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Monthly Archives: January 2010
Wind farms, deer hunting, and ghosts: this week on Block Island
Flipping through the weekly paper. Gives a great sense of the everyday life out here. My sister Jean taught out here for a year, and much of this echoes her stories (for example: ghosts do not fly over the water, … Continue reading Continue reading
Island snapshots
— “He had a way of making a simple walk down a country lane into a Grand Adventure.” — Patricia Flynn, on her husband Errol’s acting ability — Thomas Hardy bums me out, man. But I love him. Also, when … Continue reading
Posted in Personal
Tagged Errol Flynn, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Rhode Island, snapshots, Thomas Hardy
5 Comments
Snapshots with Wilde bookends
— “Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or comedy … But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications.” — … Continue reading
“Feels like a blaze of fire.”, winter 1917-18
Excerpt from The Block Island Times, This Week in History: January 16, 1918 By Robert M. Downie The winter of 1917-18 was the worst one in 200 years or more; the extended cold wave creating the most frigid winter of … Continue reading
Some Island snapshots
— “I cannot imagine how a casual reference to Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire to impress by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is perfectly … Continue reading
Posted in Personal
Tagged Andrei Tarkovsky, Block Island, Christopher Walken, Deborah Kerr, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Evelyn Waugh, Frank Capra, Gary Cooper, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hope, In a Lonely Place, Keri Hulme, Oscar Wilde, Patricia Neal, snapshots, T.S. Eliot, The Bone People
10 Comments
Island Snapshots
— Big storm. Crashing surf. Mountains of spray. Wind so loud it literally shrieked. — Crazy bright stars. — Finished the novel Beware of Pity (New York Review Books Classics), by Stefan Zweig. Can’t believe it is not more well-known. … Continue reading
Excerpts from The Block Island Cookbook, 1962
I found this book in my house. It was compiled by the First Baptist Church on Block Island in 1962. The pastor at the time was fondly referred to as “Pastor Lou”, and the first page of the book helpfully … Continue reading
The Ladybug Symmetry
I have been thinking about a day on the beach many years ago when I came across two ladybugs on the sand and accidentally separated them. I was not in a good way that summer, morbid, paranoid, and sensitive to … Continue reading
On the island
— An orgy of reading. Recuperative. I am feeling less shattered than I have. But I hesitate to even say such things. They anger the gods. — Mitchell, Meghan and Luisa came out for the day and it was seriously … Continue reading
Posted in Personal
Tagged Block Island, Clark Gable, family, friends, Hedy Lamarr, snapshots, Walt Whitman
4 Comments
Maud Gonne: “Strike Me If I Shriek.”
A letter from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats, in December 1908. Yeats had come to visit Gonne where she was living in Paris. After years and years of friendship (not to mention what they called their “spiritual marriage”), it is … Continue reading