Well my goodness. I slept until 9:40am. That hasn’t happened in 20 years. Of course, I was up for a while, sometime in the dark morning, but still. Sleep! Sweet, oblivious, restorative sleep! I always heard that Nod can desert us as we age. I imagined I’d be safe. Ha. Pride goeth before a fall, [...]
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It’s been a while since I addressed my odd High WASP culture. Those of you old-timers who find the theme annoying, please (as Faux Fuchsia would say), Look Away Now™. Those of you new to the blog, I ask your forbearance. This is a complicated topic*. We’re throwing in a book and a movie review [...]
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Let’s talk about smart people. Not real smart people, mind you, but the pretend sort we see on American television and in the movies. Have you all noticed the recent apotheosis of imagined brilliants? (If we’re going to discuss smarty-pants we might as well start with a lot of syllables.) There’s House, with the doctor [...]
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See that glossy, golden, glowing No. 5 ? I think I received it in the latest edition of American Vogue, slipped inside the covering plastic bag. But it’s possible the thing simply materialized, covet-provoking, in my mailbox. A worldwide phenomenon, apparently, as Tabitha over at Bourbon and Pearls got one too. In case you were [...]
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Next week, Professor C.’s web seminar series returns. For those of you new to the blog, my father was for many years a professor of English at a well-known Far West university. From time to time he obligingly ups the intellectual atmosphere around here, in a series of essays comparing novels and novellas to their [...]
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What High WASPs don’t do is buy art from a furniture store. Enough said. Now, some of us have collections. Real collections, of the sort that wind up in museums when the estate tax proves too onerous, or warrant their very own auction. For example, if my dear friend Reggie Darling ever decides to be [...]
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Good morning everyone. Today I am over at 50-by-50, in an interview about writing. I’d love to have you come and read. My thoughts are about 5% of your click’s import, however. Colleen Wainwright, who works as a marketing consultant, and writes the blog, “Communicatrix,” is raising money for a non-profit called WriteGirl. Her goal [...]
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Professor C. continues his seminar series, in this case with E.M. Forster, and “A Passage to India.” The work has particular meaning here, in light of my own 1982 trip. But beyond that, as Professor C. says, lie implications for Gay Pride this week in the USA. Belonging, love, power, and cultural dislocation have always [...]
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As promised, the second in a series, “Professor C.’s Wharton Web Seminars.” In which we discover how literary criticism and flame wars intersect. Before watching the film of Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth,” directed by Terence Davies, with Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart and Eric Stolz as Lawrence Selden, I stumbled on an internet war. [...]
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I’ve been following Lily Stockman for some time, at bigBANG studio. A young but wildly accomplished artist, she moved to India last year. Funded by a grant, she’s been painting pictures of India’s grain silos. I know. Her new show opens in Delhi this Friday. She is exhibiting along with three other American artists, Carrie [...]
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