Remembrance of Things Past
I was appalled to learn that Emirates Airlines was now providing in-flight mobile phone service and that other airlines might follow suit. Since the public has already displayed epic rudeness on the ground, imagine the cell phone nightmare in an enclosed space at 30,000 feet! Along with sardine-like seating, charges for food and luggage, minimal in-flight service and delayed and cancelled flights, airlines seems hell-bent on creating new customer inconvenience. To realize how bad it’s become, consider what was available for air travelers seventy-five years ago. In 1939, Pan American World Airways introduced trans-Atlantic passenger service between New York and Southampton, England. Their plane was the Boeing 314, dubbed “Clipper” in homage to the graceful...
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One of the biggest surprises I unearthed while researching my book Creole Son was the black branch of artist Edgar Degas’s Creole family tree. The revelation had nothing to do with racial intermingling, commonplace enough in nineteenth-century Louisiana, but everything to do with someone almost as famous as the Impressionist himself. In a state where miscegenation was was illegal, Degas’s great uncle Vincent Rillieux and his love, a femme de coleur libre, or free woman of color, named Constance Vivant, had no choice but to live together outside of marriage. Their union was long, happy and produced six children. Their third, Norbert, would achieve international acclaim with an invention as innovative as the cotton gin. Born in New Orleans, Norbert Rillieux was...
Read MoreSwept Away!
I was recently asked if there was a single book that most impacted me as a writer. I didn’t hesitate in answering, “Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides.” I so admired Conroy’s The Boo when it debuted in 1970 that I devoured all his subsequent works, but none prepared me for The Prince of Tides. Like millions of other readers, I was enthralled and why not? The very first line was irresistible: “My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.” Conroy was crying “All aboard!” and I couldn’t wait for the ride. The story involves a picaresque, sublimely dysfunctional Carolina clan and more than once veers with infinite grace from prose to poetry that left me breathless. Consider his white dolphin. “Rising,...
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