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 hard that they have to divert truck traffic off the interstate …
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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 block. The dogs barked, the man grinned, happy to be zipping around the neighborhood like some early-morning sidewalk elf. And then he was gone. It was a strange and fleeting little small-town moment, and it’s kept a smile on my face all day long.
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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 I’d never mastered that essential skill of 1970s’ upper-class life — tennis — I have no depth perception. Astygmatism. No wonder that all those years when I’d been stranded out there on hot tennis courts bending my knees, keeping my eye on the ball, and…
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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 for the bus. Twenty below and the parents would set the egg timer when we were really little, so we wouldn’t get frostbitten (except for that time Up North when they all got chatting and forgot us, and I had to sit on Ray Kennedy’s…
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… 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 affixed a moustache under Washington’s nose or shaved off Lincoln’s beard. He was fenced in by the barbed wire of fact. … In Cold Blood may have been written like novel, but it is accurate down to the smallest detail — “immaculately factual” Truman publicly…
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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 of the standard Typepad layouts, but I’m hoping that like re-arranging the furniture once in a while, re-designing the blog will help me come back to it more often and with renewed energy …
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Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that on the day that we’re about to swear in Samuel Alito, the man responsible for this statement: ”Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?”(and a black girl child at that), that Coretta Scott King would choose to leave the planet? Does no one else see this as a Very Bad Sign?
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The memoir brouhaha continues to niggle at me — my hunch is that it’s gained such cultural traction because it’s a symptom of a larger problem that America is having with telling and recognizing the truth. In a year in which the American Dialect Society votes that “Truthiness” is the “word of the year” should it come as any surprise to us that we’re also beset by an avalanche of literary hoaxes? “Truthiness” the ADS website declares, “refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.…
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I’ve written about memoir before, and the recent James Frey brouhaha has gotten me thinking about it all again. I actually haven’t done much work on my book these past couple of months because the avalanche of freelance work I picked up when I thought I might want to quit my job at the Big Corporation, along with a slough of deadlines at said day job have all had me up to my eyeballs in Other People’s Work. But watching the Wrath of Oprah sort of freaked me out. I thought I’d enjoy it more than I did — frankly…
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Okay, here’s what I forgot — if you’ve been writing and editing on a computer screen all day, it is very difficult to read anything else in the evening. It was a long week in the trenches — life at the Big Corporation is kind of hectic, and I was finishing a freelance copyediting job at the same time. Taking on all these freelance jobs while working full time might not have been the smartest idea I every had, but at least I’ll have enough money to renovate my shameful bathroom when I get to the other side (there wasn’t…