‘Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them’ (Thom Jones) I live with a dog-mad woman. She absolutely adores them, having surrounded herself with the beasts from an early age. First up were Brownie and Tiger, both sadly dispatched to the great canine beyond via the neighbour’s shotgun one evening, her father
When we were younger, my best friend, Dan, and I went snowboarding in the North Carolina mountains. It was so bright everywhere—the sky was this electric, herniating blue, and the sun was blinding off the snow. While we were riding up the Sugar Mountain lift, Dan became concerned that his face was getting sunburned, and
In some cases it seemed to me that feeling literally in pieces could be traced back to that sort of original fragmentation that is bringing into the world-coming into the world. I mean feeling oneself mother at the price of getting rid of a living fragment of one’s own body; I mean feeling oneself a
I live my life surrounded by books. My bookshelves are filled with literature written in different times and in different languages. Far less visible are the papers that I have written. Hidden in drawers and secret boxes lie piles of diaries, poems, reflections and fiction stories no one has ever read but me. Georg Orwell
All is Numbered. -Pythagoras I have an unhealthy relationship with numbers, garden variety numbers; Numerophobia, maybe you’d call it. I place enormous importance on the information they contain, their overt and covert messages. And despite the fact that numbers inevitably let me down, like friends who betray me, still I return to them, looking for
Another evening, another livid sky. I’m gazing out my home-office window at the horizon again. Cornwall’s towering clouds dwarf the shiny cotton balls that scud across the sky in my native eastern North Carolina. Backlit with electric danger, these massive clouds — slate blue grey and limned around the edges by the setting sun —
Officially, when we went on a road trip, I got out of the car and walked twenty feet from California to Nevada so he couldn’t be charged with transporting a minor across state lines. We thought this was hilarious. *** The one good grade I ever got in gym class was for modern dance. My
When I was 19, I secretly fell in love with a boy. He was 17. I first learned his body as I watched him walk across the campus green when he didn’t know I was looking—his curly dark hair, his camo jacket with all the pockets, his baggy jeans. I learned his face second, when
‘Don’t write like a housewife. And read David Sedaris.’ This was the advice my daughter gave me as she thrust a copy of his book, Let’s Discuss Diabetes With Owls into my hands. Three years later, on the night of my 49th birthday, Bec took me to see David Sedaris at Cadogan Hall in London.
An entertaining collection of essays that is hard to put down and forget about, Duke Haney’s Death Valley Superstars isn’t just another book about Hollywood. Using his unrivalled and unique experiences, Haney exposes the reader to some of the lesser known people to be captured by the allure of film making, acting and the promise
