It’s possible that no road trip book tour would be complete without a discussion of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: in Search of America. He talked about the uniqueness of every journey, each like a snowflake with different patterns and idiosyncrasies. Thus, he said, every different person who traveled the same road he did would have […]
The first time I walked into my house, it was filled full with someone else’s stuff. The couple who lived here had remained childless and were nearing retirement age. The wife’s mother had lived here with them until she died, and they were alone again, ready to downsize, put everything into storage and move into […]
So, even though Kerouac didn’t have the Interstates to drive on, he at least had a series of US and state highways to get him where he was going. Even when he was touring Mexico, there were well defined motor ways. And before Kerouac took his journeys, my Oklahoma neighbors to the north still had […]
I keep coming back to Roads by Larry McMurtry because driving the US interstates is a common journey that most Americans can relate to. Despite all our differences, these roads connect us to each other. They flow through us all, just as red blood flows through our arteries.
I could truly relate to McMurtry’s journey, because […]
I’ll admit it. Strange Brew is my favorite Hamlet tribute film of all time. It’s got a heroine (Pamela) instead of a hero, and instead of a prince, she’s an heiress to her father’s corporate empire. It has the ghost of her father communicating from the dead through an 80s video game machine, and a duplicitous […]
My earliest knowledge of Richard III was watching Richard Dreyfus play a flamboyantly gay hunchback in The Goodbye Girl. I didn’t know the story, I just knew Richard was a serious dude with a bad back, and he wasn’t meant to be a joke.
When we visited the Tower of London, we walked through the Bloody Tower […]
My fourth review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge explores a book of poetry by Robinson Jeffers, poet of Big Sur. Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems gives us a nice look into the poet’s prolific but not always popular career, spanning his life along the California coast with images of Carmel, […]
We took our little dog for a walk in the park last weekend, and as we were leaving, I looked out the window and said, “Golly, are those men playing cricket?” And indeed, they were.
Cricket may have originated in England, but it comes to Dallas/Fort Worth by way of India. Certainly, imperialism has its evils, […]
My second review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me on a canoe trip down a wild river in northern Georgia. Although the Cahulawassee River referenced in James Dickey’s Deliverance is fictional, the rapids and the cliffs, the forests and the kudzu are a very real and beautiful part of that country. Both the […]
When I think back on it, I really don’t know what to believe about things my ex-boyfriend told me. His brother said to me after we broke up, “S- is the biggest liar I know.” Of course, at the time I was dating S-, I believed everything; I was under his spell. His youngest brother […]