Michael Ampersant

Aug 4, 2016

Jul 30, 2016

We're still in Switzerland, and so we go for another excursion, this time to Chamonix, the town that hosts the Mont Blanc, the Alps highest mountain at 4,870 meters. In our days, the Mont Blanc was Europe's highest mountain, but then this James Bond movie came out, where the spy identifies Mount Elbrus, in the Caucasus, as being photographed from the wrong (Russian) side, and Elbrus is 5,642 meters high, which is unfair, and then somebody else figured that the Caucasus is still Europe.

"Sorry, Blanc, way it is."

Jul 28, 2016

Jul 24, 2016

The white stud

We receive a letter from---hold on---his pseudonym is The White Stud---and he writes:

"I am a sexologist with a Harley Street clinic in London, where I have developed a new, you-know-what therapy based on photography. I took the liberty to download one of your pictures for my highly medical purposes. I hope you agree with the result. Sincerely, your 'Stud'."

There you have it folks, what can we say:

And here's the original, from a recent post:

Jul 23, 2016

What we like about Ted Cruz

Lets get this in briefly. We hated Ted Cruz, and still do. But now we've found something we like about him. His reasons for not endorsing Donald Trump. He's not going to endorse a person, he said, who's insulting his father, or his wife. I wouldn't do so either, by the way. And the Republican Party---the party of family values---is all aflutter. Of course.

Jul 22, 2016

French for beginners

"HuH?"

Jul 19, 2016

Yesterday

We felt uninspired, and so Chang suggested we should make an excursion to Lake Geneva. We passed Montreux twice---coming and going---and so had a chance to contemplate on the life of Vladimir Nabokov, who lived his last sixteen years in Montreux Palace, the hotel.

Jul 6, 2016

Brexit no. 3

Jul 5, 2016

Good writing: About a dog --- James Joyce

We've started reading Ulysses, and we're not disappointed. Yes, sure, there's a problem with the tome in that there's a problem with literature anyhow, especially the literate sort: the writing coasts on the associative skills of the reader, and them skills tend to diminish with space-time. Hundred years later, us never having been to Ireland---or to Dublin, where the "plot" is set, mercilessly---not sharing much of Joyce's classical education, there's a lot of stuff we don't dig. Thousand years down the road, it'll be worse. But we are learning. We've begun to steal already ("in the shell of his hands" has made it into the penultimate chapter of This Is Heaven). And we feel assured; Joyce---hundred times better than us, of course---uses roughly the same observational distance to his characters that we keep when engaging them in a dialogue.

Good writing. Here, from the first part, Episode III (Proteus), about a dog:

A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Still in the Valais (Chang)

You may appreciate a sign of life from us, and here it is:

Q&A about our short story "The fountain of Geneva"

Cool, folks, we have a Q&A about our short story The Fountain of Geneva on Matthew Bright's site.

The main question...

Tell me about a piece of yours that you’re particularly proud of/didn’t get the attention you feel is deserved?

...and so we answer this question to the best of our abilities...ever wondered about the fountain of Geneva (jet d'eau de Genève), why its there? Does it mean anything? Is it a monument perhaps? What does it commemorate? All these questions are answered by our unreliable narrator John Lee, the first-person antihero of the GREEN EYES, and by his even less reliable interlocutor Richard Zugabe, librarian of Geneva's municipal archives. And the answers? Scandalous, of course, cum-drippin,' and unheard-of. Enjoy. Here's the link again.

Brexit no.2

French for beginners

Jun 21, 2016

After Orlando

“Broadway for Orlando”: The Exclusive Music Video from Playbill on Vimeo.

Jun 20, 2016

Trump Trump

Here are a few lines from Frank Rich, our favorite we-told-you-so artiste, about Donald Trump, in a Q&A:

Donald Trump's renewed call for a ban on Muslim immigration after the Orlando shooting not only drew condemnation from President Obama and Hillary Clinton, but appears to have deepened the gap between Trump and Establishment Republicans: Paul Ryan responded with a statement of support for Muslims, while Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn have refused to talk about their party's candidate to the press. Will there be any fallout for Trump within the GOP?

No. We’ve just passed the first anniversary of Trump’s declaration of his presidential campaign, and the dynamic within the GOP has never changed. We know the drill: Trump says something outrageous or hateful. A few GOP leaders timidly say that what he’s said is racist, misogynistic, “not what the Party of Lincoln stands for,” whatever. Then those leaders fall back in line. The dynamic will not change now, and for a simple reason. The GOP elites are frightened of Trump and frightened of their own party’s voters, who overwhelmingly supported Trump in the GOP primary.

What Trump has been saying post-Orlando, it should be added, is not inconsistent with what many other Republican politicians have been saying for years. When he claims that Obama is secretly allied with terrorists, he is echoing Sarah Palin’s charge that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” when she was on the GOP ticket in 2008. When Trump purports that failing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is tantamount to surrender, he is following a time-honored Republican script. (I would hope that when he trots it out in a debate Clinton will ask him whether “radical Christian terrorism” should be applied to the fringe Christians who have, among other acts of terrorism, murdered abortion doctors or bombed abortion clinics.) Trump’s hate campaign against all Muslims, smearing an entire religion for its fanatics, is also nothing new in the GOP. It’s of a piece with the 2010 Rudy Giuliani–Fox News–led campaign against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” (which was, in fact,a proposed cultural center, and not at Ground Zero).

Even so, Trump doesn’t care that his Muslim ban wouldn’t have stopped Omar Mateen, an American citizen born in New York. Nor did it matter to him that his Mexican wall would not have thwarted the Indiana-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel. Spewing bigotry is its own reward for Trump. We have to hope that the American electorate will end his political career in November. But surely, a year in, there’s no point in hoping that feckless Republican elites can or will do anything to stop him.

Continues here: Frank Rich

Jun 16, 2016

Back in Switzerland

(These are Chang's pictures, of course, all taken yesterday:)

Fragment, fragment: Well, we used it before, but here we go again; it's from our as yet unpublished short story Rilke's Ghost:

Years later. We’re now summering in Bürchen, Valais, Switzerland, in the chalet of a friend, our own house is rented to holiday makers. The village of Bürchen is wonderful, 1,600 meters up on the Alp, and so much cooler than the muggy summer-Riviera (the road up to Bürchen was finished in 1934—the preceding thousand years the villagers were left to their own devices). There is only one problem: Rainer Maria is buried nearby, yes, Rilke, in Raron, a small, historic town right beneath Bürchen down in the valley, three klicks as the crow flies. We’ve given Raron a wide berth so far, but Chang is playing the social networks and has to feed the hungry Facebook beast. His Korean followers can’t get enough of snow-topped mountains and Geranium-studded chalets, and the 24 hour cycle dictates daily posting. We’ve ravaged the entire region already—natives of many cultures believe that you steal their image when you take their picture—along those lines we’ve grabbed photons until nothing seems to be left of the Valais—from the Matterhorn via the James-Bond-historic-marker up on the Furka pass to the longest glaciers and highest vineyards of Europe—save Raron.