These Small Hours
Taped to the bottom of the monitor at my writing desk are the words: Novelist plumbed the soul’s depths. These words, now yellowed, are taken from a newspaper clipping of a Los Angeles Times obituary I carefully cut from the paper on the morning of November 2nd, 2006. William Styron was dead. Now that he […]
At the time of his death, Camus had been at work on a novel which mortality forbad him to complete. What he managed to put on the page was published, as he left it, thirty-five years after his end. The novel is entitled The First Man. It tells the story of a young boy named […]
Recently, I revisited a particular scene in Mel Stuart’s 1971 musical fantasy, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. Of a heavy evening, the poor paper boy Charlie Bucket arrives at the laundry where his mother, Mrs. Bucket is working late. He offers to walk her home, but the impromptu visit is really intended to lessen […]