tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-636146723310577212010-03-09T06:40:09.925-06:00Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-39153003036070575672010-03-09T06:29:00.003-06:002010-03-09T06:40:09.933-06:002010-03-09T06:40:09.933-06:00

Wait a minute--that's right outside the hotel! How do they know which way the minivan is pointing? Okay, okay... I'll just drive into the intersection and... In America that's what we call a hard left, okay? So finally we're getting out of Strasbourg, and none too soon from my perspective--my financial perspective, I mean. More on that later. Anyway, we've had some rearrangement of the

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We're heading to Besançon -- more to follow soon! View Larger Map

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When I get back to the Hotel Mercure Strasbourg Quartier St. Jean, three of the Rabbit Warriors are sitting in the sidewalk cafe outside. "Zere he is!" calls out Benedikt when he sees me. "Ze steward of ze empire!" "Did you sleep in ze BierWagen?" asks Manuel. "Ah!" says Andreas, "Ze perfect cure for jet lag! Sit down and join us for breakfast, bro. Ve are drinking Strasbourg beer! Vill

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Shortly after the death of Nora Quinn Larkin, in February 1974, two of her nine daughters felt bold enough to make long distance calls to Italy. At the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, a polite young lady answered the phone, and went to fetch the Dean of Art History. Later, comparing notes, the two daughters agreed as to how polite the young lady was, how vast the transoceanic silence

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Fr. Niall Bresnahan's own prolific pen supplied the early catalog of B&B Books: Learning the Suscipiat: the Struggles of an Irish Altar Boy, Non Serviam: The Contraceptive Mentality in Modern American Life, and The Feel-Good Trap: How the Pursuit of Pleasure Leads to Despair all appeared within three years of that fateful golf outing. In this period, he also contributed entertaining

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Fr. Niall Bresnahan, the publisher and founder of B&B Books, joked that until the success of Warrior, Daughter, Saint, he had secretly suspected himself of running a vanity press. Though repeated often, the joke, delivered in Fr. Bresnahan's nasal Cork City brogue, usually got a laugh, and quickly joined his repertoire of apparently self-deprecating humor. Fr. Bresnahan had only

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Nina began the meeting by telling Bradley and Renee a bit about what she was looking for. Since she took over as vice-president of prime-time programming, she had been trying to position her network as the place for strong narrative, interesting characters, and moral complexity. She confessed to being a big fan of the Spanish language telenovelas--she loved the long narrative arcs,

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As soon as she opened the door of the empty office suite, Renee Alcala knew that the place needed a professional cleaning. She left her own box of supplies at the front door, and gave herself a quick tour. There was a front reception area, a tiny half-bath, and three small rooms in the back, one of which had apparently been used as a combination kitchen and conference area. It wasn't

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The correspondence between Adalbert Kehr and Konrad Joseph quickly revealed Kehr to be the lonelier of the pair. More than a hundred years later, when Roger McAllister read their letters, he could feel the emptiness of Grüssau Abbey in every page, every long dense page that Kehr wrote. The old Benedictine abbey had been secularized decades earlier, during the Napoleonic wars, and had

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Although the ongoing legal dispute prevented Roger McAllister from discussing his unfortunate relationship with "the American Josephsons," McAllister would tell his audience, whether that audience was in a college auditorium, or on folding chairs arrayed around an impromptu podium at an independent bookstore, or a single interviewer in a tiny TV studio in a windswept Canadian town, that

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With quiet sincerity McAllister would explain to his book tour audiences the kinship he felt with the many descendants of Jakob Josephson. The Josephsons, McAllister would say, "had books in their blood." The family had once owned a bookstore in Munich--a used bookstore, perhaps, but the word "antiquarian" would not be excessive--exactly the sort of shop McAllister wished to own someday himself

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I wake up alone on the BierWagen. Which is to say that I wake on an old mattress, surrounded by plywood and beer-tapping equipment, with a picture of a large white rabbit, wearing sunglasses, looking down on me. It's an open question as to just how hungover I am, so I try to postpone the moment of discovery. Lying very still, I consider whether this place is indoors or outdoors. There's a

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By mid-morning on Tuesday, February 4, 2003, Nina Pagonis was running about 20 minutes late, which didn't concern her much because the people sitting in her office were the kind of people who would wait. Nina always had her assistant lead her visitors into the public part of her office precisely at the moment of their appointments, whether or not Nina herself was present. It was simply good

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Hotel Mercure, Quartier St. Jean, Strasbourg Finally, we get everybody checked in, and head up to our rooms. My room is on the fourth floor--it's kind of angular, like somebody tried to hide the attic beams of an old building by disguising them as geometric modernism--but it's nice. Actually really nice. I haven't done the euro-dollar conversion yet--my brain is still too foggy from lack of

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We're supposed to meet Henry and his entourage at the Hotel Mercure in Strasbourg. Well, it turns out that that there are several Hotel Mercures in that city--first I navigate through the narrow streets to the Hotel Mercure Strasbourg Centre, on the picturesque ile that holds the upscale shopping district, and we've almost got the minivan unloaded when Bertha gets a call on her cell phone. It's

Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-75276099275234814142009-12-17T05:44:00.021-06:002010-02-02T07:13:58.509-06:002010-02-02T07:13:58.509-06:00

.nibelungstrophe-western{ padding-left: 1em; text-indent:-1em; font-size:12px; } .sdfootnote, .sdfootnote a.sdfootnotesym{ font-size:10px; } In Rhineland grew to manhood | a noble Emperor's son Named Henry son of Henry | the proud Salians were his clan. From Franconia did these warlike dukes | most justly seize the throne Truly elected Roman Emperors1 | the German princes all did vote.The last

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The first and only appearance of Sister Martin de Porres, O.P., at the offices of B&B Books of Dubuque, Iowa, had not been a planned part of her sad itinerary in February 1974, but her visit was, nonetheless, eagerly anticipated by the publishing house staff. After all, Sister Martin de Porres had been born in Dubuque, and her scholarly distinctions and international career had been held

Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-20451785279140098342009-11-12T19:14:00.006-06:002010-02-12T06:07:20.289-06:002010-02-12T06:07:20.289-06:00

The document that came to be known, in internal network memos, as "the Western Avenue Treatment," was discovered on the upper level of a Los Angeles strip mall, its pages scattered across the carpet of an abandoned office suite, apparently spit out by a nearby fax machine--a ghostly remnant of Terrapin Pictures, a small independent production company, which had vacated the premises some

Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-69869893802496967192009-10-31T05:44:00.003-05:002010-02-12T05:35:02.062-06:002010-02-12T05:35:02.062-06:00

The beginning of the friendship between Adalbert Kehr and Joseph Konrad Josephson is easy to understand: they were both young men full of fiery dreams, immersed in dusty old books. Kehr, fresh from his studies in philology at the University of Marburg, found himself in a lonely government post at an old abbey in Silesia, a tedious clerkship which he enlivened by exploring the abbey's old

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Roger McAllister always wore the same clothes on Canadian TV as he did when exploring back rooms, attics, basements and barns: a Savile Row suit, a yellow paisley bow tie, round horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and colorfully mismatched socks. In 1992, McAllister, an appraiser of rare books based in Victoria, British Columbia, discovered that the image of a slightly distracted dandy, cultivated so

Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-14781744159738143722009-10-16T05:36:00.016-05:002009-10-17T09:46:47.741-05:002009-10-17T09:46:47.741-05:00

Speyer, Bischofhaus, All Souls Day, 1076Are we in the Bischofhaus in Speyer? Is the bishop's house the place where the Salian emperors, Conrad and his son Henry and his son Henry, accompanied by their entourage, always stay when they visit their favorite church, Dom zu Speyer, the largest cathedral in Christendom, if you don't count Byzantium? Do the emperors always tell the bishop that one of

Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-87689832164944577942009-10-07T06:32:00.010-05:002009-10-17T07:29:08.678-05:002009-10-17T07:29:08.678-05:00

We're off the autobahn now, heading on the B28 highway toward toward the Rhine river--and Strasbourg, France. You know something, I'm actually kind of excited about driving across a national boundary in contemporary Europe, now that it's all unified. I've never done it before, and I'm curious as to what actually happens. And I'm even more curious as to what Bruno and Lambert think of the

Dave O'Mearahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14551924262068617096noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63614672331057721.post-36336632627972004442009-10-06T06:53:00.009-05:002009-10-07T07:39:50.261-05:002009-10-07T07:39:50.261-05:00

We're heading down the A5, south of Baden-Baden, planning to swing over to Strasbourg to meet Henry and his entourage, which apparently includes some vehicles that can't handle the 60 km/h minimum here on the autobahn. We missed Exit 51, I won't go into why exactly, so now what we're gonna do is take Exit 54-Appenweier to merge onto B28 toward Kehl. A few kilometers longer, no big deal. Lambert,

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Source: Heinrichlied (Song of Henry), author unknown. Now let us tell how Henry feasted at Utrecht, at the palace of William, the loyal Prince-Bishop of those lands, where Henry had come in haste to settle the succession of the fallen duke, Godfrey the Hunchback, who had been stabbed in the asshole while shitting. Boldly and fairly did Henry dispose of this matter, for he did name his own son,

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Scene: An inn outside the Abbey of Cluny. Date: April 1, 1076. With feverish urgency, desperate to kneel beside Beatrice, her mother, who lies upon her final sickbed with only weeks to live, maybe days--who knows the hour except that it is coming soon!--Matilda of Canossa, countess of Tuscany, hurries home. She begs her men to let her ride all night, but they say no, it is too dangerous, the moon

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