Since the civil war, someone from pretty much every generation on the Sivits family tree has served in the military. When Daniel Sivits was a kid, his uncle, Carl Sivits, fought in the Korean War. Carl came back, but he could no longer handle life, and one night he ended it with a shotgun.

By one of those delightful and seemingly inevitable proximities to which life is always party where fiction wouldn’t dare, an artist with a passion for the theatre of pantomime, ballet and circus finds herself installed in a Montparnasse atelier directly above the apartment of a young man who is a famous mime and an obliging model. T

Eugene Walter was one of those personages who turn up in life and leave, well, an indelible impression in which all personal characteristics—manner, speech, dress and so on—are memorably distinctive. The first time I saw him was in the spring of 1952—an apparition standing in the doorway of the cramped Paris Review office on the rue Garanciere. He was wearing a faded linen suit, the kind plantation owners traditionally wore, at least in the movies, set off with a white panama hat.

The production of Obéron which M. Lehmann has just produced at the Opera must really be considered a first performance. Commissioned by the management of Covent Garden after the great success of Euryanthe in Vienna in 1823, Obéron was tailored to the requirements, conventions, and machinery of the English opera house, and was undoubtedly far from the real opera that von Weber had in mind. 

An account of the ballet in Paris since the war can only bear the simple label of chaos. But in a good sense of variety and ceaseless activity. The inexhaustible Académie Nationale de Musique et de Danse has stood firm amidst a welter of dance companies, smaller troupes and so forth, which have organized, some to dazzle briefly and disappear, perhaps to disband, perhaps to reappear under a different name. 

Marrakesh is the essence of cosmopolitanism. Its streets buzz with the dialects of the Sahara and the Atlas mountains. It is the meeting place of all the tribes of the south and the range of costumes 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

Men have often dreamed of putting an end to the problem of religion. It was the dream of Lucretius: “How many crimes have been inspired by religion!” (1). The Encyclopedists thought they had done it, and in fact their influence made itself felt in every country and across every continent.

And yet there is scarcely a human being now in the world who does not experience every day in his own inner life the reverberations of a great single religious drama that has the whole planet at its theatre.

John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978) published his first poem in 1900, when he was fourteen. He died seventy-eight years later, with fifteen books of poetry to his name. As an artist, his work was modestly esteemed, in part because the modernist movement supplanted his appeal as a traditional, conservative poet. As an editor, his legacy is more easily appraised. 

One of our neighbors is the famous couturier Azzedine Alaia, the minuscule “architect of the body’ as he’s often called because he creates his garments directly on his models, whereas someone like Christian LaCroix dashes off a sketch which he tosses at a trained team of seamstresses who interpret and realize even his most far-fetched inspirations. Alaia works sometimes late into the night, his mouth full of pins, as he drapes and pulls and turns and twists and dances around the dais like Pygmalion dressing an already transformed and fully alive Galatea.