Roy Lotz's Blog, page 3

Review: Bird by Bird

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There is a peculiar pleasure in reading books about writing. It is the only craft in which the manual to do it is an example of the craft itself. And since writers tend to be on the eloquent side, they are very good at making their particular pursuit sound interesting and admirable and arduous. Have you heard musicians talk about music? Poor fellows. Either they use the jargon of theory, or are reduced to the blandest platitudes.

Nevertheless, whi...

Quotes & Commentary #85: Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing… America when will you be angelic? … America why are your libraries full of tears?

Allen Ginsberg

It appears that I am once again writing this column in the wake of a Trump victory. Eight years ago, I chose the Joyce quote about history being a nightmare, as the only words adequate to explain my immense disappointment at the American people. I ended that post on a rather hysterical note, promising to embrace Stoicism to get through the coming tr...

Quotes & Commentary #84: Thoreau

Cast your whole vote, not just a strip of paper, but your whole influence.

—Henry David Thoreau

I began this section on my blog in the lead up to the 2016 election, the first time that Trump was on the ballot. Like many Americans, I was depressed about the possibility of a Trump presidency, even though I doubted that it would really come to pass. I went to bed on election night (Spain is six hours ahead, so the result was not announced yet) comfortably sure of Clinton’s victory. When I...

Review: The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Dust Bowl has always been a somewhat vague disaster in my mind. It occurred during the Great Depression, and the images it generated helped to define the misery of the period. But the question has always lingered in my mind: was it simply chance that the two coincided? Or did one cause the other? Like many people, my primary touchstone for the event is The Grapes of ...

Craft Beer in Spain: Tenta & Valle del Kahs

I turned twenty-one—the legal drinking age in my benighted country—in 2012, in the midst of a Renaissance in craft beer. I had spent most of college pounding cans of Coors Light, whose urinous flavor was offset by being affordable to college kids, with the added benefit that you could feasibly down ten or even twenty in a single night—a feat which naturally came with boasting rights. (I still have vivid memories of emptying dozens of cans from the huge recycling container in my dorm, and then va...

The Magic of Coney Island

The first time that I went to Coney Island, I was in college, fully in the grip of a newfound commitment to intellectualism. I was certain that I was going to be a professor, that I was going to be a prolific and influential author, and that most of the world was consequently not up to my exacting standards of culture, taste, and intelligence.

At that moment in my life, Coney Island struck me as the epitome of everything I hoped to reject. Tacky, cheap, loud, dedicated to the pleasures of the...

Historic Hudson Homes: Lyndhurst & Untermyer Gardens

This is part of a series on Historic Hudson Homes. For the other posts, see below:

Washington Irving’s Sunnyside John D. Rockefeller’s Kykuit Alexander Hamilton’s Grange FDR’s Springwood & Vanderbilt Mansion Thomas Cole’s Cedar Grove and Frederic Church’s Olana Jay Gould’s Lyndhurst & Untermyer Garden

It should perhaps come as no surprise that the Hudson Valley is full of the former (and current) homes of the exceptionally wealthy. It is ideally situated to serve as a ...

Historic Hudson Homes: Cedar Grove & Olana

Before the advent of “modern art” in the 20th century, the United States was considered something of a backwater as far as painting was concerned. Any American painter with an ounce of ambition had to travel to Paris and spend time copying masterpieces in the Louvre in order to become respectable.

This is precisely what Samuel Morse did. For two years he worked on what was supposed to be his masterpiece, The Gallery of the Louvre, in which he painstakingly reproduced several European masterwo...

Jazz: Live from the Living Room

“Well you’re a writer,” Allan said, “you know how it is. When you want to say something, you don’t make up a new word. You put old words together in a new way. That’s essentially what we’re doing when we take a solo.”

We were sitting around my dad’s dining room table, having a conversation over the battered remains of three large pizza pies. We were there to talk about jazz.

By virtue of my father, Norman, jazz has been an unavoidable part of my life since as far back as I can remember. An...

Review: The Warren Commission Report

The Warren Commission Report: The Official Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Warren Commission

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Before launching into this review, I ought to say why I read this infamous report in the first place. I have never been particularly interested in JFK or the assassination, and thus I knew just the bare basics of the official story and the conspiracy theories. My interest in the book was actually sparked by Werner Herzog, who...