The St. Vincent de Paul in Smith Street has good shirts, good cushion covers, good books - and much else. At present they have a feature on clocks. I'm not big on clocks, don't like the ticking, but if I was ... anyway, having just read Claudio Magris' Danube, when I saw Embers by Hungarian writer Sándor Márai, I bought it. In my mind I thought Márai was a writer discussed in Magris' voluminous account of the river and its voices but no ... I googled him and found an excerpt from his American Journal (http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no173/2.htm). Some strange wind of history blows through San Diego here.