Her short story, “The Terrapin,” in which a disturbed boy murders his mother with a kitchen knife after she boils a tortoise alive, Highsmith merged food issues with her own mother issues to a magnificently bent level of hysteria and horror: The dark side of domesticity. An anorexic in ...
As for those brushes with the law which often harvest in the films, mine arrived in Texas a long time back; an off-duty cop gave me his pocketknife for security and afterward taught me to two-step. The cops of Hollywood are benign. The figures are, also. They kidnap police officers ...
He wrote songs about our place on earth: the everywhere fields of corn, the third-growth forests, the humpbacked hills and grooved-out draws. The knife-sharp cold, the too-short days, the snow, the snow, the snow. His songs were our anthems—they were our bullhorns and microphones and...