Daily Blague

Robert Stone's Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties has made me look back to the most troubled decade that I have lived through. Having recovered from the Depression and World War II, the nation proceeded to fall apart, and it has been falling apart ever since. What folly! To found a New World of Hope and Promise - upon the scripture Hebrew Bible! It could never work, and it hasn't. One day we will grow up and do something about it. For the moment, we seem to be stuck in a jam, between those for whom the Sixties revealed what we might be, and those for whom the Sixties was the end of a cherished order. I wish that I could be as good-humored about the period as Mr Stone is. He has written a dandy memoir, more about the times than about himself, and more than once it brought the very smell of the time back with a rush. 

What I'm reading now: Olaf Olafsson's Valentines - one story a day - and E M Forster's A Room With a View, for the third time. And, perhaps prodded by Prime Green, I'm finally opening up Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975.

Don't miss this hilariously mortifying study of how we civilians look to Tech Support. And be sure to check out some British writers' rooms. Only Beryl Bainbridge's desk doesn't face a wall. I need a room to look out into. (Thanks to Patricia for both!)

Read about Prime Green at Portico.