College and graduate school funks can strike deep wounds. I’m not sure that reporting on this one is a service to students of today who might read it. It’s about how my aversion to anachronistic period names got me into trouble.
Personal
426 Nine south-north routes through Maarssen
Since 1968, Schwartz has been living in a village with palpable connections in space and time to large reaches of northern Europe and its past. Here he illustrates and captions them.
Continue reading “426 Nine south-north routes through Maarssen”
421 Fleishig and Altstad in the news
With a helping of author’s vanity, Schwartz claims to have foreseen, in two passages from his novel Bets and scams, some things from today’s news. Below the line, he wrestles with his reactions to the ongoing tragedy in Israel and Gaza.
412 Remembering Abner Schram
Nearly forty years after his death, Abner Schram, the U.S. distributor of the books Schwartz published from 1971 to 1988, continues to impose his overbearing, endearing self on Schwartz. To bring him back and perhaps to lay his ghost, he tells about the man and publishes their complete correspondence. Continue reading “412 Remembering Abner Schram”
410 Ceci n’est pas une peinture
Schwartz thought that his love for art in museums was strong enough to assure his enjoyment of museums, even while acknowledging that they removed art from its original locations and contexts. Last month he took a shock to the system, in Venice. For Doeschka and Bernard.
408 The iconophile Sephardi in me
Do you feel kin to people who lived in your house in the past? Schwartz indulges in the exercise, finding out that he is the successor to members of an intertwined Sephardi clan of jewelers and merchants in diamonds and pearls, members of which were Rembrandt’s next-door neighbors, while another commissioned a staggering Antwerp painting he has studied.