Archive | Book Matters
Dishes are clean, laundry is done, floors are polished, surfaces are gleaming. Permakitten Grace and I are lounging by the open window, basking in the afternoon light, the sailing breeze. I’m reading a Betsy-Tacy book, my jag of revisiting favorite childhood books not remotely over. Grace is perched on the sill, studying the twentysomethings on the street with great interest. Ella’s “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” comes on the stereo, and it feels just right. It’s quite something when you realize the most you can muster is a pleasurable sort of melancholy, an open-ended longing, but that’s 2016 in a nutshell so far.Through the Future, Darkly
I wake with the sun. The air is as sweet as it ever gets in Brooklyn; the early morning, as gentle and warm. My permakitten creeps next to me on our fire escape and together we study the city, so pretty while it sleeps. And yet. I keep thinking about how easily sweet the air was in the country. How my sheets and nightclothes felt and smelled when I’d dried them in the sun rather than the laundromat. How I’d slept. Continue Reading →
Sunshine Noir: A 5-Film Primer
It’s that time of year again. Technically it’s spring, but less technically it’s “sprintertime,” in which the weather, somedays cold and gray, still feels an awful lot like wintertime. The best way to cure such April blues? Sunshine noir films, in which the typically dark and shadowy film noir genre – all private eyes, drifters, con men, and love triangles – are dragged into the sunlight, just like we want to be. Here are some iconic examples of the genre, all of which are book adaptations. Continue Reading →