“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in
Browsing category blogging
All I want to do is go to bed with a good book. Something light and fluffy that doesn’t make me think too hard or long to write in the margin. I also want to eat sushi. Or nothing at all. Because nothing at all is preferable to anything else I can think of. Except
I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis. He’s talking about words and how they lose their meaning and become of no use to anyone when they aren’t treated in the literal sense. Like ‘gentleman’. How it use to refer to a specific type of landed noble person. How someone then used it to refer to how that
You don’t have to go home but you can’t…stay…here… Ten years ago this summer. We drove around in the warm and the sun with our hair up and our windows down and sang the words and thought “This is it. This is us.” It was our anthem. Our summer song. To dream to and believe
There’s no getting around the insanity that has been my week. I still haven’t got that organizational thing down. It’s a work in progress. If it were up to me, I’d hire my chica to do it for me. She’s saved my bacon more than once, always with a smile, and she’s doing it again
The Euro’s dad was talking about boundaries the other day. How Cumbria isn’t really Cumbria, but something all together new and not right-sounding. How some of Cheshire used to be some of Lancashire and how politicians like to redraw the map as it suits them. “You don’t really do that in America, do you?” I
“I don’t think that work ever really destroyed anybody. I think that lack of work destroys them a hell of a lot more.” – Katherine Hepburn
“…you have to live for the present. You have to be in the moment. Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.” — Oprah Winfrey ———— This morning I read the transcript of Oprah’s commencement address given at Stanford over the weekend. Jaw dropping
I don’t know about you, but if I had a daughter with an auto immune disorder that attacked her skin cells and prevented them from making pigment, I wouldn’t look at her and say “Wow. You’re really pale.” This is what my mother said to me last week. I felt like Ricky Gervais in the
Last week the winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction was announced – British author Rose Tremain’s novel The Road Home. Other shortlisted nominees: Nancy Huston, Fault Lines; Sadie Jones, The Outcast; Charlotte Mendelson, When We Were Bad; Heather O’Neill, Lullibies for Little Criminals; and Patricia Wood, Lottery. The Bridgeport Prize International Creative Writing
It was ’round about this time, in 1867, that Mark Twain set out on his grand tour of Europe and the Middle East. The letters he wrote, to be published in papers back home, became the basis for a book. Hemingway, whom I’m slowly falling in love with again, once said that all modern American
My grandmother’s not the biggest fan of Ralph Stanley. But it’s not Ralph’s fault. “Bill use to follow him around every weekend. Playing music. He’d leave me at home.” Bill’s her husband. Bill is Pa. When we got there. By the time we left there were about six more fiddlers, bass players and guitarists. My
