Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: On Location--Liwan

Separated from me at birth--in spirit if not by looks--my friend Katherine Mosby was in town to meet with her French publisher, La Table Ronde Editions.  With the publishing success in France of her novel The Season of Lillian Dawes, they were bringing out her first novel, Private Altars (which will be called Sanctuaires Ardents here), this fall.  Hurrah!

I have known Katherine for many years, and I hadn't seen her since last June when we had taken ourselves on a much-too-short road trip to Burgundy.  Oh, yes, we had a grand girlfriend time.  Old friends, good food and wine, and road trips go together like fried okra and fresh tomato slices in the South.  Now, if we'd only had spa treatments to pamper us, the trip would've been absolutely divine.

Sadly, Katherine's mother had died since our Burgundy trip, and we had much news to recount, gab or rant, and console each other over.  When we see each other we tend to talk non-stop, hopping from one subject to the next and back again, covering a lot of territory as good girlfriends do.  We had the afternoon to fill ourselves up with our new stories,  and then we would return to my new pad in the 20th for dinner with the Lone Wolf, after a drink at the Hemingway Bar, of course.

As luck would have it, Katherine's swish hotel was not far from a shoe store where I had to go buy a pair of mile-high platforms that I'd seen in the window a few weeks before.  (Ladies, for those of you who tweet with me, here they are!)

Letter From Paris: Meet The Neighbors--Oscar Wilde

 

Image via Wikipedia

The Lone Wolf and I have been living a somewhat nomadic life since November 30, 2002, when we hopped on a plane to Paris.  It was an emotional day.  We had left our dog Snapp and cat Cleo at my mother's two days before--on Thanksgiving--though we hadn't thought we had time to have lunch with her.  She and I both cried as L.W. drove us away, but we had so much left to do.  My sense of efficiency and the illusion of time as an endless commodity betrayed me in these moments. 

As is the way of life, it was the last time that I saw my mother.  She dropped dead a few months later, and I was left to mourn her as I had my father and younger brother.  My father had already been dead more than twice as long as I had known him; my younger brother for 13 long years.

There is more to tell in this story.  But for now I jump ahead. 

We returned to Arkansas a few months later to close her estate--to pack up, sell, throw away, deal with the treasures and detritus of her life as well as that of my entire family, whose flame she had been the keeper of.  It was a torturous few months, and among the thousands of objects I had to consider were the books in my father's library.  Even now I am haunted by some things I reluctantly let go. 

What is a library if not an intimate expression of one's self, a record of the stories, philosophies, theories, art, design, and ideas that inform our consciousnesses.  We can learn to see  through the eyes of another by looking at the books on his or her shelves.

One of the books that I not only kept but brought back with me to France is my attorney father's The 3 Trials of Oscar Wilde with an introduction by H. Montgomery Hyde and a portrait of Oscar Wilde (pictured above) by Toulouse Lautrec (photo at left) at the time of the trials.  The two men were friends which seems a natural pairing.  Both came from aristocratic families, whether titled like Count Lautrec or intellectual aristocracy like Wilde's parents.  Despite their cultivation and advantages, the two men were both freaks in the world in which they lived, and must have understood each other in deep and meaningful ways.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) is one of my neighbors at the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise and has a steady stream of visitors who come to pay their respects in a very personal manner. 

How Can American Journalism Save Itself?

Crossposted at the HuffingtonPost.com.  Comments not included here.

Happy July 4th everyone! This weekend, while we're celebrating our Declaration of Independence, we've just witnessed another example of the failure of the American press. The Internet, cable, and network news, and the few print-periodicals-that-have-somehow-survived, have been churning with pieces about Rolling Stone's crack coverage of (now former) Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal's out-of-control attitude and actions, which, thankfully, got him fired. As Frank Rich so pointedly asked, where were the journalists whose beat this was? How did they miss this story that had to be staring them in the face?

My personal feeling is that the good general having worked and politicked his way to the military top, knew exactly what he was doing spilling his guts to Rolling Stone's freelancer Michael Hastings. The general who "spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops" doesn't make a hair-brained mistake like this.

What was his point? I don't know, but I suspect it lies under the public's political radar, which is exactly where it will stay.