Monthly Archives: March 2012

Canadian Pennies, the Nation of Texas and a poem

April is National Poetry Month.  All sorts of organizations, schools, and institutions have all sorts of things planned to bring poetry into American life. But I heard a pretty cool one on March 30, a few days before it begins.

All Things Considered on NPR had done a story on the demise of the Canadian penny. (Canada is one of ten countries to jettison its lower denomination coins because they are just too expensive to make. The cost to make a U.S. penny is 2.41 cents–a losing proposition, but the U.S. has no immediate for its elimination, despite yearly pleas to do so. There must be a very strong “penny lobby.” ) All Things Considered had also done a faux “what-if” story on Texas seceding from the union and forming its own nation.  There were all kinds of speakers–serious and not–who took part in the piece.  My favorite was Kinky Friedman, the novelist, humorist, rockabilly guitarist who ran for governor a few years back. As foreign minister, Friedman felt that Texas should send a delegation to third world countries to teach the women how to have “big hair”!

So what has this to do with poetry?

Well, aside from its normal news day, All Things Considered also has taken on a poet in residence who follows the news team through a given day and then at the end must make up a poem on some aspect of that particular news day.

Yesterday there was Kevin Young  as the “news poet.” His task was to write a poem about anything he had witnessed, heard, learned throughout the day, and he chose the Texas story and the Canadian penny story. Here is the result, his poem “Anthem”:

ANTHEM

Kevin Young, NPR's Poet in Residence

Life is a near
death experience.

You can go
to hell, I’m goin

to Texas. It costs
more than a penny

to make a penny.
A dollar for your

thoughts, and a dream.
People have to breathe

where they live.
A town big

as her hair.
Aren’t there more

worlds than three?
Texas is finally

free, but not its lunch.
Cleave can mean

to sunder
or to meet. The threat

must be imminent.
Look and see—

the daffodils, the rain sage
upright, the high

desert, fire warnings,
the scorched trees. Cloven,

clove, clave, cleavage,
cleft. Every day’s
a lottery. Hoods,
blood. The death

of the Canadian penny
means we all may need

to round up. Leaves,
left. Bereave,

bereft.

To understand many of the references you would have to have had heard the “TEXAS-AS-NATION” original story. (Click on link above). I was fortunate; I heard both the Texas story and then the poem.  (It seems he threw in a line about the Mega-Millions lottery madness that was happening that day, as well.) What a great way to end the week and to end the month.  To hear Kevin Young read the poem, click here. It’s pretty good for a poem that was made to order.

Friday Film Review–Manhattan

My sister is flying to Edinburgh today and I happened to be searching for a particular clip from the movie Manhattan.

You know the opening of Manhattan where Woody Allen is doing a voice over, purportedly writing a book about his love for the city? The gorgeous photography–Woody had the legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis as his cameraman–the pulsating Gershwin music, the edgy decision to film in black and white, all work to make this perhaps Allen’s most beautiful film and certainly his greatest paean to the energy, diversity, pulse of New York City.

If you don’t know what I am referring to, check out the opening clip here:

The simplicity is its beauty.  There are no screen credits, no rolling text, just this gorgeous black-and-white montage of Manhattan.  The title of the movie itself appears as a vertical, flashing neon sign, one that you might not notice because it is so incorporated within the segment.

Quickly, the plot of the story is this: Isaac (Woody Allen), a writer whose ex-wife is publishing a tell-all memoir of their marriage, is dating a high-school girl (Mariel Hemingway).  Granted that in hind-sight this relationship feels a bit uncomfortable, but Isaac is in fact the moral center of the film (and his high-school girl-friend perhaps the most mature and un-jaded of all the characters). His dating the young girl pales as an issue when juxtaposed against the shallownesss, the deceit and the disloyalty of the other main characters.  Isaac’s friend, Yale, is having an affair with Mary, played by Diane Keaton, in what seems to be a reprise of her Annie Hall role–all intellectual charm and goofiness. (Manhattan came out two years after Annie Hall.)  She is endearing here as well, but it is basically the same character. Anyway, Isaac is attracted to Mary and Mary to him, but he will not act on it because she is having an affair/relationship with his best friend. The fact that his best friend is cheating on his wife who is also Isaac’s friend is also troubling to him.  Not until the affair between Yale and Mary ends, does Isaac allow himself to act on his feelings towards her.

I won’t spoil it, but there is more  treachery and disloyalty to come, and towards the end of the film, Isaac bursts into the classroom where Yale is teaching and makes an impassioned speech for morality. It is one of those movie moments when the action, the story, the jokes stop and someone makes an intelligent plea for humanity and for decency.

But the story, in many ways, is secondary for me with the film.  It is simply beautiful. The black-and-white photography mixed with George Gershwin’s exhilarating music is majestic, perfect.  It might not be far off to say that no one can make a city look better than Woody Allen.  Consider his recent efforts outside New York:  Paris in Midnight in Paris, Barcelona in Vicki Christina Barcelona, and London in Match Point.  In each film, the particular city seems a character in itself–a beautiful, energetic, lively character. A city’s tourist bureau would love to have Woody Allen film their promotional releases. He has a certain means of capturing the magic, the gestalt of a place. (Rome is next in his upcoming film, To Rome with Love.)

I used to pop Manhattan in the VCR/DVD whenever I was feeling particularly blue, for watching it somehow made me feel better.  I don’t know why–it really is rather depressing on the whole–but Isaac’s last speech to Yale is something special. Or perhaps the energy of Manhattan itself is what affects me, and my personal malaise at the time proves to be no match for that vigor and life pulse.

Anyway, as I said, my sister is flying to Edinburgh today and I stumbled upon this wonderful video by accident. Someone has taken the opening scene of Manhattan, and substituted black and white photos of Edinburgh.  Woody Allen’s voice over–where he praises Manhattan–is taken up verbatim except instead of Woody’s unmistakeable New York accent it is a strong Scottish voice and the word “New York” is replaced with the word “Edinburgh.”  Here it is below. Enjoy it.


“It is always a matter, my darling, of life and death…”

Hans Christian Andersen's Window-sill Desk

“It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.”

I teach eighteen year old boys. They are very bright, quite talented, and well-situated so as to take advantage of the most amazing opportunities.  And yet they are still eighteen years old–filled with false bravado and insecurities, dreams and fears, uncertainties and confusion.

And this is the week!

In the States, April 1 is the arbitrary deadline that most colleges and universities set for informing applicants whether they have been accepted or rejected. The three or four days beforehand is a time period when these students believe that their lives sit in a balance.  I try to tell them–not flippantly–that it is not the end of the world, that perhaps rejection from one school and acceptance to a lesser-desired one might be the best thing to happen to them.  Who can tell?

But I have to remember as the poet says, at that age “it is always a matter of life and death.”

I don’t envy them their angst.  And I don’t downplay it. It is very real–and almost palpable in the school hallways. Instead I give them this poem, which I think is good for them to know.

The Writer by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

There are two important pieces in that last verse.  One, I realize that for them everything–a university rejection, a break-up with a girlfriend, a strike-out when a game is on the line–everything is “a matter of life or death.”  The second is that wish that the speaker “wished you before, but harder.”  Undoubtedly, they will be battered and smacked up against hard obstacles. Even the most fortunate among them–and they are mostly fortunate–will have moments where things seem hopeless.  And so, like the poet, I wish them well, I wish them smooth sailing, and I wish it even harder.

The difficulty of thinking…the ease of not.

Bertrand Russell once said that people would do almost anything to avoid having to think. And we do. Consider how we go through most of our days.  Rise, commute, work, commute, dine, sleep. Certainly there are vacillating degrees of how purposefully we interact with our own lives, but mostly, I would say, we do things by rote.  For the most part, the majority of us do not “live our lives deliberately” as Thoreau advised us to–we would make ourselves mad if we did–but what are we sacrificing?

Samuel Beckett wrote that the routine, the habit, the treadmill of our lives is a way of deadening the pain of existence (how wonderfully Beckettian!); breaking out of the routine, the habit, the treadmill is exciting and might mask the pain, but it is temporary and not without risks.  To think deliberately is indeed difficult. But it is what makes us who we are. Our thinking is what separates us from others, what individualizes us.  There is a second kind of truth in the Cartesian “I think therefore I am.”  It is not simply a statement of existence, but one of uniqueness as well, an emphasis on the “I.”  And if we choose not to think, are we waiving our individuality to become simply a part of the herd?

In politics, for example, do we think or do we react? Do we consider the world around us or do we merely accept what we have been trained to accept? Are we so entrenched in our “camps” that we allow their ideas to immediately become ours without the trouble of thinking? Do we even have a personal philosophy?  How many of us could state what it is?  What do we believe in?  When have we last THOUGHT about what we believe?

The avoidance of thinking is hardly a 21st-century phenomenon–it just seems easier to do these days.  The opportunities for distraction, the ease in which we can fill our lives with noise, makes it all too easy to avoid stopping to think.  And like most habits, once we have learned to “not think,” it becomes a very hard habit to break.

But again, what are we sacrificing?

I’m not sure, but I’ll think about it.

Shattered Sky–An Important and Hopeful Documentary by Steve Dorst and Dan Evans

Tonight I was lucky enough to attend a premier of the film Shattered Sky in Washington D.C. as part of the closing night of the Environmental Film Festival.  (Full disclosure: I was invited because I am friends with one of the filmmakers, Dan Evans.)  Held in the majestic Carnegie Institution for Science at 16th and P streets with a following reception at the Bar at the Hotel Rouge, the film seemed like a good way to spend a Sunday night and catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in a while.

I am so glad I went.

The film–which will be shown on PBS stations in the fall–deals with two distinct environmental situations, separated by four decades. In the 1970s, when the hole in the ozone layer was first detected, the science showed that CFCs were the main culprit, and America and Americans led the way to curtail the use of these photo-carbons around the globe. Fighting against an indifferent world, many of whom had financial interests in the status quo, the EPA–under the Reagan administration–pressed its case hard. The climax of this fight occurs in a marathon session in Montreal when America held sway and the rest of the world finally signed on to greatly limit the use of these ozone-depleting agents. The film  celebrates this moment in American leadership, touting the efforts of Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan admnistrations. It is this battle–and the victory–that is the crux of the film.

Now fast forward, thirty years.  Climate-change is today presenting even more dire predictions. But the topic has become a political tug-of-war.  With the “ozone” problem, there seemed to be immediate repercussions for the public–such as skin cancer and cataracts–and the public made its voice  heard through the marketplace, refusing to buy aerosol products, for instance, and forcing industry’s hand to come up with alternatives. The effects of climate-change, however,  are not so immediate–and the possibilities of market pressures from the public are unlikely given our modern way of life. Plus, while we are enjoying this balmy spring, it is hard to imagine immediate  down-side.  But the down-side is there, and it is drastic. The film deliberately tries to skirt partisan politics; instead, it asks for America to take on the kind of leadership that it showed in the “ozone” battle many years ago.  And it asks, because the situation is urgent.

Unlike many environmental documentaries, however, Shattered Sky does not leave one feeling helpless and doomed, but instead is full of hope. For if America was once able to forget its political differences and  fight together to counter an environmental disaster such as the depletion of the ozone layer, it can certainly rise to the occasion once more.

The science is there.  Those who oppose it, who try to find holes in the facts, do so for other reasons than truth, reasons that often deal with economy, industry, and self-interest. The film is riveting, rational and cautiously hopeful, even as it recognizes the possibility and the consequences of no action at all. Check out the film’s web site for more information.  Check out its Facebook page. And more importantly try to check out the film.

The Shattered Sky web site is here: http://www.shatteredsky.com/

The IMDB review is here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1795650/

Letter-writing, letters, Beckett and love

About five years ago, I traveled to Durban, South Africa.  I flew direct from Washington, D.C. to Johannesburg and then a short flight from Johannesburg to Durban. It is a grueling flight–19 hours in the air and plenty more in airports.  But during the flight, I read volume one of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940.  I must admit I was enthralled–and may be the only person to have read the nearly 900-page collection in one sitting. Nevertheless, three years later I am now reading volume two ( The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956).  Certainly there is a touch of the voyeur in reading another’s letters, and, for me, not a little hero-worship in reading the letters of Beckett as he casually mentions Jack Yeats, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Nora Joyce, etc.  (The first letter in this collection is a postcard that he had sent to Joyce, a pre-printed, government regulated correspondence limited to family news because of the war.  Beckett sent the postcard from Paris to the Joyces in Switzerland, saying that he and Suzanne were all right.  He wrote it on January 12, 1941 and it arrived in Switzerland on the 17th. Joyce never received it, however, having died on the 13th, the day after Beckett wrote it. )

Anyway besides the snoopiness and the adolescent-like hero worship, the letters have me thinking of correspondence in general.  Except for writing thank-you notes –a good habit I learned from my father and my uncle–most of my correspondence now is through e-mail. Even the majority of my manuscript submissions are done electronically with the cover letter included in the submission.  Yet there is something about letter writing I miss.

A love letter, or any kind of letter for that matter, is so much more intriguing to receive–and more fulfilling to write–than a text or an e-mail. During a 10-day trip to Paris, I once wrote fourteen letters back home to the love of my life. I can still see the thin hotel stationery, the blue, white and red airmail envelopes, the soft lobby light in the ragged hotel under which I poured out my soul. Today, those letters probably mean more to me than to the person that received them. They capture a unique moment in my life, an amber-encased slice of who I once was.

In that sense,  I take pleasure  in reading  letters that I have written or received in the past–they transport me to where and who I was at the time they were written.

(Perhaps  the most beautiful love story I have ever read is by an Irish novelist named Niall Williams entitled Four Letters of Love.  It is a wonderful novel that revolves around letter writing–as well as around painting, fishing, the Aran Islands, death, heartbreak and redemptive love.)

What about you? Have you  given up on snail-mail completely? I worry about the impermanence of all our correspondence, of the ephemeral nature of e-mail and texting. True, they say that every stroke of your keyboard can ultimately be retrieved and that nothing in cyberspace really disappears, but are the biographers and historians of the future going to have access to these? Is the estate of a future Samuel Beckett going to allow some academic to sift through the computer files –deleted and saved–of the person whose name is entrusted to them?  I cannot say. But I do know the thrill of opening an envelope, of slipping out a hard-stock card, sheets of creamy stationery, or ripped pages of loose-leaf.  Am I simply missing some golden-hazed memory or have we truly lost something special?

E-mail me what you think.  Hah!

Book Review: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

  I was prepared not to like this book.  The hype was too much.  I had read a “life-style” piece in the NYTimes Metropolitan section about Englander, an interview with him in The Guardian,  a front page review in the NYTimes Sunday Book Review, another in the London Review of Books, and a handful of smaller reviews. The title and the author seemed to be everywhere.  And yet, I was wrong.  The hype was deserved–the eight stories in the collection are gem-like in their perfection. Solid, thoughtful, inventive, poignant and droll.

The title of the collection famously alludes to Raymond Carver’s story and collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  In Englander’s title story two couples sit around in a sunny kitchen drinking hard–just as they did in Carver’s story. The difference is that we are not in Carver’s Mid-West; we are in Florida, and Englander’s two couples are a secular Jewish couple who live there and a Hasidic couple from Israel, visiting after many years.  The conversation is tense, the husband uneasy with these Hasidic guests that he has just met, and the ending surprising and sad. (Go here to read Carver’s original story: “What we Talk About… and here to read it as it finally appeared with editor Gordon Lish’s revisions, “What We Talk About…”)

Several of the reviews I read mentioned how Englander’s stories seem to channel Kafka through Woody Allen, and the example they site is the story “Peep Show.” In fact, this Kafka/Woody Allen connection is what drew me to the collection.  In this particular story, a secular Jewish man walks into a peep show, advertising “live girls” and gets 5 tokens. Inserting the first token, he encounters several women, one of whom particularly arouses him. After the partition closes, he deposits another token, but this time, when the barrier opens, it reveals three rabbis from his past who begin to scold him; subsequent tokens reveal his scolding mother, his pregnant wife, and himself.

There are other stories that touch have a similar absurdity and wryness–particularly one about a gang of Long Island Jewish boys dismally failing to wreak revenge on an anti-Semitic bully and another about a summer camp for senior citizens–but overall this is not the tone of the collection. The final story “Free Fruit for Young Widows” and the second story “Sister Hills”  are memorable and distinct vignettes of life in Jerusalem.  Both have a historical sweep and a personal sadness. Both are extraordinary.

“The Reader” and “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” seem the most personal of the collection, and they too are brilliant. The language in these–as in all the stories–is clean and efficient, but beautiful and evocative.

As I said, I was a little put off by all the hype. But it was well deserved.  These are stories that will stay with me for a while and which I will return to often.

20 Greatest Irish Movies from the past 25 years

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to one and all.  It is glorious here–70 degrees and sunny when we usually have grey skies and sleet.

Here’s something to get you talking.

Twenty Greatest Irish Movies from the past 25 years:

20. Cal (1984) –young IRA man falls in love with older woman (Helen Mirren) whose husband , a Protestant cop, had been killed by IRA.   Good movie. Better novel.

19. Once (2006) — sweet story, sweet players, sweet music. And the ending is perfect.

18. The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)–Beautiful story and a hauntingly beautiful Eileen Colgan

17. The General (1998)–Brendan Gleeson as Dublin crime boss

16. The Guard (2011)–Brendan Gleeson/Don Cheadle

15. Hunger (2008) — Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands

14. The Snapper (1993)–Colm Meany in the 2nd of the Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle

13. The Boxer (1997)–Daniel Day-Lewis

12. The Butcher Boy (1997)–Good film of a great novel.  And Sinead O’Connor as the Virgin Mary!

11. The Dead (1987) — Angelica Huston’s greatest moment.

10. Breakfast on Pluto (2005) — Cillian Murphy’s breakout role…as a transvestite in war-torn Belfast and London.

9. The Van (1996) –Colm Meany and the Irish World Cup victory. Last of the Barrytown Trilogy.

8. The Field (1990) — Richard Harris.  Powerful and tragic.

7.   Some Mother’s Son (1996)–Helen Mirren in a story of the hunger strikers

6. Waking Ned Devine (1998)–Ian Bannen/David Kelly

5. Into the West (1992) — Two boys and a horse.  Gabriel Byrne, David Kelly

4. In the Name of the Father–Daniel Day Lewis/Peter Postlethwaite

3. Michael Collins (1996) –Liam Neeson/Alan Rickman

2. The Commitments (1991)–Hardest Working Band in the World! 1st of the Barrytown Trilogy.  Great music, fun story.

1. My Left Foot (1989) –Daniel Day-Lewis. Simply wonderful. Beautiful, funny, inspiring..

Friday Film Review: Into the West

Old Lady:  “You can’t take that horse onto the lift.”

Little Boy:  “I have to. The stairs would fucking kill him.”

                                                                                Into the West (1992).

The drunken revelers started up last weekend, college kids in goofy hats, increasingly offensive t-shirts, and green New Orleans love beads, lining up at Finnegans Wake on Spring Garden, weaving down Spruce, and jamming any bar that has an apostrophe in its title.  But since tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, I thought I add to the festivities by taking a look at a wonderful–and somewhat underrated–Irish film, Into the West.

The film is the story of two boys, their widowed father, and their bleak existence in the tower flats of North Dublin. When the boys’ grandfather (the inimitable and late David Kelly) arrives suddenly with a majestic white horse, the young boys’ lives are transformed.  There are conflicts with the police (hard to hide a horse in your 7th floor flat), with undesirable racing buffs, and with the upper-class “gentry,” as well as a sweet nod to Irish myth and the legend of tir na Nog.

Written by Jim Sheridan (and two others) and starring Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin–who were married to each other at the time–the film traces these two young boys and their dreams of going into the West.  Except for them the West is the American West of cowboys and Indians, of gunslingers and tumbleweeds. It is a far cry from the fields and rocks of Galway and Mayo.  Yet sure enough when the authorities come after them–they retake their horse from a high-stakes horserace–the boys gallop into the West.  It is here that Irish myth comes into play and the ending of the film is certain to raise a lump in your throat at the very least.  Yet, to me, it is wonderful.

I saw Into the West on the last day that it was playing in the theaters in Philly.  I wanted everyone to see it, so when my young daughters begged off because they had too much homework, I famously told them that they “would have homework the rest of their lives, but they would get to go see this only once.”  To this day, I am glad I forced them to go.  And I think they are as well.

Deluded Knights in Philadelphia

About two and a half blocks from where I live there is a small patch of grass at the triangle where three streets cross–Girard Avenue, American Avenue  and 2nd Street. There, Girard is a busy, double-wide street with an active trolley line, restaurants, tattoo parlors, bodegas, beauty salons and banks.  2nd Street is a bit smaller but filled with restaurants, bars, boutiques, and galleries and American is but a desolate patch with a beer distributor and the abandoned stables where the horses and carriages that circle the historic area used to be housed. On the north side of Girard, American is just beginning to blossom, anchored by the beautiful Crane Building which houses both the Indigo Art Galleries and the Pig Iron Theater Company.

Sitting in the triangular patch made by these three streets  is a large statue of Don Quioxote astride his horse Rocinante. Why Don Quioxte?  I am not sure.  The plaque on the statue says that it was a gift from a “sister city” in Spain, Ciudad Real, and it is an exact replica of an original sculpture by Joaquin Garcia Donaire.  But again, why Quixote?

Quioxte was in many ways a mad man…an idealistic, well-meaning mad man, but mad nevertheless.  His quests and adventures, while couched in the greatest of intentions and wrapped in the mantle of chivalry and honor, were actually farcical and embarrassing.  Quioxte’s famous battle against the windmill, which he had perceived as a dragon, has given us the idiom “Tilting at Windmills,”  a phrase for fighting against the wrong thing, about declaring war on something that is un-winnable and un-fightable, or for dreaming a victory against something that is not at all what one was fighting for or against.  So why is he in Philadelphia?

Philadelphia prides itself on its place in the history of the United States.  It was from here that the colonists argued, debated and hammered out a Declaration of Independence and then a Constitution, both of which are revered around the world.  Throughout the year, one would be amazed at the hordes of international tourists who pose for pictures in front of the revolutionary landmarks, in front of Independence Hall or the Liberty Bell.  In a world where independence and liberty are not a given, it is humbling to see so many people come to honor it here in Philadelphia.  And so, why Don Quioxte that deluded knight?  Is the fight for civil liberties and religious tolerance–two concepts that were the lynchpins of the city–a quioxtic dream?  Is working towards harmony and liberty really just a pipe-dream of some writers from the 18th-century Enlightenment.

But this thing with knights gets odder still.  Just twenty-three  blocks due west of Don Quioxte is a blazingly gilded statue of Joan of Arc.  Now, I have always loved the story of Joan of Arc.  (I may be one of the few people who have read Mark Twain’s novelization of her life other than for academic credit. And I have read several serious biographies of her as well.)  I have always loved her spunk, her feistiness, her belief in her cause. But one has to admit, as a representative of knighthood, she is a bit suspect. This was a woman who heard voices, voices that encouraged her to leave her simple peasant life, shift to a more masculine nature, don armor and lead a country into battle.  Which she then went and did!  This statue–which is a copy of the one that sits in the Place des Pyramides in Paris and was sculpted by Emmanuel Fremiet–looks across at the neo-classical beauty of the Philadelphia Art Museum and is the starting point for the famous Kelly Drive. It is blindingly gilt and quite handsome.

But then again why, in this city that put an end to medieval monarchies and aspired to a new form of human government, has a heroine of the monarchistic tradition been placed in such a prominent public position?

It probably means nothing, but I think of them often.  They are basically on the same street, less than 2.5 miles apart in a straight line.  They are undoubtedly–along with Shakespeare’s Falstaff –the most suspect knights in all of history.  And yet they are here, in the city that shook off a king and aspired to freedoms never before imagined.

(A kind of interesting irony: just as Joan of Arc died in the flames in 1431, the model for the Joan of Arc statue, 15-year-old Valerie Laneau, burned to death in a house fire when she was 77.)