Edmund White died this past summer at the age of 85, having lived about four decades longer than he must once have expected to. His HIV diagnosis came in 1985, around the height of the AIDS epidemic, when he was in his mid-forties. It can’t have been a complete surprise, given that he’d spent most […]
Georges Perec was born in Paris and died in Paris (or at least a suburb just across the Périph), which didn’t necessarily qualify him to write about the city. Natives of a place tend to suffer from a degree of what-do-they-know-of-England ignorance of context, or even, to get more metaphorical and more clichéd, the fish’s […]
“You can’t have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers,” Michael Tilson Thomas once declared. “They simply define what music is.” By the same token, we might say you can’t have New York, London, and Paris as your favorite cities, collectively defining as they do the standard against which we measure — and usually […]