Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. – Virginia Woolf

I’m reading The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf and enjoying it a good bit but I’ll leave the expounding to clever types like Flynn.

I find, more and more these days, that I’m one of Woolf’s commoners. On Saturday I read Silence of the Lambs. It left no impression on me whatsoever. Demme’s interpretation swallowed it whole.

We drove eight hours and listened to Footloose and blew bubbles. We climbed a mountain. Twice. Traveled through fog. Sucked strawberry and banana through a straw. We played with rubber foots – FOOTS – fingers and snakes. We ate these apple things that looked like cakes.

“I trained as an actor in New York, and one discipline I studied was the Stanislavski technique, the basis of which is to live truthfully in the imaginary circumstances. That is what I try to do when I write. I set up an imaginary world, and try to let the characters live truthfully in that world.” DeLauné Michel

The Euro and I talk a lot about the interplay between acting and writing. It was the Chekhov-Stanislavski connection that finally made him realize what I was trying to do as a writer wasn’t so very different from what he was trying to do as an actor. And that, maybe, I wasn’t as nonplussed by his art as he imagined me to be.

His emotional engineering and mechanics of expression are much more concrete, much more tangible than mine. He uses his body, his face, his physical voice. Engages the real eye and not just the mind’s eye. He’s all about immediate interactions and reactions and sussing out wants and needs and objectives. In this last regard he’s become freakishly Freudian.

I don’t have his talent. His stage presence, or his life presence. And when it comes to certain communications, I don’t do physical or verbal very well. Lines drawn on paper and algorithmic keystrokes that turn 1s and 0s into meaning…those are my choice emotional mediums. I accomplish more with writing than I ever do with speaking. With writing, I can make you understand. When I speak I often lose all train of thought and any eloquence I might possess. I may as well beat both our heads against a brick wall. It would be more satisfying and we could get on with things quicker.

So, we talk a lot about acting and writing these days. The truths that join them both. And agree even through our disagreeance that he is perfectly suited for one and I the other. We also eat a lot of chocolate.

Lucky, this point in time and space
Is chosen as my working place
Where the sexy airs of summer,
The bathing hours and the bare arms,
The pleasant drives through a land of farms,
Are good to a newcomer.

–Auden

Flynn and I are going on a mini-break next month. The last time we were together we were both living in the North of England. I was working for the Crown Prosecution Service and she was studying literary criticism and pulling pints in the Northern Quarter. I have some vague recollection of looking at bones and mummies…anthropological brain candy.

- Journal, September 2009

“One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.” – Carl Sandburg

Images, compliments Flynn and me, were all taken at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara. There’s something very comforting about Connemara. Like it’s waiting to be someone’s Walden Pond. Like it was.

When Sandburg died, his wife, Paula, just up and left. She took nothing with her. The house remained as it always was, donated to the National Park Service.

No one does interviews quite like The Paris Review. In a 1984 interview, Thomas Frick asked English novelist and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction, JG Ballard, how a book took shape for him. Ballard’s reply follows:

“That’s a vast topic and, to be honest, one I barely understand. Even in the case of a naturalistic writer, who in a sense takes his subject matter directly from the world around him, it’s difficult enough to understand how a particular fiction imposes itself.

But in the case of an imaginative writer, especially one like myself with strong affinities to the surrealists, I’m barely aware of what is going on. Recurrent ideas assemble themselves, obsessions solidify themselves, one generates a set of working mythologies, like tales of gold invented to inspire a crew.

I assume one is dealing with a process very close to that of dreams, a set of scenarios devised to make sense of apparently irreconcilable ideas. Just as the optical centers of the brain construct a wholly artificial three-dimensional universe through which we can move effectively, so the mind as a whole creates an imaginary world that satisfactorily explains everything, as long as it is constantly updated. So the stream of novels and stories continues . ..”

Download a PDF of the full interview

The documentary Forgiving Dr. Mengele (2005) follows Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor, and her decision to forgive the Nazis who killed her family, in particular Dr. Josef Mengele who experimented on 1,400 pairs of twins including Eva and her twin sister, Miriam.

In 1944 Eva’s family were taken to Auschwitz where she and her sister were separated from the others – they never saw them again and believe they were murdered in the gas chambers. For nine months the girls were experimented on, injected with potentially lethal bacteria and given no treatment.

After World War II Eva immigrated, first to Romania, then to Israel and, finally, to Terre Haute, Indiana, where she created the C.A.N.D.L.E.S Museum (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors). The museum’s mission is to “eliminate hatred and prejudice from our world.”

Eva’s metamorphosis from embittered survivor to tireless advocate for reconciliation is sparked when she, in an attempt to get information about the experiments, meets with another former Auschwitz doctor. Her ideas about justice, revenge and the possibility of healing through forgiveness – as well as the passionate opposition from other survivors- become a window to a larger discussion of the many ways people define forgiveness.

“Who are you,” Eva asks, “to tell me how to heal myself?”

If you haven’t already, please watch the documentary about Eva – “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”. Email me and tell me what you think.

“I feel like Virginia during the Civil War,” I tell The Euro.

It’s the World Cup and we’re watching the Opening Ceremonies in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“You better not be cheering for the US,” he says.

He’s only serious about sport once every four years. NOW is every for years.

The United States isn’t use to being the underdog. But that’s exactly what we’ll be on Saturday when we play England at the World Cup.

Traitor that I am, I’m with England. (Carlos Bocanegra’s legs notwithstanding.)

That said, my momma always tells me I need to be more patriotic. So if the US pulls off another 1950-style upset, I can totally get behind that too.

I have the loveliest back garden. With climbing ivy and purple flowers and white hydrangeas and a massive rose bush covered in little yellow sprays. Two tomato trees I’m determined to grow. My mother grew hundreds. Quite literally, hundreds. I can grow two. Probably not.

I thought, for a moment, back in May, I’d like to have tanned legs this summer. That thought came back to haunt me. The legs remain, as ever, poultry-coloured.

The tops of my neighbours’ houses, lined up all symmetrically, remind me of Brighton Beach houses. This makes me smile.

I want a hammock. Something bright and colourful. To swing in and catch Vitamin D in and just be all good-feeling in. But I don’t want ticks in my hair. Ticks terrify me. I use to love sleeping in the grass. I don’t do that anymore. Ticks are why.

Maybe I’ll put up a massive Moroccan canopy instead. I saw something like this once, at a friend’s house in Greece. It shaded patios and pillows and pools. Books about espionage. I could do nothing but sit beneath it until it got too hot for me to sit any more. With a tea set my mother gave me.

There’s always the problem of the sun, of course. My splotchy hands – my leopard spots. And that fat ole Robin that keeps mistaking my hat for a nest.