No Matter What Their Background, The Southern

The Great Thing About Having Money Is That You Can Actually Just Get On With Your Life And Not Have To Think About Paying The Bills Or Crouch Over The Wall Street Journal Or The Financial Times And Look At The Stock Figures And Things Like That. That Bores Me Rigid.

The Day When A Frenchman Switches From The Formality Of Vous To The Familiarity Of Tu Is A Day To Be Taken Seriously. It Is An Unmistakable Signal That He Has Decided - After Weeks Or Months Or Sometimes Years - That He Likes You. It Would Be Chulish And Unfriendly Of You Not To Return The Compliment. And So, Just When You Are At Last Feeling Comfortable With Vous And All The Plurals That Go With It, You Are Thrust Headlong In To The Singular World Of Tu.

Next To The Defeated Politician, The Writer Is The Most Vocal And Inventive Griper On Earth. He Sees Hardship And Unfairness Wherever He Looks. His Agent Doesn’t Love Him (enough). The Blank Sheet Of Paper Is An Enemy. The Publisher Is A Cheapskate. The Critic Is A Philistine. The Public Doesn’t Understand Him. His Wife Doesn’t Understand Him. The Bartender Doesn’t Understand Him.

Day After Day We Looked For Rain, And Day After Day We Saw Nothing But The Sun. Lavender That We Had Planted In The Spring Died. The Patch Of Grass In Front Of The House Abandoned Its Ambitions To Become A Lawn And Turned Into The Dirty Yellow Of Poor Straw. The Earth Shrank, Revealing Its Knuckles And Bones, Rocks And Roots That Had Been Invisible Before.

Prescription For Writer’s Block: Fear Of Poverty.