Alexander Stuart

       I just meditated and swam beneath the moon and stars, a truly wonderful start to the week. The impulse to swim at night always reminds me of Paul Bowles' magnificent novel, The Sheltering Sky - and in particular a passage where Kit finds herself, at night, looking into a garden at a wide pool, surrounded by graceful palm trunks: "She stood staring at the calm dark surface of the water; straightaway she found it impossible to know whether she had thought of bathing just before or just after seeing the pool..." Her swim becomes a revelation: "She stepped out into the moonlight and waded slowly toward the center of the pool. Its floor was slippery with clay; in the middle the water came to her waist. As she immersed herself completely, the thought came to her: 'I shall never be hysterical again.' That kind of tension, that degree of caring about herself, she felt she would never attain them any more in her life." From Paul Bowles' The

   My novel, The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition , including my diary of the making of Tim Roth's multi-award-winning film of the book, is now available on Amazon Kindle for only $4.99.

     Our son is lucky enough to go to a school that has its own bamboo forest, a completely magical space that can enchant adults just as much as children. The scale of the forest and the wondrous passageways through the bamboo take you completely out of your immediate world and place you not simply in nature, but nature at its most primal. There is for me something unique about bamboo. I love all plants, and some people prefer a palette of colors with flowers all around, but the swaying green and golden-dry bamboo shoots and leaves of any species (and there are almost 1500 species of bamboo in the world) stir my spirit in a way that is quite profound. Watch the extraordinary "Bamboo Forest" fight sequence (on YouTube ) from Ang Lee's masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for a sense of the scale of bamboo in the wild, and its beauty. As someone with a passion for gardening, I also enjoy growing bamboo - although it is a plant that you must be wary of, sinc

      I love the films of Sofia Coppola - I think she is one of the most truly original and gifted filmmakers of her generation, with a unique personal vision quite different from her father's or any of her contemporaries. Since The Virgin Suicides , through the stunning Lost in Translation (Bill Murray's best performance, even including the unforgettable Groundhog Day ), and including Marie Antoinette - which I loved for its pure surface-quality and removed sense of being in the Royal Palace, almost totally unaware of the French Revolution unfolding outside (while listening to Bow Wow Wow, of course!) - Sofia Coppola has created haunting, dreamlike works that, to my mind, are like a kind of post-modern "world-suburb" alienation akin to Antonioni at his finest. Her vision may to some extent be privileged, it may have something to do with Warhol's love of surface (she sat upon his knee as a child at family gatherings), but it is unique and just as meaningf

Just discovered a very cool cartoon blog called Hyperbole and a Half by Allie . Don't know much about it or Allie but I just love it...fresh, like the produce:)