Okay, I have a thing for Marcel Ophuls, the director and creator of both "The Sorrow and the Pity" done in the 60's and then a follow up which I love most, "Hotel Terminus: The Search for Klaus Barbie--1988." It isn't morbid or crazed Nazi hunting. What is it is interviews… Read full post »

Free Write:

I have always had wanderlust or wandering genes or some need to move about. No, not always. It started at 43 when my daughter was born. Then it escalated.  

This need to move is less a need to move to and more to leave from. It always is accompanied by the… Read full post »

                                Yitzhak Rabin in Bermuda

 I’ve never understood, not really, when writers’ say, "It was the day I… Read full post »

A week or two ago my daughter, bless her, said, "Mom, you are such a symbiotic type." I loved her use of that word and had a dim memory of long ago, writing in praise of it. When packing my writings, I found it, this old essay I am cutting way… Read full post »

I am leaving early tomorrow for a stop in Paris and then on Thursday the 4th onto Helsinki with a friend Jan Sand's age to see him and the city.

 Packing is always a bitch, esp with diabetes supplies up a wazoo. But I wanted now that I got rid of… Read full post »

               Who surfaced today, 40 years later

When I was nineteen and in college, Dr. B was the shrink everyone was sent to. I talked about him with folks at the West End bar which was our collective Columbia -Barnard hang out… Read full post »

 Harry Orange on the left, sleeping next to Casey three mere days ago

Sometimes I think I'm tough and maybe at times I am. But since Harry died, I have been unable to focus, to talk,  to think, to concentrate, hell unable to be.

Then I remember what my mom… Read full post »

 "Eighty percent of life is showing up" Woody Allen

1. Of Scarcity

Like many, I live in an uneven relation with love's abundance. For example, what I always wonder about Woody Allen’s famous line is: What about that twenty per cent and is this moment the time to not show up?

Though… Read full post »

Despite all manner of relation-al losses, I was doing fine. Also, I started on a new diabetes regime which required a new-ish drug called symlin, injected three times a day before means, a drug that lowers insulin and therefore reduces body fat. I of course talked to my great fun beloved… Read full post »

IMO we need an immediate response about the slowness here!!! I know everyone agrees.

In reading many and answering many yesterday, I actually realized that I needed a book in order to keep waiting.

David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again" was the one closest to m… Read full post »

Poor Emily Holleman who has had far too many letters from me of late.

I'm going to be brutally honest here even at the cost of embarrasing myself. I think there are two types when it come to shame. Those who have it in spades. And those who have guilt… Read full post »

The last draft was strewn about the room–the pages; the finaly galleys. I had six hours left, six hours to hand in the irreversible, the fianl corrections. My last chance to get the words and rhythms right. I had too many files on each chapter, couldn’t figure out whi… Read full post »

                                   True stories on writing a book 

        … Read full post »

 For our amazing daughter, who comes in at the end.

Eddie and I knew each other all our lives, and he lives on after his death last September, as the most vivid of all my many dead. For everyone who loved him, we say he's so vivid because he was… Read full post »

I have claimed and have lived a pretty moral life. Ethical.  I must have been a very… Read full post »

  Me at the Louvre

Yes, Paris is beautiful and yes, I've had a great time here for the most part. But I have to say that I disagree with those who think it is just divine. Maybe it is if you speak French well as once I did at merely 19,… Read full post »

I don't know if I can make an Open Call but this is my story:

I come from a family and a town, for that matter, where it was terrifying to me that everyone but everyone dressed so well, most especially my mom and my sister, and eventually my dad as… Read full post »

So much of what we read, assuming the writer is a good one and Anna Quindlen is way up there, depends on our mood and life circumstances at the time of reading.

Unlike many reviewers here, I adored the first half of this book, did not find one sentence or… Read full post »

Pretty gutsy thing to do, hmm?

It's been so long since this book was written, and I do not re-read it, or only once in a great while, and then the sections I like best, primarily the last two chapters.

I will discuss both the book here, and Israel. Which maybe… Read full post »

So I came here only to write a note to Deborah Young, who had worried about me in Israel, a note I had missed. I felt a little fear, to be honest. I wrote her anyway, with anxiety about being so near the real OS not the mail.  

 I remembered that Kathy Riordan… Read full post »

I  was here for over six months, obsessively.  Thanks to Deb I learned the ropes early on and read and commented with great interest. Then life lowered my free time and I had a book (novella) to write and I did. Now I have a second one to write. I can… Read full post »

Wish I were still writing and reading here.

I wanted to learn to write better and went to Tel Aviv. I learned what I instinctively knew when I first signed up for OS, that one gets only if one gives. Due to having a writing class of 8 brilliant persons, I knew I could not respond here, however much… Read full post »

Especially when life is hard, with hurdles one has no idea how to leap over,  and over here I'm in the midst of so many hurdles, so I find that   writing is soothing.

Maybe because I've done it for so long, it's merely a good habit. I couldn't answer why I write when… Read full post »

 Ed Kritzler circa 2005-- RIP

I haven't been here since June. At that time, Eddie, my ex and lifelong friend, had a successful operation removing his stomach and there were NO cancer cells. He was declared Cancer Free. Once he was out of the woods,  I c… Read full post »