During the span of a significant birthday a few days ago, I was spoon fed several tablespoons of hard to swallow gloop: First tablespoon. Lydmilla phoned with good wishes, also explained: “At your age there are no prints left on the tips of your fingers.” I hadn’t known this. Second tablespoonful. Richie phoned with congratulations,(…)
If any loquacity remains in my life’s stockpile, it hasn’t been diminished during these months in quarantine, the quarter of a year that got tagged onto concurring years of (mostly supine) solitary living. As it’s happened, I’m almost mute. Or have been muted. I don’t know why, nor by what and don’t even mind. Truth(…)
“One wants to be the needle in the haystack. Not the haystack.” – Don Draper One sister wants to be the needle. The other sister doesn’t want to be either one. My friend DE would prefer being the needle. Me? I would like to be the haystack.
“For people of my age,” she thinks, “the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist … And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside(…)
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.” Erich Fromm Before it happened to me, I’d only known one person with it. This was an older/almost(…)
You said, I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to another sea. Another city will be found, a better one than this. Union Station, Los Angeles, California >> Fullerton >> Riverside >> San Bernadino >> Victorville >> Barstow >> Needles >> Kingman, Arizona >> Williams Jct >> Flagstaff >> Sedona Any new lands you will(…)
In the same way that the source of the Nile River is Lake Victoria, I (by accident) stumbled on the source from where all clichés arise. Common places, banalities, platitudes, all matter of cliché bubble up gently in this location. How was I to know during a recent holiday after ordering huevos rancheros on Red(…)
“Life is painful, nasty and short – in my case it has only been painful and nasty,” Djuna Barnes 1978-1981 by Hank O’Neal The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katherine Smyth Normandy Stories by Guy de Maupassant Molloy by Samuel Beckett Herman Melville by(…)
– continued – A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul Burmese Days by George Orwell Death in Venice by Thomas Mann At the Edge of the World by Jean-Vincent Blanchard Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell The Ordeal of Gilbert Finfold by Evelyn Waugh(…)
– continued – Staying On by Paul Scott The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster Where Angels fear to Tread by E.M.Forster Mother’s and Sons by Colm Tóibín A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren New Ways to Kill your Mother by Colm Tóibín The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy(…)
