Discoveries: Arts and Culture

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...

A friend gave me this Noble Prize winning author's book, which contains three novellas for Christmas. In our post Christmas New Year's conversation, she told me she and her mother had read the last of the novellas over the Christmas holiday.  So I commenced to join them and found the words hypnotic, requiring me to continue reading these 3 and 5 page chapters, nearly finishing, or perhaps finishing in one day's reading.  Modiani's novella has to be read slowly, savoring phrases that linger in the mind.  He is concerned, in a dream like manner, with loss, with lost people, with people who have lost their identities, or have hidden themselves, or assumed other identities.  In other words, with characters who are different than they seem.   I felt he was preoccupied with collaborists with the Nazis when Germany occupied France, and that had probably earned him the Noble Prize as it is not a part of history treated often.  I might have surmised that he was Jew...