Peruvian Amazon Ayahuasca's Influence on Great Writers
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
My second to last night in the jungle finds me in the passenger seat of a ramshackle vehicle driving to the outskirts of Puerto Maldonado, gateway to the southern Peruvian Amazon. We are leaving the city, seeking once more the dark, fecund shelter of the forest. Amado, a middle-aged Peruvian man wearing Adidas pants and a baseball cap, is behind the wheel. He is the ecolodge's affiliate curandero, serving their "alternative tourism" offering. I booked one night with the lodge but instead of spending it in the luxury of my first really clean room in a month, I've just been living as a writer-in-residence at a research station deep in the jungle.
Posted on Sat, Jul 10, 2010
Rachel Blaustein's Kinneret, A Child's Poem of Israel
Author: Rachel Blaustein
Sitting on the edge of the pebbly shore of Kibbutz Ein-Gev, I realize that this is no ordinary kibbutz, and this is no ordinary shore. This is the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Well, not really a sea, but a manmade lake Israelis call the "Kinneret." The name, Kinneret, comes from a poem called, "V'Ulai" by the early Israeli poet, Rachel Blaustein. It was written in 1923, while Rachel was living a lonely life in a small, one-room apartment in Tel-Aviv. She was dying of tuberculosis, and the poem recalls her heady youthful days at Kibbutz Degania, on the south shores of Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), between 1909 and 1913.
Posted on Thu, Jul 01, 2010
Beauty, Tradition & Fascism in Antonio Gramsci's Sardinia
Author: Antonio Gramsci
Nestled between the lake Omodeo, once the biggest artificial basin in Europe, and the basaltic plateau of the Guilcer, this cozy hamlet lies in the very heart of the big island. Here, everyone knows each other, and animals still have right of way. Manners and traditions blend exquisitely, and I can't help but be amused at tourists, taken aback when children wave at them. It's not a mere indication of politeness; it's an ancestral manifestation of the desire to make guests feel important.
Posted on Thu, Jun 10, 2010
Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon of Disquiet
Author: Fernando Pessoa
In my backpack lived a copy of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. In three hundred-and-fifty pages of unrelated aphorisms, Pessoa describes the inner life of an assistant accountant in Lisbon. Nothing ever happens. A train trip to nearby Cascais is about as action-packed as the book ever gets, but there is a powerful, subversive energy in the accountant's unwillingness to participate in life. Lisbon is his universe, and he has no desire to walk anywhere other than the streets of his home town. Maybe if I visited Pessoa's Lisbon I could cure of my travel addiction, I thought, immediately realizing the irony.
Posted on Tue, Jun 01, 2010
Sun & Moon in Montepulciano, Under the Tuscan Sun & New Moon Film Locations
Author: Frances Mayes
Ardent fans around the world might curse me for combining a lighthearted scene from the 2003 film version of Under the Tuscan Sun, loosely based on Francis Mayes' bestseller, and a captivating scene from New Moon, the second book of the popular Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. But as a fan of both, in addition to being an American writer living in Italy, the comparison came about innocently while New Moon the movie was under production. I got caught up in the Internet blurbs over where to film the Italian scenes of New Moon, released November 2009. When official word got out Montepulciano was chosen over Volterra, the actual Tuscan village featured in the book New Moon, the scenes I imagined while touring each town collided and melded in my mind.
Posted on Sat, May 01, 2010
The Chimera, A Mystical Journey of Nazli Eray's Orpheus
Author: Nazli Eray
A rock burning bright on an August night. A full moon lights up the sky. I'm up on a mountainside, watching the natural flames shoot out of the rock. This is Chimera. I am at Cirali, a sleepy town in Mediterranean Turkey, yet suddenly I feel transported into the world of Orpheus, a Turkish novel that I helped translate into English a year earlier. Standing here, watching the flames dance, I am inside of the novel.
Posted on Tue, Apr 20, 2010
Letters of a Portuguese Nun: A Literary Mystery in Beja
Author: Mariana Alcoforado
I first heard the name "Mariana Alcoforado" from a history professor at Evora University in the rural Alentejo region of Portugal - an area not far from Lisbon known for its rolling hills and endless cork and olive trees. The story Professor Libanio Murteira Reis told of a clandestine love affair between this nun and a soldier - and the subsequent literary mystery that unfolded - enchanted me so much that I decided to seek out the remnants of the tale. I began with the scholarly writings devoted to this controversial story and the landmarks that remain from the life of this nun born in the seventeenth century in the town of Beja.
Posted on Sat, Apr 10, 2010
Henry Miller in Paris, The Mean Streets of the Tropic of Cancer
Author: Henry Miller
Best not to look at the scenery: eight lanes of traffic, roaring motorcycles, flashing billboards, and steel-and-glass office buildings as hideous as those beside any freeway in Houston or Atlanta - overall, a depressing introduction to France. This was the bus ride from Charles de Gaulle airport into Paris; and, after a nine-hour flight in coach, I was composed of little more than grogginess, jet lag, and panic.
Posted on Thu, Apr 01, 2010
Mad Men, Creating a Perfect World on the Avenue of Dreams
Author: Don Draper
These are the words of Don Draper, the enigmatic advertising guru in Mad Men, America's spellbinding TV drama series. Set within the glamorous world of New York's Madison Avenue in the early sixties, Mad Men is one of the most perfectly realised TV dramas ever made. Scenes unfold in a slowly mesmerising rhythm of such elegance that it is easy to digest the often unsavoury behaviour of its characters and the dubious values they aspire to.
Posted on Wed, Mar 17, 2010
Flower Children of the 60's & Ken Kesey, Father of LSD and Hippies
Author: Ken Kesey
The hairs on the back of my neck stiffened as I realized that before me lay the physical manifestation of the lost dreams of my heart. Some inexplicable connection seemed to exist between my early childhood life in England and the American West Coast. Those early memories of hearing Scott Mckenzie's San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair) had somehow planted a seed in my mind and magical chords linked my imagination to the city.
Posted on Wed, Mar 10, 2010
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