- Stay Connected
Follow Town Topics Online
Whistling in the Dark on Wagner’s 200th Birthday
I’m looking at a photograph of my father when he was a graduate student at Indiana University. He’s wearing a sleeveless sweater and in his lap is a princely male…
Doing “Gatsby”: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Man With the Beautiful Shirts
The Garden Theatre was filled to overflowing for the Friday evening showing of Baz Luhrman’s big, jazzy, flamboyantly picturesque improvisation on The Great Gatsby (see review in this issue). People…
Deanna Durbin’s Star Shone Brightest in the World’s Darkest Hour
It’s already old news now, as dated as its subject — the obituary notices announcing the death at 91 of Deanna Durbin, the “plucky child movie star” who saved Universal…
Hello Goodbye Alexandria: A Five-Day Whirlwind Tour of Cavafy’s City
In the loose living of my early years the impulses of my poetry were shaped, the boundaries of my art were plotted. —C.F. Cavafy, from “Understanding” (1915) Monday was a…
Up the Hill and Over the Top With Berlioz, Jack Nicholson, and Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013)
I had just never heard music like that. I never heard melodies that wafted away and came back to earth a long way off. —Colin Davis on first hearing Berlioz…
In the Month of His Birth, A Little Touch of Shakespeare in the Night
Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells …. —Bob Dylan You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames, that old river poet who never, ever…
Waiting for the Glass Family: A J.D. Salinger Experience on His Double Anniversary Year
It’s the first day of March and I’m at the new hospital lying on a gurney, unsedated and edgy, nothing to do, no TV I can watch old movies on,…
Reflections on the Crown Jewel of Manhattan’s Literary Hotels
We went to the Algonquin for lunch …. We sat in a big round booth built into the wall that felt cozy like a clubhouse. —Margaret Salinger I can’t…
Bargain Days at Bryn Mawr, An Interrupted Conversation, and A Sunset in Trieste
With apologies to Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” but at the Bryn Mawr–Wellesley book event, “The best is yet to be, the last of the sale, for which the first…
Remembering My First Bryn Mawr Book Sale and a Man Who Was Interested in Everything
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India. —Edward Gibbon I bought no books at my first Bryn Mawr Book Sale,…
