Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.
I don't much like Singapore. It's very big, very modern and very urbanised. As a rule, I prefer older places where you get a sense of the history.
Dear bells! how sweet the sound of village bells When on the undulating air they swim!
The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.
I grew up in Lake Orion, Mich. What was best about Lake Orion where, where we grew up was it was a suburb of Detroit but had a lot of open space around.
Nothing marks the change from the city to the country so much as the absence of grinding noises. The country is never silent. But its sounds are separate, distinct, and as it were, articulate.
And so I love films that are kind of rural in atmosphere. And you know, it's just a nice place to be day after day. All be it, it can be hard, it can be hard work. You can get hot.
There is a gentleness in Michigan that you just can't replicate.
A clock struck out the hour of twelve, and the bird in the hedgerow was still singing as we marched out to the roadway, and followed our merry pipers home to town.
The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.
