French world
Some of my writing has appeared in French newspapers and magazines, and as essays in collections. I post the best of them here.
Rocking the solitudes
Does it matter if we Canadians don’t know the ‘other’ culture’s stars? Boomers will be boomers. Give us a name-brand musician from the 1960s or 1970s, and we flock to the concert halls. Whether it’s vintage James Taylor or Pink Floyd or whoever (Who-ever?) at the Bell Centre, I’ve tried to see ’em all. Or…
Bertolucci, cinema’s past — or its future?
Bertolucci and the European film adventure Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci’s recent death brought to mind all his artistic achievements, some of which have fallen into disrepute in a different cultural climate. His later Hollywood-funded work was more popular (and Oscar-winning) but did not get the critical applause of the early films. And his treatment of…
Sartre : a free man
Sartre: still alive today? Jean-Paul Sartre died in April 1980. Curiously, that was the month I graduated in Philosophy, after studying Sartre’s writing intensely. I hastily composed a detailed obit/essay, which was somehow published in the Montreal daily Le Devoir. For me, college was serious business: I studied a lot of politics and philosophy, working…
Love and war in Geneva
Ariane, married to the bored and detached fonctionnaire Adrien, is trapped in a life of banal social-climbing in Geneva, with its vivid social taboos. She soon becomes triangularly linked to Adrien’s superior, the very haut fonctionnaire Solal.
Dien Bien Phu and after: the U.S. inherits an intractable conflict
You thought the Vietnam war was lost by 1974? Turn your clocks back two decades Almost 70 years after the French defeat — and, all credit due, the Vietminh victory — at Dien Bien Phu in northwest Vietnam,1 lessons continue to be drawn from a military confrontation that saw the defeat of a well-equipped Western…
Les Lumières en Amérique: America and the Enlightenment
As North America was about to erupt with the American revolt against imperial Britain in the late 1700s, many liberal currents in Europe were feeding this move toward freedom. My 2009 essay for a panel discussion on the Enlightenment held in Divonne, France focused on the connections between American revolutionary thinkers, principally Paine and Jefferson,…