I now have my guidance for 2024: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. My goal…
Lisboa 3: Sintra
My research on Sintra was inadequate. I knew the train ran from Rossio and that my navigante occasional card would zap me there. I would find a stellar collection of historic sites and walking trails to explore. Buses run from the center of Sintra to distant palaces....
Lisboa 2: The Beauty and the Shame
I left the Gulbenkian Foundation astonished, moved, and thoroughly ashamed of what my country has become politically, morally, and culturally. The art I saw returned me to the politics that I had hoped, to some degree, to ignore for a few days. When I was there,...
Trump Redux 3: Disturb the Comfortable
Banksy didn’t say it first. “To Comfort the Disturbed, and to Disturb the Comfortable” is the title of a poem published by poet, activist, and educator César A. Cruz in 1997. It makes sense, however, that Banksy’s murals do exactly that. Tyrants hate art. Real art,...
The Words We Are Willing To Hear
Back in the late nineteen-sixties, I clipped a cartoon from The New Yorker, at a time that urban renewal was doing its worst in a variety of Boston neighborhoods. It summarizes perfectly how I feel about the State of the Union: “The GOP and MAGA have taken down most...