Writing Life

Archive for January, 2010

Christmas season is now officially over. In our household Christmas lasts from the day we put up our artificial Christmas tree until the day we take it down again. We always put the tree up on the day after Thanksgiving. This year, that was November 27. We took the tree down today, January 10. Which means that the tree was up for a grand total of 45 days, or about an eighth of a year. Not bad for a couple of atheists. Read the rest of this entry »

The current foreclosure crisis nearly cost me my house. But my friend Darrell stands to lose a lot more. The crisis could cost him his life. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there a film that perfectly captures the emotional toll of the current foreclosure crisis? Is it The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford’s 1940 classic in which an impoverished family is forced off its land by the Great Depression? Could it be Country, the 1984 film in which Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard play a married couple struggling to keep the family farm from being repossessed by the bank? How about Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, in which Judith Anderson portrays a woman who chooses to die in the flames that engulf the mansion she loves rather than leave it? Read the rest of this entry »

2009 was the year that I finally tackled Anthony Trollope. Well, perhaps I didn’t actually tackle him, but he was in my grasp for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations!
Beginning today
You no longer have
A mortgage to pay. Read the rest of this entry »

The post office sometimes creates moral quandaries for me. A few years ago I had a mailman who occasionally delivered other people’s NetFlix movies to my house. Because it never occurred to me to check the addressee’s name on the envelope, I didn’t realize that a mistake had been made until I opened the envelope and discovered a DVD that I had never ordered. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the most interesting writings I’ve encountered are in pages that have never been published. In 2008, at a flea market in Sacramento, I purchased a diary kept by one George Hiromoto for the year 1944, during which time he was a prisoner at the Gila River Japanese Internment Camp in Arizona. The month after finding George’s diary, I returned to the Second Sunday Antique Faire and Flea Market and found another collection of fascinating unpublished writings. Read the rest of this entry »

Today my 16-year-old granddaughter Mallory came over to the house. She was seeking my help with a homework project that’s due tomorrow, a report on two literary works by renowned American author Zora Neale Hurston. There is not much I can help my grandchildren with. They all know more about computers and contemporary culture than I do. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years back, I ordered a boxed set of DVDs called “The Val Lewton Horror Collection” for my personal video library. By chance, the shipment arrived the day before Thanksgiving. Thus, my wife and I spent a good part of our Thanksgiving that year watching classic black-and-white horror films such as The Cat People, The Leopard Man, and, our personal favorite, I Walked With A Zombie. Ever since then it has been a tradition in our household to watch at least one horror flick on Thanksgiving. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately the government has been urging bankers and stockbrokers to eschew complicated derivatives and return to selling so-called “plain vanilla” financial products. I have a big problem with this. Read the rest of this entry »