Category: Memory

A busy, successful two weeks: seminar in London, then here on my home turf; attending several student concerts, one quite inspired, the other beautifully produced – amazed at the capability of our kids, and wish I could have participated at that level at their age; and then tonight was a fine Late Thanksgiving – four…

Early, gray but with enough light to waken me. Among various work, and things not done, and a few things done: still a certain drift, this frequent anxiety that my inept use of my own time puts my life in the category of ‘unsuccessful, also ran, not quite sound.’ Not quite a failure, certainly not…

[Read today at V.’s funeral, after other remembrances by H. and one of her French relatives.] With Vanessa, the sheer range of enjoyable things to remember about her is a bit daunting – so much hard work, so much fun – writing, shopping, dancing – talking with people from all over the world. The endless…

Do other people get as confused over the implicit values of their memories?… maybe it’s because I’ve moved around so much, and am so dissatisfied. When something reminds me of certain angles of life in LA: the Santa Monica bus as it passes that big, difficult-to-negotiate intersection near Rodeo Drive; the cheesiness of Santa Monica…

Feeling, late at night, peculiarly disconnected, dislocated: not merely in time and space, but in intention, in dream – I feel as though I don’t know who I would want to have been, what I would want to have happened. Regrets, as you no doubt know from the rest of my blog, are not unusual…

Not real ones. It is colder, and there will be snow, but we haven’t seen any yet. But I kept thinking of one of Peter Altenberg’s postcard poems, the one sung in the first of Berg’s wonderful but rarely performed Altenberg-Lieder: Seele, wie bist du schöner, tiefer, nach Schneestürmen.Auch du hast sie, gleich der Natur.Und…

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…

In seeking (I am, undoubtedly, what religionists would call a seeker, in many ways) some strategies to get me out of my slough, to get me writing these two articles which are both so overdue and on the verge of being too overdue to publish, I went to Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird, which is…

For some obscure reason, tonight I remembered being friends (acquaintances? – at least she seemed to think I was amusing for a time) with a gorgeous, extremely chic, rather wild, very sexy party girl of the highest order, while living in Hong Kong. I can’t quite recall her name…. I’m the kind of person who…