I really shouldn’t have, but I bought this pulp novel on Ebay a week ago and just got it in the mail.–it was just a $1.99.
I’m a sucker for these pulps from the 50s/60s–but especially if they’re film tie-ins, like this one:
The Best of Everything written by Rona Jaffe.
The movie starred Hope Lange, Stephen [...]

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Heading to Utah tomorrow, but spent Sat. and Sunday in Las Vegas seeing the family.
Today I went to the Atomic Testing Museum. Very strange. Very fascinating.
In the museum there was a 13 minute movie about the Atomic Bomb and Testing in Nevada. They must have put speakers or something under the floor and under our [...]

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I’m trying to get caught up on my New Yorkers. Did you read the profile of Ian McEwan from the Feb. 23 issue (which, by the way, had that hilarous and grotesque cover with A Rod)?

Daniel Zalewski’s profile of the Atonement author (read it here) is so compelling, so readable, and SO long. I almost [...]

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Leave it to NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac to put me in such a great mood at the end of a long  week (but productive–wrote fifteen more pages; am now into the 3rd chapter of my novel).
Love this poem by Peter Meinke, so funny and strange. We all have a kooky uncle. Mine is my Uncle [...]

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Ooof. Long week. But a good one.Started at the second college and also a night class at a writing school downtown. All that and I managed to go to my office and work on my book!
This week, amid all of the chaos and driving to and from the schools I got in the mail the [...]

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Van Johnson has died (this has been a bad week for classic movie stars!). He was 92.

Van Johnson was often described as having “affable charm and boyish good looks.” He was especially good in the MGM musicals of the 1940s, though as a dramatic actor he was often underrated.
Here’s Van (and June Allyson–a frequent costar) [...]

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Sadly, Beverly Garland has died.
As a kid I had hoped thought she was a long-lost sister of Judy Garland. But, I learned later, she was not.
She was a B-Horror Movie Queen, a prolific television actress –the first policewoman on television (some of you younger kids might remember her from Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Lois and [...]

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<–that’s our Turkey Soap Dispenser
I just pulled a pumpkin cream pie out of the oven.
I’m thankful for the coming new year. a year of change. A year of hope. A year of dazzling prolificacy.
I’m also thankful for this:

**this was one of those cheesy products advertised in the sidebar on Facebook.
You know how much I [...]

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Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.
The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity whiich you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as a necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that [...]

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When I think of all of the issues of the NewYorker that went unread in my (subscription) lifetime it makes me want to cry. I absolutely LOVE reading NewYorker at the gym. No, not when i’m power lifting 160lbs over my head (wait, is 160lbs too light?), but on the elliptical (how many of you [...]

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