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Patrick Leigh Fermor, But Occult
“A few days after he had sent the Cuxa postcard, he read her some chapters from the autobiography of Michael Ashman, a minor travel writer who had walked across Europe in the late thirties…” The above passage comes up in the first third of M. John Harrison’s 1992 novel The Course of the Heart. I…
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“Glass Onion,” Round 2
Watched Rian Johnson’s latest film on the big screen solo last month, and watched it at my folks’ place this week while visiting. (I’d also watched Knives Out with them on a Jersey visit, so it seemed fitting.) Definitely a film that (for me, anyway) rewarded multiple viewings. And, good lord, Janelle Monáe’s work in…
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HOLIDAY CUSTOMS OF NEW JERSEY TOWNS, EPISODE 14: Okcidenta
Travel to the end of the interstate highway near the border of Monmouth and Ocean Counties and you’ll find what remains of the town of Okcidenta, founded in 1923 and later abandoned after the mayor and town council were implicated in a horse racing scandal. The town council numbered twenty-six residents in total; the town’s…
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Two years ago I bought a domain
I have a “professional” site up elsewhere. In the early days of the pandemic, I thought, What if I had another space somewhere? Somewhere for, shall we say, old-school blogging? And then pandemic-era depression set in and I did nothing else with this space for months. Scratch that, a year. Scratch that, two years. But…