Books & Ideas
Heather Rogero at the Martha’s Vineyard School of Etiquette has opened enrollment for the fall sessions of her Classy Little Ladies courses in manners, poise and style.
The five-session course for girls ages 5 through 12 begins the first week in October. Students are placed in age groups, with friendship preference available. Each class is one hour; the course concludes with a mother/daughter afternoon tea also at the Mansion House Inn in Vineyard Haven.
Judy Blume loves to read. She has stacks of books piled around her house. They fill bookshelves, clutter the kitchen counter and sit precariously on coffee tables, leaving no room for coffee cups. "I wrote to Dave Eggers this winter," she said, gesturing to his book, The What of the What, which sat at the top of one pile. "He e-mailed back!"
She confessed that she still gets nervous around other writers, particularly if she has not yet met them.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are out walking, and come across a child obviously drowning in a pond.
There is no one else around. You know the pond is not deep enough to drown you and that there are no dangerous things, like alligators, in the water. The only small cost to you is that you might ruin a good pair of shoes, and your clothes will need dry cleaning.
The toes of Daniel Libeskind's black elkskin cowboy boots curl up like those curved walls he so loves - spiralling curves that cross a void of history in the Jewish Museum he designed in Berlin, bathtub-like curves beckoning 75 feet down into bedrock in his master plan for the Ground Zero memorial, a curve inspired by a shard of earth to house exhibits in the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, where even the floor curves six feet down.
The White House, the American Civil Liberties Union, that "idiot" the British Prime Minister, the United Nations, the FBI, CIA, State Department, New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, CNN, and the Internal Revenue Service.
It's not often you hear them - and a lot of other governments and organizations as well - lumped together as part of the same problem.
It's usually not a good thing when an interview ends in bloodshed, but an exception will be made for Ward Just, who was still nursing his wounds from a battle with a wicker basket when this reporter left his West Tisbury home one morning this week.