family matters!

The next pages of “Tinkers” are taken up with Howard’s wife’s decision to commit him to a funny farm.  It’s easy to set up Kathleen, as a bitch, but this would be to remain at the level of good guys, bad guys, witches and angels (or vampires and angels), and of course that will  not […]

George waited until Saturday to run away.  He hitched Prince Edward to his father’s wagon and led the animal and wagon out to the road …
Kathleen said to Howard, George has run away.  He said, How do you know?  She said, He left Joe alone in the toolshed.   He didn’t split the wood.  He didn’t […]

This is one of the finest days of 2010, at least here in Trégastel.  It’s sunny but cool, with a constant breeze.  I can’t help be go back over the pages of “Tinkers” where the wind plays the role angels played in the Old and New Testaments.
Max Weber was right to see and state that […]

There is much to be said for “Inception.”  It’s not something that will go away with a whimper.  People will continue talking about it, and when it comes out in DVD Blue Ray, etc., the conversation will be rebooted.  In the meantime, despite the images and the musical score of this unusual surprising film, I […]

This is the transcript of a conversation with Paul Harding, the author of “Tinkers.”   It can be referenced at OpenLoop Press.

My maternel grandparents grew up in northern Maine and led very difficult, very impoverished lives, and even though I always went back up there with my grand-father fly-fishing and all this sort of stuff, subsequently, […]

These passages have yet to be commented upon by the critics.  They are among the most dense and beautiful of the novel.  Charlie finds a book in a box in an attic, and brings it with him to George’s bedside.  But even this is subject to doubt.  Was it Charlie who found the book?  Or […]

One of the most pertinent categories I have come upon in my “travels” (from one blog to another) is the idea of the tear-jerker.  Everybody uses this expression — it’s immediately understandable.  Maudlin would be the college dictionary equivalent. 
I’m reading “Tinkers” by Paul  Harding, and I’m saying to myself: this is pretty much of a […]

On the 23rd I copied out two exerpts from “Tinkers.”  Please remember how the second one begins:
“A wind would come up through the trees, sounding like a chorus, so like a breath then, so sounding like a chorus, the breath of thousands of souls gathering itself up somewhere in the timber lining the bowls and […]

I vacationing in Brittany, at the seaside resort town of Trégastel.  I left “Hidden Buddhas” behind in Paris, but I want to do something here, an exercise of sorts, which was often practiced by cinema critiques, both in English speaking countries and in France, i.e., to talk about the film based only on your memories […]

Here we are back with the seagulls.  There’s a wonderful passage from “The Thousand Autumns” describing the flight of gulls over myriad human realities, most of which have been touched upon in the novel.  Nobody anywhere who has paid attention to the sights and sounds produced by gulls can be indifferent to this idea that […]