The Writing Life
Musings, Books, Observations, Wanderings
Coming Soon!
The Jew and the Jackal
by Lark Gould
A journalist and photographer head out on their own to cover the scoop of a lifetime. What they get instead are life lessons in the power of observation and the perils of becoming the observed
Musings
The Island that Time Forgot, Remembered
We trudged off to the land beyond our oceans to find bats that were bigger than we were, four-eyed fish with bone structures that pre-dated the dinosaurs…
Finding Ghosts in Hanoi: Hotel Métropole
Graham Greene stayed there. And so did Joan Baez, Jane Fonda and Charlie Chaplin. And then came Donald Trump. The Hotel Métropole in Hanoi has seen its share of dictators…
Dancing at the Wall in Tunisia
When I last visited Tunisia it was 1984. The government had chosen to end subsidies on wheat and bread. The public rose up, people were killed, discussions happened in whispers…
11 Howard: Inventing Art and Anna
I didn’t stay at 11 Howard in New York. Rather, I drew it in and breathed it scene by scene, room by room, all 14 floors of it. There was a lot of talk about it in the day…
The Last Time I Saw Richard
It wasn’t Detroit in ’68. It was not even Richard. It was dark. It was dark café days. And it was a time when the U.S. was at war with itself. It wasn’t the first time but it was not to be the last…
Bruegel Brings It All Back Home
Bruegel painted it; Auden eulogized it; an article by Elisa Gabbert today’s NYT shined a light on it, and I felt it. It’s a musing on a 1560 painting by Pieter Bruegel the elder…
To Joan, the Day Before you Died
I never liked you Joan Didion. In life, I doubt we’d be friends. You would not have approved of me – whatever my accomplishments or gains that would have lead me through your door…
Forgetting on the Day We Danced
And then there was the dancing in the dark, in the jungles of muddy roads and unfamiliar camps. I was in Nigeria and the air was thick with the scent of decay and the buzzing of bugs…