Member-only story
Internet Diary 12/22–12/29
Ring and Run
Dreams, recipes, links, unsent tweets, facts that stick around.
“I’m sorry, I can’t read anything right now, but have fun with it!”
— Unsent tweet from my draft’s file, with no available context, back in March.
I woke up the other day to the sound of a doorbell. My husband was still asleep. I got up and went to the door and no one was outside. “Did you hear a doorbell,” I asked him, later, when he woke up. “We don’t have one,” he said. “We have a knocker.” There hadn’t been anyone at the door for so long, I didn’t remember this. It was apparently a dream, a very short dream, long enough to wake me up, like the day playing ring and run.
“Years ago, when he was thinking about writing an autobiography, John le Carré recounts, he hired two detectives to research him and his family. As the son of a flamboyant con man, as a spy for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and as a novelist who spent his days making up things, truth and memory tended to blur together: “I’m a liar, I explained. Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practiced in it as a novelist.” He was interested in learning the facts of his life, he told the detectives — since, “as a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.””
— from the beginning to a review Michiko Kakutani wrote of the one book of autobiographical writing John le Carré published. She shared it on Twitter the day he died.
A tweet about favorite Wong Kar Wai scenes sends me on a search for them which leads me to Films at Lincoln Center online, where they are having a Wong Kar Wai online festival.
The wonderful poet Jean Valentine has died, and so social media is full of her poems. This one stood out to me tonight.
If you ever wonder, “Where did hamburgers come from,” Louis’ in New Haven makes that claim.
The Huffington Post was founded in 2005, which means my memory of reading it in 2004 is either a delusion, the memory…
