tunisia? Well, most people know that Allen’s
father was the Redskins coach George Allen, but they don’t realize that
his mother was born in Tunisia. Is his mother Arab or was she from a
French colonial family? I don’t know. But that was my recent role in
keeping democracy safe in America.

http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/?p=426

8/15/06, 2:04 pm EST

The First YouTube Election: George Allen and “Macaca”

There have already been strong intimations that Virginia Republican Senator George Allen has a “race problem.”
Now the 2008 GOP presidential pretender has shown off his unique
sensitivities again by repeatedly calling an Asian operative from his
competitor’s campaign “Macaca.” A Macaca is monkey native to Asia. The
man, S.R. Sidarth, is of Indian decent.

Not content with insinuating that Sidarth is a primate, Allen also
said to him, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!” For
the record: Sidarth was born in Virginia.

Unluckily — more than unluckily, stupidly — for Allen,

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Posted in Current Affairs

energized solitude

Posted on August 13, 2006 by Bob Metcalfe | Leave a comment

I had always loved being alone, and so departures–no matter whose–left me feeling free, even happy. Parting from someone allowed me to go back to my life–my real life, which was always interesting to me because it was hidden. This secret life was usually peaceful and in my control. It was not a refuge or a hole I crawled into to be still and silent. It was an active thing with noisy habits, and it contained the engine of my writing.

–Paul Theroux, My Secret History (293)

http://www.paultheroux.com/

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Posted in Books

Dyer on West

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Bob Metcalfe | Leave a comment

Anything Geoff Dyer writes is worth dropping everything for and reading at once. This time he writes about Rebecca West. In this passage he describes how tone can control fom:

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is digressive and meandering – you never
know what’s going to happen next – but this is not to say that it is
shapeless. It may sprawl – it is sprawling – but remember, for a start,
how what is offered as an account of a single journey has in fact been
stitched seamlessly together from three separate trips. Over time we
have grown familiar with the complex organisation of works such as
Bleak House or Ulysses; in contemporary fiction we admire the intricate
interweaving of plot, character and themes in the novels of Ian McEwan.
Making different demands on the reader’s expectations of order, Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon has the unity and fluidity of a sustained
improvisation in prose. As with a saxophonist or trumpeter, the
controlling factor, the thing that allows West to range so widely
without ever losing her way, is tone. The book’s bold demonstration of
the way that tone can take over some of the load-bearing work of
structure is crucial to its innovatory importance. Within an overall
constancy of tone West moves easily between registers

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Posted in Books

First Novel

Posted on August 8, 2006 by Bob Metcalfe | Leave a comment

Randoph reports from the coast–

I AM! working on some music, but need to earn more money for expensive gear so I can sound better than I really am. I am living in Kittery, ME with Nora in a beautiful apartment w/ hardwood floors, and a sunset out the window over the Piscataqua river to die I work for Milner Lobster co. and work about 10-11 hours a day. Not on the fishing boats, but around the docks, delivering to Boston’s seaports and resturaunts, and sorting numerous spiny lobsters (scorpion cockroaches of the sea). I have many salty gashes that have turned to callouses on my hands. Nelly is working at a specialty sandwich shop in downtown Portsmouth a short walk right over the bridge. Your photos look wonderful! Looks like you are really covering a lot of ground–some really great architecture too. I wish I had more time for reading/writing/music/anything stimulating. My
next book is going to be "The Lobster Coast" by Colin Woodward. I guess now that I am a "Maine"iac, I should learn a little bit about the history of the Lobster industry.

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Posted in Travel

Not The Paul

Posted on August 7, 2006 by Bob Metcalfe | Leave a comment

I ate in this restaurant in Copenhagen my first night there. It
is in Tivoli Gardens. I took the special menu for the evening, four
different wines, as many glasses with each course as I wanted. I could
barely walk out at the end of the meal, which was excellent. As much as
I remember. The waitress was from Poland, very nice. Had
come to Copenhagen for work, liked it but not enough to want to stay
all that long. Winter too long. Fish and seafood are the speciality of the restaurant.
When I got back home to NH I bought a guide to Copenhagen and read up a
little on some of what I saw and glimpsed in my two days there. At
first I thought I had eaten at a restaurant called The Paul, which has
a Michelin star. After looking at photos on the web and searching the
Tivoli Gardens map I finally concluded that it was this restaurant and
not the Paul. This is called something that means Fish—Nimb? I should
look it up again and put in the proper link just to give proper credit
to everyone. Here it is–http://www.nimb.dk/La_crevette/forside.htm
This photo is of La Crevette, where I ate. Nimb (fish) is the name of
the company that owns it and the name of the other restaurant they run
in Tivoli. Great meal I had that night. As good as any we had in Paris,
and that’s praise. A couple from Australia sat at the table next to me, across the aisle, but close enough that I could hear them all evening. Only five or six other people were scattered around other tables. The Australian talked as though he had made the trip just to have this seafood he was eating. He treated his companion more like a sister or cousin than a spouse or girlfriend. He was about seventy, had traveled widely, she maybe fifty or sixty. The evening was wholly delicious—the air out in the gardens, the twinkly lights all over, the crowds enjoying summer.

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Posted in Blogroll

Stewart our Leigh-Fermor

Posted on August 5, 2006 by Bob Metcalfe | Leave a comment

I’m half way through Rory Stewar’ts amazing book, The Places in Between. Stewart walked across Afghanistan in January of 2002 just shortly after the fall of the Taliban. (yes, that was then . . . .) Now Stewart has a new book and Slate is running excerpts from it under the title "the best book about Iraq." I’m sure it is. Stewart served as governor of a southern province of Iraq. He’s only 30. An adventurous Scotsman.
http://www.slate.com/id/2146691/entry/2146692/?nav=tap3
It strikes me that Stewart is this generation’s Leigh-Fermor. Anthony Lane just had a super piece about Leigh-Fermor in The New Yorker. Unfortunately it is not online. Look for the May 22 issue. Here’s a discussion of the piece from a website called Worldhum.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: "An Englishman Abroad"

A few weeks ago, we declared
(with the help of Thomas Swick) “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh
Fermor one of the greatest travel books of all time. Leigh Fermor, now
in his 90s, is not as well known to many American readers as other
great travel writers of our time. So it was a pleasant surprise to
find, in the May 22 issue of the New Yorker, a lengthy profile of Leigh
Fermor by Anthony Lane. The story describes a writer who has lived one
of the most compelling lives of the 20th century—so fascinating, in
fact, that Lane insists it makes the rest of our lives “laughably
provincial in their scope.”

Writes Lane:

We fret about our kids’ S.A.T. scores, whereas this man,
when he was barely more than a kid himself, shouldered a rucksack and
walked from Rotterdam to Istanbul. In his sixties, he swam the
Hellespont, in homage to Lord Byron—his hero, and to some extent his
template. (He once hunted down a pair of the poet’s slippers, “their
toes turning up at the tip,” in Missolonghi.) In between, he has joined
a cavalry charge, played a game of polo on bicycles outside a Hungarian
castle, observed a voodoo ceremony in Haiti, and plunged into a love
affair with a princess. He has feasted atop a moonlit tower, with wine
and roast lamb hauled up by rope. He has dwelled soundlessly among
Trappist monks. He has built himself a house on the soutehrn coast of
Greece, where he still resides. He has written seven travel books and a
novel, though which is which one cannot readily say, for the travel
books pass from fiercely empirical to the fantastic without drawing a
breath.

Lane notes that “A Time of Gifts” and another travel book, “Between the
Woods and the Water,” cover “the first two-thirds of that footsore trek
to Istanbul,” and that Leigh Fermor has long talked of writing the
concluding volume. “I’m absolutely longing to get at it,” Leigh Fermor
told Lane.

We hope he does.

Unfortunately, Lane’s story is not available online. It’s well worth a read.

Posted by Jim Benning • 5.31.06
Categories: Weblog • Life of a Travel Writer • Literary Travel • Page Turner

http://www.worldhum.com/weblog/item/patrick_leigh_fermor_an_englishman_abroad_20060531/

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Posted in Blogroll