Category: Columns

  • Strine Wine

    When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he…

  • A Tale of Two Tales

    I just saw Memoirs of a Geisha. In the movie, there’s a scene where the geishas play a drinking game with their clients. Somebody tells two stories, and then everybody else has to guess which is true. With that idea in mind, I have two stories for you this month. Story #1 goes like this.…

  • A Valentine Across the Fence

    Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial…

  • A Winter Warmer

    These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the…

  • Hang In There, Baby!

    I live in utter fear of motivational products—those soundbites of schlocky uplift that appear on calendars and posters, accentuating images of glorious sunsets, soaring eagles, big-eyed children dressed as cute hobos, and kittens dangling precariously from tree branches by their tiny, razor-sharp claws. It’s because there lives inside me a deep-seated anxiety that everything I…

  • In Memory of Richard Pryor

    I had begun writing on an entirely different subject for this month’s column—plea bargaining—but then a friend called to tell me that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III had died. I put all thoughts about plea bargains aside, went down to my basement, and dug out an old Pryor album. Staring at it, I was…