ON THE MORNING of our last full day in France, we took an intercity train from Paris out to Normandy. For this journey, we were not on the TGV, France’s futuristic high-speed train system. We were on an intercity express train, which, despite not being a proper bullet train, still moved with dispatch out of […]
Matt Talbot: Paris notebook
AS PROMISED, DEAR READERS, THIS WEEK I’M GOING TO TALK ABOUT PARIS. We began our journey into France from Zurich, Switzerland on the TGV, France’s famed “bullet train.” I’d never been on a modern high-speed train before, and the experience was exhilarating. Our train wound its way through tunnels and pastoral valleys, making its way […]
Matt Talbot: Italy presents variety of architecture, landscapes
ON OUR LAST NIGHT IN ROME, we went over to St. Peter’s Basilica to see it in the evening light. I have fallen in love with this city, its people, its beauty. I will be back. My time here in Europe impresses upon me the most striking difference between here and the United States: Europe […]
Matt Talbot: Finding joy in the journey as well as the destination
DATELINE: ROME. I’ve always wanted to start a column like that, and now, at last, my dream has been realized. Rome, the Eternal City, has me bewitched. Our first full day here, we awoke early and started at St. Peter’s Square, basically getting the lay of the land before we went there for real on […]
Matt Talbot: From the past, an understanding of the present
REGULARLY IN THIS SPACE I REFER TO PEOPLE AND EVENTS FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, roughly the period from the time of Homer in the 8th century B.C. to the decline and fall of the western half of the Roman Empire in the late 5th century A.D. My purpose is to demonstrate that, despite the sophisticated tools […]
Matt Talbot: Darn hippies
THOSE DIRTY HIPPIES ARE RUINING THE COUNTRY! There, I said it. Yesterday, after a bunch of those unwashed college students took over the administration building at Berkeley, demanding an end to the draft and the Vietnam war, well, I just got fed up.
Matt Talbot: No seasons in California? Look closer
I HEAR ALL THE TIME FROM FRIENDS who grew up in the Eastern United States that Northern California “has no seasons.” There is a sense in which that is true, of course. I was stationed in Indianapolis for a few months during my Army tour, and it was my first experience of what easterners refer […]
Matt Talbot: Our growing industry gap
LAST WEEK I WAXED WISTFUL about the passing of the American consumer electronics industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Part of that is a sort of patriotic nostalgia — Zenith, RCA, Admiral and the rest of the American manufacturers were the “home team,” and I took their defeat by Japanese electronics giants as a sort […]
Matt Talbot: Restoration
ONE OF MY HOBBIES IS FOLLOWING THE RESTORATION OF VINTAGE TELEVISIONS AND ELECTRONICS. If I had an actual house rather than my tiny studio apartment, the garage would be my workshop, and it would be stuffed with color televisions of 1960s and early ’70s vintage, in various states of disassembly and repair. Part of the […]
Matt Talbot: Where the heart is
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. — Robert Frost, “Death of the Hired Man” NORTHERN CALIFORNIA WILL ALWAYS BE THAT PLACE FOR ME. I can leave it, but it always exerts an irresistible draw, like a mother calling her child home. When I was […]