LivingSmall

To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior…Whenever and wherever a foehn wind blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about ‘nervousness,’ about ‘depression.’ … . Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Even for Livingston, a place where the wind routinely blows so […]

We got a little snow last night, and as I opened the door this morning to let the dogs out and get the paper, a very cheerful-looking man zipped past my house. I’ve never seen him before, but there he was on his 4-wheeler equipped with a snowplow. He plowed my whole side of the […]

My latest novel is Oran Pamuk’s Snow and it has finally happened. I picked up the paperback in bed the other night, opened it up, looking forward to a good read, and realized that the type is very very small! I’ve worn glasses since my late teens when I discovered that there was a reason […]

Not much to say, really, except it’s twenty below zero this morning! Twenty below! When I was a kid that was the magic number — the number at which even the grownups would concede that it was Really Cold Outside. Twenty below and Dad would drive me to school instead of making me go wait […]

… instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could have […]

Despite having grown up deep in the heart of the preppy, upper-class suburbs in the 70’s and 80’s (Ordinary People was shot in my high school my junior year), I had grown weary of the pink-and-green design. So voilà! A new design — I’m still no webmaster since as you can see, this is one […]