Discoveries: Arts and Culture

A charming summer read. Having been  a great fan of " The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and " the Book of Laughter and Forgetting", I was delighted to see a new novella by Milan Kundera.  I thought the best thing about Chezoslavakia opening, was that we got Kundera's work in translation! There is also " The Joke" and " Life is elsewhere" This is as the Washington Post correspondent says, " An entertaining divertissement, a lightly comic fiction blending Gallic theorizing(Kant, Hegel) and Russian Style Absurdity."   Yes, those were his influences...the charm is that he does the unexpected...when you think you know, he reverses it...and therein is the humor and wit. We know what is what, but we play the game. The greatest revelation is one Robert Frost made: the poetry and significance in life is in the every day; open your eyes and see it!  Witness it.  Kundera  weaves Stalin and a story of hunters and his men, including Krus...

Now I pick up my new edition of ARAMCO WORLD and there is an article in the July/August issue about this portrait by Charles Wilson Peale which has been reinstalled in the new whole reinstallation of the American wing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I also visited the newly reinstalled American wing in the Baltimore Museum of Art. This portrait is of Yarrow Mamout, a freedman who bought property on a street where Secretary of State John Kerry makes his home and where John and Jackie Kennedy lived.  That is Dent Street in Georgetown.  There were only two houses there when Mamout, a Muslim bought his property.  Charles Wilson Peale was in Washington DC in 1819 to paint President James Monroe's portrait. He had heard of the elderly Mamout, whom "local lore wrongly touted as more than a hundred years old" and sought him out to learn the secret of his longevity.  He recorded the meeting in his diary and penned Mamout's obituary. . For more details see:  A...