Paris

Van Gogh In the Road

August 12, 2016

On an exotic summer Sunday I step into the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and head not toward a vision but a sound. “It’s the light or, rather, the lack of light in The Outskirts of Paris that makes this dirt road and the man in it faceless and gray and in need of southern…

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Deadly Numbers

November 18, 2015

I was an Iraqi professor of statistics until the United States and later ISIS destroyed my classroom and much of the university. I suppose I should thank each group for attacking when school wasn’t in session, but I believe that may have been coincidental. At any rate, like civilized people everywhere, I commiserate with the…

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Freud and Wife Visit Picasso

November 3, 2015

In Paris Lucian and I again socialize with other glamorous and creative people, and most mornings he paints while I write, imagining myself a female Fitzgerald thirty years after Scott brought exotic but doomed Zelda to this marvelous city. Several Parisiennes tell me Lucian and I might be an even more dazzling couple. Within a…

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The Coco Chanel Style

July 27, 2011

My mother washed people’s clothes and died young in 1895 when I was twelve, and my food-peddling father deserted his five children. For six years I lived in a Catholic orphanage and learned to sew. The moment I turned eighteen they said goodbye and I escaped to sing in cabarets and thought I well did…

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Hemingway Fifty Years Dead

July 6, 2011

Early morning on a July second Ernest Hemingway, battered by decades of alcoholism, assailed by a brain injured in one car and two plane crashes, haunted by a lifelong fear of inherited mental illness and certain that it and rapid aging had forever rendered him paranoid and defeated, quietly arose from a bedroom separate from…

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