After devouring The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson’s deep dive into the infamous serial killer who plagued Chicago at the time of the 1893 World Fair, I promptly bought another of the author’s titles at my local Barnes & Noble. Due to a series of life events (and overall lack of interest in…
Tag: Culture
Book Review: Parisians
In case you’re new here, I’m an American who once upon a decade ago, lived in Paris for a year whilst I completed a master’s degree. That year was one of the best and simultaneously most challenging years of my life. I loved the endless charm of the architecture, the smell of the flowers, the…
A journey in purple (part four)
Day twenty-three: We’re in the final push to the end of the class. This is the time to edit out entire paintings and clean the remaining essentials. I don’t particularly enjoy this phase. It feels rather cold-hearted to abandon something that I created from nothing. As I consider this sentiment, I feel like a true…
A journey in purple (part three)
Day seventeen: Today is the first day back after the university’s spring break. I spent the week leading a group of college students on a volunteer trip to the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Most of the trip I spent considering whether or not I was an effective and inspirational leader. Most of the trip I…
A journey in purple (part one)
A rumor that might be truth: purple sells paintings. A reality I know to be truth: despite color theory, purple is almost impossible to create using red and blue paints. The fact I’m left with: I probably won’t be selling many paintings. Day one: My introduction to watercolor class, held in the basement (ahem lower…
Looking back. Moving forward.
reflect back on the year. Although the marking of a year is somewhat arbitrary given that time never stops or even pauses, the rhythm of pausing to celebrate the past 365 days in order to move on does seem to add value to my life each time I do it.
A deluge of consciousness
I “wrote” this blog post while taking a shower. Which is to say: creativity struck me at a very inconvenient time. If I’ve learned anything in my past few years working as a “creative” it is to crank content out when inspiration hits. So, instead of reading a book to gain continuing education credits for…
Book Review: The Bourne Supremacy
This time last year, I was writing a review for The Bourne Identity, the first in Robert Ludlum’s trilogy. As I discovered while reading that book, the storylines of the book and the movie series are incongruent. Other than being fairly similar in the characterization of the main character, Jason Bourne, the screen writers really…
Book Review: Sense and Sensibility
I really love Jane Austen’s books – or at least most of them. I did not mean to read two Austen books back-to-back, but I became really disenchanted with the nonfiction bore I kept attempting to finish reading (and I was feeling the “do more of what you love” empowerment) so I threw my reading…
Book review: Into the Wild
Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer (1996), was a bummer of a book. Describing the ultimately fatal journey of a disillusioned, middle-class young man into the Alaskan wilderness, the book seeks to explain how and why Chris McCandless died. Through interviews with the family members he abandoned on the East Coast and the friends he…
L.M.Beatty 