Banbury That’s how Steve Boykewich described the first chapter of Ingrid Rowland’s book about Athanasius Kircher and Baroque Rome: That strange, bitter Jesuit, Melchior Inchofer, who as censor of Kircher’s Coptic Forerunner had expressed such enthusiasm for the work, seems to have soured on his colleague’s enterprise some years later. Inchofer’s 1645 satire of the Jesuit […]
Category Archives: New York City
“Life Imitating Borges.”
03-Jan-13Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung, Death.
20-Dec-12Frankfurt (Oder) I had the sudden conviction that I should finally more fully explore the writings of Marie-Louise von Franz, a second-generation Jungian whose writings I have been impressed by in the past. I am in general always partial to people who have some kind of redemptive salvific Messianic purpose in their work: ‘Like all of us, […]
Chance led me, as it sometimes leads the prepared mind, to Plutarch’s Life of Marc Antony not long ago, and I was struck by the following incident. After the collapse of Marc Antony’s fortunes and his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Actium, knowing that the assassins of Augustus were on their way and that […]
Names like Freelove Titus, daughter of Bathsheba Titus. From Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, where I was pleased a few days ago to find a number of old Kuhner family graves.
From the Nutty Catholicism Department…
26-Sep-12A friend tipped me off to the story of the “monkey Jesus,” a botched fresco-restoration effort by an elderly woman in a Spanish parochial church. “The once dignified portrait now resembles a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic,” the BBC story reports. This is fine: paintings sometimes get destroyed. But […]
Amber Scorah.
06-Aug-12A friend’s (very nice) new website. She did a profile of me not too long ago. It’s odd to read about myself in the third person, but there it is. One of the people in Denning was talking to me today about how impressive this “Facebook friend” of mine was – it was Amber. No […]
The Wolfman.
02-Aug-12The Film Forum is hosting a celebration of the work of Universal Pictures – a studio which has been operating for a hundred years now. One of its programs was a triple feature of three classic horror films, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Wolfman. I had time to catch only the last film […]
In Queens.
31-Jul-12Walking down the block in the early afternoon on my natal street, and the wind brings to me the smell of the ocean – the summer onshore breeze that sets in on summer afternoons. So beautiful, and so laced with so many memories – of the small town in the city where I grew up, […]
In New York City this past weekend, I was at a Canada Day barbecue in Cooper Park yesterday which ended perfectly… a cop car drove onto one of the park paths and stopped a hundred feet from us so the cops could watch the thirty-odd people having a picnic. After ten minutes of being watched […]
Oh My God, I Love New York.
14-Jun-12Pugsley Pizza, Bronx, NY.