Main category.
I went to a panel discussion yesterday on writing about family as part of the Tennessee Williams Festival and must say I think I learned more about writing about family from Tom and Rose, the play we saw last night that was a mash up of Williams’ intertwined relations with his disturbed sister and his use of her as character after character in his work. Williams called New Orleans the first city where the spirit…
The Tennessee Williams Festival started on Thursday and it is always one of my favorite festivals in the city – and this from a city whose festivals never quit. Yesterday morning I went to a panel discussion on one of my favorite authors, Walker Percy, and listened to three Southern writers discuss The Moviegoer. The feelings this all aroused was a watershed of my first wanting to write at the tender age of 20, my…
A friend forwarded this video to me about a revolution in education and yet the revolution is a throwback to an education system that worked that we then changed and institutionalized and silo’d ages and sometimes gender and lost all of this momentum. I went to see a woman talk about her life in Tibet and how children are educated by throwing everyone in the classroom together and the older kids help the younger kids…
I woke this morning to this out my front window: And this in the news: Syrian Troops Open Fire on Protesters in Several Cities Budget Impasse Increasing Risk of U.S. Shutdown Japan Encourages a Wider Evacuation From Reactor Area Hundreds of Thousands Flee Ivory Coast Crisis Catholic Order Reaches $166 Million Settlement With Sexual Abuse Victims
I signed up for the NOPD listing of crime in the 1st and 3rd district and I’m a little sad I did. I have received in the past couple of days two disturbing notices about two young men who died. Two separate incidences. They died not because of anything more stupid than they had guns. One had a gun and the other had a gun and they got in an argument and shot. Good grief!…
I was walking by the Wildlife and Fisheries building across from the Royal Orleans and it was actually so beautiful outside I found myself almost like a character in a book that I’m writing in my head. I had walked by several young black men, all very, very handsome (the eyes of some New Orleans blacks are so distinctively ethereal it’s hard to describe, they are a lighter shade of brown, entering a gold or…
I ran into two women I see at yoga all the time and one asked me what are you doing here as I was at a panel discussion (Tennessee Williams Festival) on writing about music and the question seemed so odd and so I stammered, “Well, I’m a writer and you know, well what are you doing here?” The one responded, “We’re on the panel.” And then they moved towards the stage. I stood waiting…
So I ran into my first love’s ex who is a mystery writer and I said it’s sad about him, dead, hard to believe. She said I spoke to him for ten minutes and it was sweet. And I had waited by my cellphone but alas he was too close to death’s door to talk by phone. Instead a mutual friend had read him a note I’d written. Sad, I said. And we parted ways.
I was reading likethevodka and thought oh, this is so familiar. When I first got together with Zsa Zsa as my neighbor calls Tatjana, I thought this is deja vu becuase I grew up with my father who sounded like Desi Arnez times 100. “Why not read the sick-lopedia?” he would ask me. Meanwhile, we have survived into our fourth year of not understanding each other 80% of the time, which we chalk up to…
I was born in 1959 and if you are my age then you might remember the anxiety the Cold War produced in us kids and how I used to have nightmares about a plane crashing into the moon across an inky blue sky and then the world coming to an end. Well, I just got a notice from a kid’s site telling me as a parent how to reduce the anxiety in my child over…