March 29, 2012 – 11:03 am
This week, America’s intelligentsia have been thrilled, ravished and agonised by the long-awaited return of Madmen and the sudden death new mini-series, Obamacare v Supreme Court. SCOTUS normally allocates an hour for these kinds of legal challenges; with Obamacare/ACA they have put aside three days. (And the verdict is …) Things always connect, so I’m [...]
October 7, 2011 – 11:04 am
Diana Gribble at home, September 2011 Prefactory babble: most remarkable (The eulogy below; skip this preface as you will.) Yesterday, jangling phone, Constant Gardener saying: it’s a terrible line, ring back in five and I’ll get Chong to answer on a better connection. Seeing that I was asleep, reasonable at 7:45 am after a late [...]
October 5, 2011 – 11:13 am
How do you lose someone? It is why we can’t take anything for granted, though we do that every minute. When I heard that Diana, great friend and much admired and adored person, had passed away last night, it had already seemed a long time coming, though she had only been ill three months. She [...]
August 2, 2011 – 11:01 am
At the morning kaffeklatsch with my yoga group Amy Winehouse came up, which reminded me of this great bit of writing about the tragic beehive. It was posted in the London Review of Books blog and takes off from this fascinating photo. Lidija Haas writes: In my favourite picture of Amy Winehouse, she’s holding a [...]
I’m reading Sebastian Smee’s essay on the late, great painter Lucian Freud. Freud says: ‘I was quite pleased when John Wonnacott said “You are a marvellous painter of flesh but you can’t compose,” I thought “Oh good”, because I felt that the way I put things looked awkward, in the way that life looks awkward.’ [...]
Dennis Hopper: “you kids, you got no respect for nothing” “After many hours of listening to Hopper talk … it became increasingly clear that he needed to tell his own story … When I think about Hopper, I hear his voice in my head: the nasal Kansas vowels; the cowboy twang; and last but not [...]
