John Baker’s Blog

In this piece from Dick Jones Patteran Pages he responds to a grim physical illness and the prospect of the debilitating effects of powerful immunosuppressants:
And yet, for all my hopes for future endurance, I need powerfully to disengage myself from both past and future as the principal determinants of present functioning. I need to locate [...]

Go to Otherwise and play around in the archives.
For several weeks she and her brother–she, a 55-year-old woman with a bad right kidney and strangling liver and arthritis in her wrists and thumbs, and brother, a 40-year-old 95-pound retarded man with alopecia and a worrisome white count–had struggled to pack up and carry away the [...]

Italian conservative leader, Silvio Berlusconi, was asked by a young female voter how she could bridge the poverty gap. His answer was, ‘You should look to marry a millionaire, like my son, or someone who doesn’t have such problems.’
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The Swiss assisted suicide group Dignitas, which was evicted from its flat in Zurich after complaints [...]

Chris Routledge in Guardian Unlimited diagnoses how a really classy writer, like Dashiell Hammett, can make a diversion from their plot lead right to the story’s heart.
The story of Flitcraft is a simple one. A successful real-estate agent, with a happy family life and money in the bank, Flitcraft steps out of the office for [...]