Well, American Idol  is over for the season, and the right person won, much to everyone's amazement. By the time they got to the announcement, at the end of a lavish two-hour variety show spotlighting over-the-hill singers as diverse as Bryan Adams, Graham Nash, George Michael and Donna/… Read full post »

So Annie and her friend were walking their dogs along the beach at Dionis a few days ago. They decided to cut up to Tuppency links on their way back to town. That meant crossing some property lines, but on Nantucket in May, that’s a tradition as firmly entrenched as the Vineyard-Nantucket… Read full post »

My Dad has been on my mind lately,  as more and more of my friends join the quiet fraternity of the fatherless. He's a pervasive spirit, looking over my shoulder when I drink an India ale or eat a Hagen Daz bar, nodding when I cut a redundant sentence… Read full post »

I have always had a problem with the classics. I find them remote and forbidding. Dauntingly verbose, armored with generations of academic exegisis, their aura of difficulty and virtue sealed under a yellowing veneer of remote time periods and foreign cultures, they were always a chore. I read them… Read full post »

I hate wind. And it hates me just as much. Mere anthropomorphism? Don't be too sure. Living on this flat island in the Atlantic Ocean has convinced me that the wind has both a malignant intelligence and a nasty sense of humor. It's good for nothing but… Read full post »

Reading Bibliofiles' tuesday post took me back to Orwell's masterpiece and I read 1984 again, something everyone should do every few years. The novel remains always relevant, unfortunately. And it's always an inspiration.

Critics like  to dismiss the book as a quaint and dated/… Read full post »

So what do Google, Joe Biden and Colin Powell have in common? Each found themselves at the juncture of history and conscience; each had an opportunity to make a stand and change things for the better. Each of them failed. Each of them had a counterpart who was somehow… Read full post »

I don't know whether to refer to this as a 'wake up call' or a 'reality check' or maybe just skip the cliches altogether and present the facts.

For the last few months a thriller I wrote has been haunting the atrium of the Creative Artists Agency, ringing… Read full post »

Still thinking bout John  Fowles, a few days after finishing The French Lieutenant's Woman.  He wrote a brilliant essay ten years ago, treating his personality as a private club, "to which I belong, for my sins." The members were always at odds, including "one fathead who fancies himself a/… Read full post »

My relationship to books has always been carnal. It’s a safe, secret promiscuity. I remember my first childhood crushes, the puppy-love infatuation with the Hardy Boys books and the James Bond novels. I went steady with Albert Payson Terhune’s dog books for a while in grade school.
I sup/… Read full post »

I remember visiting Nantucket in 1979, walking down Main Street. Cool, interesting-looking people greeted each other in the cross walks, or chatted by the Gardiner’s Circle sign on Washington Street. The sign is a compass with the  distances from Nantucket to everywhere else inscribed ar/… Read full post »

After three and a half seasons, I want to see someone get lost on Lost. I mean, seriously – they’re stranded on a huge  tropical island which is nothing but beach and untracked jungle – with occasional hatches, compounds  and clearings for home-made golf courses. Anyone w/… Read full post »

I wear pink crocs.
My son got them originally, as part of a publicity give-away at party early June three years ago. They were too big for him. He didn’t like the color. I tried them on, just for fun -- and scarcely wore any other shoes until the/… Read full post »

From the film There Will Be Blood.

It's just out on DVD, wth various collector's deluxe editions, which got me thinking about the movie all over again. Many scenes in this one dimensional portrait of the monomanical capitalist as world-eating monster irked me. The ease with which… Read full post »

Modern criticism and political journalism have created a toxic new manifestation of Jung’s collective unconscious. Masses of critics and pundits, without any apparent connection (there is no evidence of a yearly town meeting where they decide this stuff), arrive at a universal consensus. It mi… Read full post »

For most of human history people have devised elaborate ways of classifying each others’ personalities. Race prejudice is an obvious example, a simple template which lets us know without a moment of observation or rational thought that this person is lazy and that one is stingy and… Read full post »

In the new spate of memoir scandals the newspapers are full of recriminations and finger pointing. Everyone feels that everyone else should have made the one phone call to L.A. County Child Services (for instance) that would have brought Margaret Seltzer’s crudely assembled deceit tum… Read full post »

I recently purchased the complete Twilight Zone on DVD and discovered that one season featured hour-long episodes. They were uniformly bad, and I began to feel that Rod Serling’s story-telling style required a half-hour format. I didn’t see those sixty minute stories as a kid, because th/… Read full post »