Word: edgar
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...mother is partly fanciful. She has the melodramatic sulfur of the mad mom in one of David Sedaris' "memoir" stories, the domineering vindictiveness of a shrew-mother from 40s movies. In fact, she's played in the film by none other than Ann Savage, the virulent megabitch Vera in Edgar G. Ulmer's cheapo noir classic Detour. That was 62 years ago, and now, at 86, she is the icy Queen Maddin, standing in for all the city's overbearing women. (As narrator, he says, "Never underestimate the tenacity of a Winnipeg mother"). Still she pops up unbidden...
...prize for allusion must go to veteran American writer John Edgar Wideman. In response to Luc Lang's subversive tale of a zookeeper who teaches kids a lesson by getting his birds to bite them, Wideman pens a single, luminous, 2 1/2-page sentence about an American in Brittany who hears what he wrongly thinks is a demented young boy babbling incoherently. The story's title, Wolf Whistle, is the same as a 1993 Lewis Nordan novel about Emmett Till, the real-life civil rights martyr whose name Wideman's character eventually invokes: " ... I saw for the first time two parrots...
...Washington. Gourmet restaurants are taking notice. Labels like Santa Teresa's 1796--a top Hamilton pick for its "honey smooth" finish--from Venezuela are after-dinner favorites at Cacao in Miami. "It reminds me of the global market shift to New World wines," says Cacao's chef-owner, Edgar Leal, who has begun hosting aged-rum tastings. "The same is happening with digestifs...
After Robert Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961, the Justice Department waged a war against organized crime. Despite the foot dragging of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had long claimed there was no Mafia, the Justice Department indicted 116 members of the Mob. Bobby also undertook a personal vendetta against Hoffa, who was convicted of jury tampering and pension-fund fraud in separate trials...
...nonfiction. I have just been reading a book about Arab culture. Another book about a young man who got drawn into Islamist groups in his late teens. I am reading a book about the peculiarly English nature of evolutionary theory. I just read a long story by Edgar Allen Poe. A novel by a friend of mine called John Preston called, The Dig, which I think is very fine. I am fairly omnivorous I guess. Hmm? what is by the bedside? I am re-reading Christopher Hitchen's book on God, because I am going to be on stage talking...