Paris
Van Gogh In the Road
On an exotic summer Sunday I step into the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and head not toward a vision but a sound. “It’s the light or, rather, the lack of light in The Outskirts of Paris that makes this dirt road and the man in it faceless and gray and in need of southern…
Read MoreDeadly Numbers
I was an Iraqi professor of statistics until the United States and later ISIS destroyed my classroom and much of the university. I suppose I should thank each group for attacking when school wasn’t in session, but I believe that may have been coincidental. At any rate, like civilized people everywhere, I commiserate with the…
Read MoreFreud and Wife Visit Picasso
In Paris Lucian and I again socialize with other glamorous and creative people, and most mornings he paints while I write, imagining myself a female Fitzgerald thirty years after Scott brought exotic but doomed Zelda to this marvelous city. Several Parisiennes tell me Lucian and I might be an even more dazzling couple. Within a…
Read MoreThe Coco Chanel Style
My mother washed people’s clothes and died young in 1895 when I was twelve, and my food-peddling father deserted his five children. For six years I lived in a Catholic orphanage and learned to sew. The moment I turned eighteen they said goodbye and I escaped to sing in cabarets and thought I well did…
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