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  • In praise of Joan Didion

    I have always loved Joan Didion’s books, especially the essays. In some cases, such as Slouching towards Bethlehem, or The White Album, I care about the subject of the essay; but in Miami, or Salvador, I don’t – yet it’s the sentences that are always so amazing, so eerily short and blunt, yet so utterly…

  • Stumbling [and] Rhetorician [and] Aftermath [and] Ready

    Writing this paper: pleased at a sentence, frustrated at a page; gratified when a point comes clear, dismayed when it blows up into something aggressive and nonsensical. Read what I had for V–, and was surprised at how mad and rambling and repetitive and polemical and… well, you get the idea – how overdone, how…

  • Another life

    After working on the paper in fits and starts all day – the starts are quite productive but short, the fits just useless time-wasting – and going through lists and lists of Simpsons and Buffy shows… I think about LA and wonder, if things had gone differently, if I might have fallen into another life…

  • Loot

    Pleasant birthday lunch with friends – a bit quiet for some reason (which is odd for our bunch, we usually all chatter like magpies), but everyone seemed in a good mood, just less talkative than usual. Much loot. Felt pretty much like a twelve-year-old on Christmas morning – ooh look chocolates from A., Lush bath…

  • 50

    This is it… 3 am Eastern Standard time, which is 8 am here. Huh. Well, I’m having neither the "it’s only a number" (i.e. it doesn’t matter) nor any miserable "oh no I’m old" feelings. Best articulated as: Boy, am I fifty. (I do remember telling my mother, when she turned fifty and was clearly…

  • Monk!

    Meredith, I mean. Although I have complained several times about the presentation I’m doing in half an hour – silly timing to do any presentation at all, thrown together out of scraps of previous work, doesn’t even fit the Theme Word of the seminar (which they picked after I volunteered, thanks much) – the truth…

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