Discoveries: Arts and Culture

It has been months since I have visited my blogger...so sorry!  Tonight I was returned to it, by an evening with the man Tony Wheeler,  who started the LONELY PLANET guide(which he has now sold) ....the name came about because Wheeler  heard a song sung by Joe Crocker, in which he thought he heard him say," I found such a lonely planet....but what he actually said, was, "I found such a lovely planet.." Some of his revelations: he finds China the most interesting place, as it was closed when he started his travels in the 70's when he did his "hippie" tour through Iran and Afghanistan...in 1972.  Now he has the  Wheeler Foundation work on more than 50 projects in the developing world and in the establishment of the Wheeler Center for Books, Writing & Ideas in Melbourne, Australia, to, in part, create one of UNESCO's literary heritage cities, like Dublin! The most fearful moment in 50 years of travel was in Guatamala when his daughter, who is now ...

I have a confession to make; I only have read the non fiction of the great novelist Philip Roth. I am acquainted with all his ouevre and its impact and mythology and I found this essay very interesting for citing Roth as writing comedy, not satire or humor...and that he is a sum of his contradictions.  The most cited quote is so quintessentially memorable.   "When I was first in Czechoslovakia, "Roth wrote in a much quoted line, " it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters" , which can be said of Russia and other societies through time. Even, now, America.  Gopnik sees Roth as a storyteller.  Roth says "The writers who expanded and shaped my sense of America were mainly small -town Midwestserners(I am one) and Southerners(I agree there! ), he writes. He includes in this group Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Erskine Caldwell...