954 Hillside Terrace, Pasadena, California There are houses that impress by arriving loudly, and others that seem to have grown into their site by degrees. The house at 954 Hillside Terrace in Pasadena belongs to the latter category: a 1965 mid-century residence folded into the trees of the San Rafael neighbourhood, where architecture, landscape andContinue reading “A House in the Trees: Kristen Wiig’s Modernist Pasadena Retreat”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Chapter 39: Summertime
The coursework is getting harder, so I’m being kept busy, and I can’t wait for summer to arrive. There are highlights, too. I go up to see Topper at Harvard when I can, and I visit Cornelia at Radcliffe as well. She’s found herself a boyfriend, a cute, scatterbrained boy with a soft heart andContinue reading “Chapter 39: Summertime”
Difficult Men: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels and What We Have Made of Them
Rochester broods. Heathcliff rages. Huntingdon drinks. The men of the Brontë novels have been romanticised for nearly two centuries. It may be time to look at them more carefully. By Bergotte There is a moment in Jane Eyre that readers have been arguing about since 1847. Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall, has just revealedContinue reading “Difficult Men: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels and What We Have Made of Them”
Chapter 38: Trying to Get to You
Texas, 10 April 1956 Dear Birdsong, I’m flying around the country for personal appearances. I can’t begin to tell you about it, so I won’t! But I can promise you one thing: if you’re back with Miss Mary for your birthday this year, I will be too. I miss you, but you don’t seem toContinue reading “Chapter 38: Trying to Get to You”
The Human Condition According to Homer
By Bergotte There is a moment in the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad that has no real parallel in world literature. Priam, the aged king of Troy, has crossed enemy lines in the dark, slipped past the Greek sentinels, and entered the tent of Achilles — the man who killed his son, who dragged thatContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Homer”
Chapter 37: Rowan Oak
I bring Topper to the South for Easter in 1956. The boy is in Los Angeles, so we don’t see him. It feels strangely empty to be back home without him here. On Easter Sunday, he’s in San Diego for the Milton Berle Show. I drive over to visit his parents and see their newContinue reading “Chapter 37: Rowan Oak”
Den enfaldige mördaren
Essay · Film & Memory The Angels of Skåne Hans Alfredson’s Den enfaldige mördaren — released in 1982 and almost entirely unknown outside Scandinavia — is one of the great films of its decade: a fable of class, cruelty, and avenging grace set in the flat southern Swedish countryside, carrying in its long frame aContinue reading “Den enfaldige mördaren”
Chapter 36: Mystery Train
The boy is now a superstar. I can’t explain it. I’ve never experienced anything like it, nor, I believe, has America. It’s unnerving. It makes me nauseous. Sometimes, when it fully hits me, the realisation of it, I have what can only be described as a nervous breakdown: strange, weepy convulsions. “This can’t be goodContinue reading “Chapter 36: Mystery Train “
A Room with a View
Essay · Literature & Ideas The View From the Window and the Cost of Looking A Room with a View is a comedy, and it is a love story, and it is a novel about Florence, and it is a sustained philosophical argument about the relationship between the body and the soul that Forster dressedContinue reading “A Room with a View”
Mel Brooks at 100: the Brooklyn kid who turned laughter into a weapon
As the last surviving titan of America’s golden age of comedy reaches his centenary, we celebrate a man who spent eight decades proving that the surest way to defeat a monster is to make a room full of strangers laugh at it There is a story Mel Brooks likes to tell about The Producers. AContinue reading “Mel Brooks at 100: the Brooklyn kid who turned laughter into a weapon”
My World of Interiors 