Among the unfortunate recent victims of Manhattan’s extortionately exorbitant rents is the Librairie Française. Last year the venerable New York institution had its rent raised from $360,000 to $1 million per year. The shop was founded in 1928 by Isaac Molho a Sephardic Jew from Salonika, who was invited by David Rockefeller himself to rent a space on the Promenade in Rockefeller Center in 1935. The Maison Française, in which the Librairie was located, flanked the south side of the Promenade, with the British Empire Building flanking the north — the bit of greenery in-between is called ‘Channel Gardens’ accordingly. The sign on the façade said ‘Librairie de France’ but in conversation I have never heard it referred to as anything other than the Librairie Française.

During the Second World War, the shop also operated a publishing house called La Maison Française that printed Gaullist propaganda as well as titles by French writers like Jacques Maritain, André Maurois, Jules Romains, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was the post-war period, however, in which the Librairie Française flourished. (more…)

In anticipation of the annual commemoration of my birth, the University of Stellenbosch Rugby Football Club yesterday sailed to yet another victory in the FNB-sponsored Varsity Cup. Of course, a Maties victory is not exactly news — Stellenbosch is accustomed to victory, especially on the home turf at Coetzenburg (seen above). Indeed, Stellenbosch have won every Varsity Cup since the competition’s incarnation, which seems much less impressive when one points out this is only the third year of its existence. Nonetheless, to defeat the traditional rivals of the University of Cape Town — Maties and Ikeys are like Hatfields & McCoys — particularly warms the cockles of the heart. 17-14, not a bad score — the Ikey Tigers put in a good effort, but I am told UCT hasn’t beaten Stellenbosch in rugby for nearly 20 years. Impressive, considering that — despite being Ikeys — UCT manages to put up a good quad and make it to the final. (more…)

Persuant to our discussion regarding Scotland’s three parliament buildings, Scots Law News reports that the Caledonian scribe Alexander McCall Smith has been called to the Scots bar.

All of Them More Beautiful than the Current Parliament Building

IT IS ONE OF those curious aspects of Edinburgh: its multiplicity of parliament buildings. The Estaits of Parliament, as they were known in the old days — consisting of the three estates of prelates, lairds, and burghers — first met in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle in 1140, though the first gathering of which we have primary source material was at Kirkliston in 1235, during the reign of Alexander II. The body led a somewhat peripatetic existence, meeting wherever was convenient, and even met for a year in St Andrews, where the building which housed it is still known as Parliament Hall. Indeed, that august edifice is home to the proceedings of the Union Debating Society, where the germinal gasbags of Scotland, and indeed of all three kingdoms, first enter the fray of political discourse.

In 1997, nearly three-hundred years after the Parliament was abolished, it was decided to bring it back, albeit in much reduced form. Great were the rumours and discussions about what effect the return of legislative power might have on the country, and Edinboronians pondered where the body might be housed. There were obvious choices, and less obvious choices, but in the end the Westminster government decided to go for the choice that hadn’t been suggested at all and built one of the most heinous offences against the sensibilities of taste that the land has ever seen. And so, the fact is that Scotland has three beautiful parliament buildings, none of which it uses. (more…)

While this Cape Dutch mansion sits in the hills of Montecito in California, it bears the name (and style) of an old Cape Peninsula town. “Constantia” was designed by Ambrose Cramer (take a peek at his nifty grave) in 1929 for Arthur & Grace Meeker, with landscaping by Lockwood deForest, Jr. The Meekers sold the house to the architect Jack Warner. In the late 1960s, Stewart & Katherine Abercrombie bought the place, and hosted the Dalai Lama on one of his trips to the United States. It was the subject of a 1979 feature in Architectural Digest. The place is for sale, currently listed at $17,900,000. (more…)

Various sources have brought to light the new film “Lourdes” by the Austrian director Jessica Hausner. The film depicts the pilgrimage to Lourdes of a non-particularly religious woman (played by Sylvie Testud) suffering from Mutiple Sclerosis who is healed of her illness. The film by a non-believing director has met with both praise and suspicion from Catholic quarters, and has been compared, at least stylistically, to the work of Michael Haneke (whose latest, “The White Ribbon” is currently showing in New York). Latest to weigh in is the Catholic Herald‘s indispensable Anna Arco, who writes:

I saw it as an exercise in theodicy where God loses. In a quiet dispassionate way, Jessica Hausner, the film’s Austrian director, paints a bleak picture of a world where fate is a blind, arbitrary force and human beings clutch at the straws of faith, half-truths in their cowardly despair. The suffering are not healed, human nature is selfish and the problem of pain is not solved. God can’t exist because he isn’t fair. Christianity offers a web of half-truths obscuring a nihilistic reality.

Miss Arco recently spoke with the director, and the interview will be published in the next Catholic Herald. (more…)

George Hitchcock, The Annunciation
Oil on canvas, 62½ in. x 80½ in.
1887, Art Institute of Chicago

The Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith — noted for the fact that his books are actually a pleasure to read — pens a letter to readers every few months. In the latest letter, he mentions that he recently attended the Jaipur Literary Festival in Rajasthan’s famous “Pink City”:

But the visit to Jaipur was not all literary festival. My wife and I paid a visit to the Mother Theresa Home in the city, which was, as you can imagine, a very moving experience. Over two hundred residents, most of them with nowhere else to go, no possessions, and no money, are looked after by some seven sisters. These sisters are tireless – completely tireless – and give their lives over to the living care of these abandoned people.

At a time when the Catholic Church is coming under severe criticism for its failures (which have been, understandably, very much in the news), we should perhaps remember the extraordinary work of people such as the nuns of this community, who have done so much to bring love into the lives of those who have nothing and who would otherwise die alone and uncared for. I cannot tell you how moved I was by what I saw and by my conversation with the nuns.

An apposite reminder.

If you haven’t yet read Prof. McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series, I suggest you float down to your nearest bookseller and purchase the first installation (handily titled 44 Scotland Street) today. They are a procession of delightful stories surrounding a number of fictional characters in an Edinburgh townhouse, and if you’re familiar with the capital city, you might just come a cross the occasional non-fictional friend interspersed amongst the creations of McCall Smith’s mind.

First, I noticed that Herr Beck labelled your humble & obedient scribe as “my impossibly bizarre former colleague” and a “living anachronism”. The context was largely complementary, as Beck expressed his certainty that I could enlighten him further upon the subject of Ember days (which of course I can, but won’t). But then I noticed a more subtle — and yet simultaneously all-too-blatant — anti-Cusackian dig in his piece on Ted Gioia’s The Birth (and Death) of the Cool in B&N Review:

Ceremonial maces?!? While six of those seven terms are undoubtedly aimed at other individuals, there is no way that this mention of one of my particular areas of expertise can be construed as anything other than a mischievous and deliberate anti-Cusackian provocation by the forces of Beck. I questioned the son of Granby seeking the meaning behind such an act, but in his inimitably mysterious fashion he emitted a soft, false laugh and faded back into the folds of the evening mist.

The real reason for Beck’s act of aggression is simple: he’s envious of my having been published in the Quarterly Journal of the Guild of Mace-bearers of England & Wales. He’s likely further miffed that I attended the university with the finest collection of medieval maces in the world, while he was stuck sacrificing holly-crowned virgins to Wotan in the wilds of New Hampshire. There you have it: mace-envy, the latest vice of today’s jaded youth.

Those of you unfamiliar with Stefan Beck’s work are all the poorer for it. Just the other day I was speaking with the ever-delightful Allison Burbage, who was searching for unfamiliar books to read. I directed her to Stefan Beck’s demi-annual Fiction Chronicle in the pages of The New Criterion to steer her in the right direction. In the future Mr. Beck best watch his back — we members of what I like to call the ceremonial mace enthusiast community are skilled in the sophisticated art of retaliation.

“Argentina has to be one of the most underrated travel destinations,” Michael Buerk writes in his salute to Argentina in today’s Daily Telegraph. An excerpt:

AT THE HEART OF IT ALL IS Buenos Aires, one of the world’s most exciting cities. I was there for months during the Falklands War, reporting for the BBC. They were praying for me in our local church. If only they had known how close I had come to eating myself to death – those steaks are huge – they would have prayed even harder.

It is an intensely Anglophile country, and was even then. The upper crust didn’t want to argue about the sovereignty of the Falklands (any more than they would want to argue now about oil drilling); they wanted to know where in Jermyn Street to order their cavalry twills. The hundreds of thousands of descamisados (literally, “shirtless ones”) who packed the Plaza de Mayo screaming for Mrs Thatcher’s blood would break off when they saw the BBC logo on the camera to make sure they had got the lyrics to “Hard Day’s Night” exactly right. The city’s biggest department store was called Harrods, the poshest club was (and is) the Hurlingham and the most popular film during the war was “Chariots of Fire”.

The veterans of the Malvinas, portly and grey-haired now, camp out in the Plaza de Mayo, still begging for better pensions. Porteños (the locals’ name for themselves) call them “the whiners”. The memorial to the 700 or so Argentine dead is prominent enough, but it is just a list of names and the eternal flame has long since gone out. It faces the great clock, built by the British a century ago (with a movement copied from Big Ben). The locals still call it the English Tower, even though it was officially renamed after the conflict. The cause still rankles, but the war is an embarrassment.

There’s poverty in the suburbs but, at its heart, Buenos Aires is a grand city, laid out in the days when its wealth and its future seemed unlimited. The world’s widest avenues, finest opera house, most opulent fin de siècle town houses, and – my idea of heaven – Italian restaurants cooking the world’s most wonderful meat. (Try La Brigada, where they cut the tenderloin with spoons. And don’t order “Baby Beef” looking for a light meal; it weighs in at just short of a kilo.)

It’s an old-fashioned European city, with a café society oddly short of dark faces. The original natives, and the African slaves, were wiped out or pushed out. The most prominent of the country’s remaining blacks (70 or so, it is said) was arrested at the airport recently because officials thought her Argentine passport must be a forgery.

The city is full of grand monuments, mostly to the chancers who snatched independence when Spain had its back turned, bowing the knee to Napoleon. They are as extravagantly memorialised in death as they were spurned in life; nearly all of them died in exile.

Argentina’s real heroes can be seen, stuffed, in the colourful old dock area, La Boca. Life-size models stare at you from the shops and down from the balconies. There are just three of them, and a tawdry trio they are. Eva Duarte Peron, of course, the actress who slept her way to the bottom of the movie business and into the life of a crypto-fascist colonel on the make; a long-dead tango warbler called Carlos Gardel; and Maradona, the squat footballer with the hand of God and the soul corroded by cocaine. Two of them died young; the third is still trying.

Death is a big thing in Argentina. La Recoleta cemetery is worth the trip in itself. It’s an entire suburb of gloriously overblown mausolea; a gentleman’s club for the dead, even harder to get into than the Garrick. Evita is there, in the Duarte family tomb. Her father’s relatives famously said they wouldn’t be seen dead with her; now she’s banged up with them for all eternity. There’s a new museum to Evita that’s worth seeing, with a pinch of salt.

I would dispute Bs.As. being “an old-fashioned European city”. It is instead a rather vigorous American city that retains many of the best attributes of an old-fashioned European city.

Van al die operahuise in Afrika, die helfte is in Suid-Afrika — dink jy, daar is net vier operahuise in die vasteland. Nietemin, opera het ’n ryk en vrugbaar tradisie in die land, en die koningin van Suid-Afrikaanse opera-sangers is die sopraan Mimi Coertse. Sy was in Durban gebore in 1932 en het haar stem-opleiding in Suid-Afrika voltooi. In 1953, Coertse het die uitsaaier en komponis Dawid Engela getroud. (Engela het sy “Huwelikskantate” vir hul troue saamgestel). In Januarie 1955, Coertse het haar opera debuut gemaak in ’n kleine rol in Parsifal by die Teatro San Carlo in Napels.

Dit was 17de Maart 1956 — St. Patrick’s Day — toe Coertse die rol van die Koningin van die nag gesing in “Die Zauberflöte” met die Weense Staatsopera in Oostenryk. Sy het met die Weense Staatsopera vir meer as twintig jare gebly. Gravin Christl Schönfeld onthou:

In sy lang voortgang, Mimi Coertse het baie eerbewyse opgestapel. In 1961, die Medalje van Eer van Die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns; in 1966, die prestige titel van “Kammersängerin” vanaf die regering van Oostenryk; in 1985, die Suid-Afrikaanse Dekorasie vir Voortreflike Diens; en in 1996, die “Oesterreichische Ehrenkreuz für Wissenschaft und Kunst” (Oostenrykse Erekruis vir Wetenskap en Kuns) — die hoogste kunsdekorasie van Oostenryk.

Waar is sy nou? Sedert 1998, Mimi Coertse bestuur die “Black Tie Ensemble” — ’n projek om die verandering tussen opleiding en professionele uitvoering te versag. ’n Halfeeu van diens in die kunste voortsit!

I’ve only just discovered the blog of The New York Review of Books and found this entry on blogging in eighteenth-century France (if you will) interesting.

A friend accuses me of being able to connect everything back to either Scotland or South Africa, depending on my whim, and this blog post provides a handy example. It’s author is Robert Darnton, a Harvard cultural historian and expert on eighteenth-century France. Professor Darnton is the son of the much-respected war correspondent Byron Darnton, who was killed during the war while reporting in New Guinea. (Gen. MacArthur, a difficult man to impress, held Darnton père in such regard that he informed Darnton’s widow and his newspaper, The New York Times, personally).

In 1943, a year after his death, a Liberty ship was christened the U.S.S. Byron Darnton. After the war, the Byron Darnton was beached off the isle of Sanda in Scotland. The pub on Sanda — one of the most isolated pubs in the country — is now named The Byron Darnton after the ship that was named after the father of Prof. Robert Darnton.

So there, from eighteenth-century French blogging to twenty-first-century Scottish pubs.

Torontonians or those in the general vicinity of that metropolis might be interested in attending the upcoming launch of Seraphic‘s new book, Seraphic Singles: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Single Life. Of course, Dorothy is no longer single but instead happily married to a Scottish friend of mine, and you can see her gleefully prancing about the grounds of the Historical House the happy couple now call their home in this 4m29s video clip.

But when & where’s the book launch you say? It’s Thursday, March 25, from 7:00–10:00pm at the Duke of York Pub, 39 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, in God’s Own Dominion of Canada. The book is printed by the Canadian publisher Novalis, and is already obtainable from Amazon.com. Copies of the book will also be available for purchase at the book launch.

You drive to the end of the world, turn left, and continue. That’s the way to get to Diaz Point. Namibia’s coastline is supposed to be the least hospitable on the planet, with desert meeting salty ocean with naught in between. Staying the night at Seeheim, an agglomeration of half a dozen houses nearby a stone castle hotel, we woke early and drove the 200+ miles west through the arid rocky desert. The experience is made all the more interesting for the 16,000-square-mile “Restricted Diamond Zone” one drives on the northern periphery of. Namibia’s diamonds are primarily alluvial deposits, meaning they rest on ancient river beds, sitting on the soil or resting just a few feet below. The forbidden territory’s guards are believed to have a policy of shooting first and asking questions later. There are over sixty countries in the world smaller than the Sperregebiet (forbidden area), as the Restricted Diamond Zone is colloquially known.

Eventually — passing through the area inhabited by the wild horses of the Namib, descendants of German cavalry horses and farm animals variously escaped or set free — you arrive at the town of Lüderitz on the Atlantic coast. Besides its German street names (Zeppelinstraße, not to mention Bismarck, Bahnhof, Moltke), the town’s architecture is a curious Teutonic colonial, reinvented for the almost-tropical locale. From one or two of the local businesses, one could easily imagine a slightly overweight German in a linen suit and panama hat, with an eye-patch as well as a cane for his limp, ordering around the natives crudely while engaged in some nefarious criminal enterprise or campaign of sabotage.

But for Diaz Point, you go to Lüderitz, turn left, and go further still. Driving south from the colonial town, you encounter a barren, rocky, and utterly colourless landscape, the grey tones of which immediately bring to mind the surface of the Moon. Am I still on Earth? Only the blue sky and the occasional appearance of vegetation remind you that you’re still on the third planet from the Sun. (more…)

The State Opening of Parliament has always been an occasion of great ceremony, most especially so on the one occasion when the King of South Africa himself was actually present. When South Africa became a republic in 1961, the State President took the role of the Governor-General. While formerly centered on the old main entrance, the President now enters Parliament at the 1983 wing (as seen at right), where he is greeted by a guard of honour and pauses to hear the National Anthem played by a military band.

Before 1994, morning dress was the norm for the State President (and for the Governor-General before him), but since that time the head of state has tended to wear a business suit on the occasion. That doesn’t stop the other Members of Parliament and their spouses from dressing up. There’s an unspoken contest among female MPs and MPs’ wives to wear the most daring or arresting hat to the State Opening, and often tribal leaders attend in the traditional dress of their peoples. (more…)

The Eden Spiekermann group, who were responsible for the redesign of The Economist in 2001, recently developed this logotype for the Dutch province of North Holland. The conjoined legs of the ‘N’ and ‘H’ integrate the province’s coat of arms.

Police Inspector Blog, by “Inspector Gadget”, is a pseudonymous blog written by a police officer that documents the absolute ridiculousness of modern British policing. The inspector has also published a book documenting how “you can be arrested for pinching a few crisps from a schoolfriend, throwing cream cakes or denying the existence of Santa Claus – while burglars, muggers and drug dealers go about their business unmolested by the forces of law and order”. I’ve been reading the blog for years now and it definitely lives up to its tag phrase of “You couldn’t make it up!”

Gadget’s latest post shows how humour has been systematically abolished in the modern police services:

Via Hilary.

Chelsea, Muttontown, L.I.

I have commented before about the perils of over-restoration, in which a building’s owner becomes a little too enthusiastic about its preservation and ends up with a building that, except in style, looks almost new. Chelsea sits on a 500-acre preserve in Muttontown, L.I. which has come into the hands of the government of Nassau (the county on Long Island in-between Queens County and Suffolk). The county has managed to maintain the house and its grounds at exactly the appropriate level: not plastering over every crack to make it ‘good-as-new’, nor neglecting it so it becomes structurally unsound, but rather allowing it to develop and age naturally. These photographs from the ever-capable James Robertson admirably display the house and its grounds, including its shallow canal-moat. (more…)

I can’t help but be amused by the brash contrast of the informal and the formal in this photo of Yoweri Museveni’s inauguration as President of Uganda in 1986. The years after Idi Amin’s overthrow in 1979 were almost as turbulent as the rule of the alleged cannibal. Milton Obote, the man Idi Amin had overthrown to gain power, returned to the presidency for five years during which Uganda’s troubles never ceased. In January 1986, the Obote government collapsed after Museveni’s rebel army seized the capital. The old emperor had fled, and the apparatus of state hailed the new emperor as their own. Museveni, Holy Writ in hand and guided by a clerk as the Chief Justice looked on, took the oath of office and formally ascended to the presidency of the nation. (more…)

Having had more snow than usual this winter, we have been blessed with a sudden warm spell that makes one appreciate spring’s coming is not far. While winter days are best spent indoors beside the hearth, today’s temperature made some significant flirtations towards 60°, thus requiring a venture outdoors. Bescarved and betweeded, I tromped through the fields, greeted by birds singing an unusual tune, perhaps surprised by the lack of late winter’s usual frigidity. Viewing the leafless trees and the lifeless vegetation there is little doubt winter is still definitely upon us. But at least some of our avian friends remain amongst us.

Over two-hundred species of bird, the enthusiasts tell me, have been sighted in the fields and marshes through which I tromp. Most famously, twenty years ago a Wood Sandpiper — Tringa glareola — found its way to these parts. The Wood Sandpiper breeds in Scandinavia and spends northern winters in southern Africa or Australia (a not disagreeable routine, one would suppose). The 1990 Wood Sandpiper of Westchester whetted the whistles of birdwatchers (themselves a curious species) up and down the Eastern seabord. (more…)

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