The Wonderful Pen

This Side of Paradise

2012-01-26T18:01:00.001-07:00

"Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'?
No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody."
p. 192

"That was a misfortune; this has been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the channels you were searching last year."
"What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?"
"Perhaps in itself...but you're developing. This has given you time to think and you're casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels..."
"But, Monsignor, I can't do the next thing."
"Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall."
"Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do."
"We do it because we're not personalities, but personages...Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on...while a personality is active, it overrides 'the next thing.' Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he's done. He's a bar on which a thousand things have been hung--glittering things sometimes, as ours are."
"And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I needed them." Amory continued the simile eagerly.
"Now you've a clean start...You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing!"
p. 94-95

"When I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach----"
"Happy families try to make people feel that way," said Tom cynically.
p. 192

This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Steinbeck on love

2012-01-26T17:46:00.002-07:00

And don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens -- The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

-John Steinbeck, in a letter to his son

Non-space

2011-11-08T21:08:00.000-07:00

Lorelai: "I just need...space."
Max: "Well I don't. In fact, I want as little space as possible. A hundred clowns crammed into a Volkswagen, that's the kind of non-space I'm talking about."

♥ Max Medina.

Hemingway

2011-11-02T18:50:00.000-06:00

The world breaks everyone and afterward
many are strong in the broken places.

-Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Feelings

2011-10-23T17:28:00.001-06:00

Some excerpts from a really great article by H. Wallace Goddard on interpreting feelings (which ones come from Satan, or from God).

Full article here.

“That which doth not edify is not of God, and is darkness” (D&C 50:23). The impression [of sister being bitten by a rattlesnake] I had was from Satan, not God. God does not mock, cajole, annoy, torment, or tease us. It is contrary to His nature. It is Satan who is the father of lies and misery.

Feelings and impressions are only creditable if they come with that signature lilt that testifies that they are from God. Otherwise they are no better guides for wise living than a fortune cookie at a second-rate Chinese takeout.

Satan likes to keep us in a state of low-grade unrest. He wants us bothered and fretful enough that we do not break into joy and goodness. But he does not want us irritated enough to take off our spiritual shoes and shake out the pebbles.

I have learned that a heavy sense of sadness is not some sure indicator of our spiritual failure. It often means that we are simply tired. It can also mean that Satan is trying to “interrupt [our] rejoicing” (Alma 30:22).
Satan loves to have us feel irritated with our spouses, children, our bishop, our co-workers, and our lives. He relishes misery and he knows that the best way to get humans to consume massive quantities of misery is to subtly sneak it into our daily diet. One spoonful at a time we consume tons of murk.

So, are feelings to be distrusted or ignored? Will they only lead us into trouble?

A sweet Christian couple in a rural Utah town came to know and love a young man in their neighborhood. When he was preparing to leave for his mission, he invited them to attend his farewell even though they were not LDS. They attended. In fact they felt warmed and blessed by the music and messages in the service. They later consulted their minister. “Why did we feel so good when we were at that LDS service?” The minister’s response: “You can’t trust your feelings. Never listen to your feelings!”

If that counsel were put into action, it would undermine one of God’s chief ways of communicating with us. It would leave us at the mercy of cold---and fallible---logic. It would leave us shivering.
God recommends otherwise. Paul listed the first fruits of the Spirit as “love, joy, and peace” (Galatians 5:22). Those fruits have a distinctly emotional character. If the Spirit is our sure guide and He primarily speaks to us through feelings, we must not discount feelings as a guide in our lives.

Yet not all feelings are created equal. Some are more trustworthy than others.

Brother Dayley has wisely observed that “we know we are learning under the influence of the Holy Ghost if we are being edified. Edification is characterized by a perception of goodness, a noticeable enlarging of the soul, and enlightenment of the mind. Those who desire to learn by faith must continually reject darkness and seek light” (K. Newell Dayley, (1994). “And Also by Faith.” Brigham Young University 1993-94 devotional and fireside speeches. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University.)

We can test any impression by its sweet, inviting nature and by its consonance with good sense. We should join our minds with our hearts in discerning God’s will. That can be a powerful combination. Our minds can provide a unique balance to our feelings.

If you are as good as I am at rationalization and self-deception, then you know the importance of cultivating spiritual sensitivity. This is a lifelong process. Most of my spiritual blunders were the result of listening too selectively to the messages of my emotions and treating logic as a servant to discernment rather than a partner and friend. Our impulsive desires can get in the way of what the Lord wants for us unless partnered with good sense.

What are the principles of emotional management? I recommend a very selective attending to feelings.
Ignore negative feelings. Go toward the light. Push away darkness. “Look to me in every thought; doubt not, fear not” (D&C 6:36).

There is an exception to the general rule of ignoring bad feelings. On special occasions God may send a warning feeling of foreboding. There is a way to discern whether it comes from Father. When darkness comes from Satan, it leaves us feeling hopeless and helpless. If Father sends a warning, it will be attended by clear and specific instructions for getting out of the darkness and into the Light.

Most instances of gloominess settle over us without providing a clear message to our minds. In such a situation we can ask God, “Is there something you want me to know?”

If He does not give specific instructions and if we are doing what we believe to be right, we should dismiss and dispatch the feeling. God is not the author of gloom. We can fight darkness with faith and gratitude.

I suggest that we learn to tune in to the subtle whisperings of Heaven. Notice the gentle nudge to offer kind words. Enjoy the wisp of love that comes unbidden in our daily lives. Dwell on feelings of peace and spiritual reassurance. Be grateful for every hint of goodness.

When we are less experienced, Satan will try to block such impressions by asking us, “Maybe that is just your own selfish desires talking! It is all just self-delusion.”

Satan wants us to turn from light to darkness. But, if, for example, we have asked God how we can better serve Him and a clear impression comes that is consistent with what the Bishop or goodly parent might ask us to do, we should do it. If, in the course of our day, we feel inexplicably happy, we should thank Heaven.

Listen to the echoes

2011-05-25T20:42:00.003-06:00

Weller: ...you wrote that early on in your writing career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas, "the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton," and so on. Do you still do this?

Bradbury: In the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head. First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events, whether it was disastrous or joyful. So there are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, you have all the art experiences you have had that are separate from the living experiences: the things you've learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So that's all in your mind as a fabulous mulch, and you have to begin to cause it to come out. So how do you do that? By making lists of nouns and then asking yourself, "What does each noun mean?" You can go and make up your own list right now, and it would be different than mine. It's your own list of nouns. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. The fire balloons. All these things are very personal.
Then, when you get the list down, that's when you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, "Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I instantly put this noun down and not some other word?" Do this and you're on your way to being a good writer....You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, "Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them." When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

...

Weller: Do you believe there is life on other planets?
Bradbury: There are a million planets out there. Of course.
Weller: But you don't believe we've been visited?
Bradbury: No, there's no proof. Roswell is a bunch of s---. It's all a lie.
Weller: Do you think humans will ever reach Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our own?
Bradbury: If we can create the technology to travel at the speed of light.
Weller: Will that happen?
Bradbury: I think so, yes.
Weller: And what about time travel?
Bradbury: No, time travel will never happen. It's totally impossible.

Love it.
Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews -- Sam Weller

How many have you read?

2010-11-23T20:32:00.005-07:00

This is a ranked list of "the world's" favorite books, in order of popularity. How many have you read?
Instructions: Copy this list. Bold those books you've read in their entirety; italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or just read an excerpt.
via Garrett

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession -- AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

My count is 42 read, 7 partially read.

Otherwise

2010-11-02T19:18:00.003-06:00

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

--Jane Kenyon, ©1996

Yeats

2010-09-23T09:36:00.000-06:00

"Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey
the heart longs for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is
true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet."

--W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

Not fiction

2010-07-22T07:45:00.002-06:00

"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."

--Ray Bradbury, quoted by Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960)

P. Fitzgerald

2010-07-19T18:34:00.002-06:00

Admiring the work of Parker Fitzgerald. His daily polaroid quote project is genius. I want it for my own.

Walking

2010-07-04T10:29:00.004-06:00

...thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together...Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. (p. 5)

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimultes the passage through a series of thoughts.
The surprises, liberations, and clarifications of travel can sometimes be garnered by going around the block as well as going around the world, and walking travels both near and far. Or perhaps walking should be called movement, nor travel, for one can walk in circles or travel around the world immobilized in a seat, and a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind, and this is what makes walking ambiguous and endlessly fertile: it is both means and end, travel and destination. (p.7)

It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value. Both rural and urban walking have for two centuries been prime ways of exploring the unpredictable and the incalculable...(p.10)

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. (p. 13)

A solitary walker is in the world, but apart from it, with the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group. (p. 20)

To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimage makes it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp...The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling and universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. (p. 50)

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts.
If in no other way one can resemble a god, one can at least walk like one. (p. 68)

"The solitary stroller and the city"- Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. (p. 171)
The average rural walker looks at the general - the view, the beauty - and the landscape moves by as a gently modulated continuity: a crest long in view is reached, a forest thins out to become a meadow. The urbanite is on the lookout for particulars, for opportunities, individuals, and supplies, and the changes are abrupt. (p. 182)

Dickens- "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish." ... and he walked so fast and far that few ever managed to accompany him. He was a solitary walker...(p. 184)

There is a subtle state most dedicated urban walkers know, a sort of basking in solitude - a dark solitude punctuated with encounters as the night sky is punctuated with stars. In the country one's solitude is geographical - one is altogether outside society... and then there is a kind of communion with the nonhuman. In the city, one is alone because the world is made up of strangers, and to be a stranger surrounded by strangers, to walk along silently bearing one's secrets and imagining those of the people one passes, is among the starkest of luxuries... It is an observer's state, cool, withdrawn, with senses sharpened, a good state for anybody who needs to reflect or create. In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life's most refined pleasures. (p. 186)

--excerpts from Wanderlust: a History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit

Emerson

2010-06-15T17:28:00.000-06:00

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you will begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Muggeridge

2010-04-28T21:01:00.003-06:00

"I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God's purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse - and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse - and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistably growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story.

"You know, it's a funny thing, but when you're old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won't go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God's creation, you are a participant in God's purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.

"Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God's love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth.

"The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second--class hotel."

--Malcolm Muggeridge (The Great Liberal Death Wish, Imprimis, May 1979, Hillsdale College, Michigan)

Jubal Sackett

2010-02-14T10:28:00.003-07:00

"My time would come, but a wide land lay before me and it was to that land that I belonged. I would drink from a hundred streams, make paths where no men had been, and eat the meat of strange animals before I died."

"This was my world and I was at ease with it."

--Jubal Sackett, Louis L'Amour

Foreign cities

2010-02-05T12:05:00.001-07:00

"Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected check in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city." -Bill Bryson

Travel

2010-02-05T12:03:00.000-07:00

"To see a thousand objects for the first and for the last time, what can be deeper and more melancholy? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant." Les Miserables, p. 216

A thankful heart

2010-01-06T21:24:00.002-07:00

Ebenezer Scrooge is one of my favorite characters and is in one of the best stories ever written, of course. I like the songs he sings after his change of heart. I'd like to be able to maintain that attitude.

With a thankful heart, with an endless joy
With a growing family, every girl and boy
Will be nephew and niece to me
Will bring love, hope and peace to me
Yes and every night will end, and every day will start
With a grateful prayer and a thankful heart.

With an open smile and with open doors
I will bid you welcome, what is mine is yours
With a glass raised to toast your health
And a promise to share the wealth
I will sail a friendly course, file a friendly chart
On a sea of love and a thankful heart.

With a thankful heart that is wide awake
I do make this promise, every breath I take
Will be used now to sing your praise
And to beg you to share my days
With a loving guarantee that even if we part
I will hold you close in a thankful heart.

I'm alive! I'm alive!
I've got a chance to change
and I will not be the man I was
I'll begin again
I will build my life
I will live to know that I fulfilled my life
I'll begin today
Throw away the past
And the future I build
will be something that will last
I will take the time I have left to live
and I will give it all that I have left to give
I will live my days for my fellow men
And I live in praise of that moment when
I was able to begin again
I will start anew
I will make amends
And I will make quite certain
that the story ends
On a note of hope
On a strong amen
And I will thank the world and remember when
I was able to begin again!

2009-09-18T07:03:00.001-06:00

And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day
by Michael Blumenthal

Things are not as they seem: the innuendo of everything makes
itself felt and trembles towards meanings we never intuited
or dreamed. Take, for example, how the warbler, perched on a

mere branch, can kidnap the day from its tediums and send us
heavenwards, or how, held up by nothing we really see, our
spirits soar and then, in a mysterious series of twists and turns,

come to a safe landing in a field, encircled by greenery. Nothing
I can say to you here can possibly convince you that a man
as unreliable as I have been can smuggle in truths between tercets

and quatrains on scraps of paper, but the world as we know
is full of surprises, and the likelihood that here, in the shape
of this very bird, redemption awaits us should not be dismissed

so easily. Each year, days swivel and diminish along their inscrutable
axes, then lengthen again until we are bathed in light we were not
prepared for. Last night, lying in bed with nothing to hold onto

but myself, I gazed at the emptiness beside me and saw there, in the
shape of absence, something so sweet and deliberate I called it darling.
No one who encrusticates (I made that up!) his silliness in a bowl,

waiting for sanctity, can ever know how lovely playfulness can be,
and, that said, let me wish you a Merry One (or Chanukah if you
prefer), and may whatever holds you up stay forever beneath you,

and may the robin find many a worm, and our cruelties abate,
and may you be well and happy and full of mischief as I am,
and may all your nothings, too, hold something up and sing.

© Michael Blumenthal, via

Roosevelt quotes

2009-06-28T18:18:00.004-06:00

Yesterday at the Museum of Natural History, I saw these great quotes by Theodore Roosevelt in the lobby.

Youth:
I want to see you game boys; I want to see you brave and manly and I also want to see you gentle and tender. Be practical as well as generous in your ideals; keep your eyes on the stars and keep your feet on the ground. Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to a successful life. Character in the long run is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

Nature:
There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as much as it does protection.

Manhood:
A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can. It is hard to fail but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood. Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die, and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.

The state:
Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law. A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy. Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords. In popular government results worth having can only be achieved by men who combine worth ideals with practical good sense. If I must choose between righteousness and peace, I choose righteousness.

--Theodore Roosevelt.

Time

2009-04-12T11:01:00.001-06:00

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

*

2009-04-11T13:38:00.001-06:00

"Part of the beauty of the Western myth is that it offers no guarantee—you might get a happy ending or you might get a rattlesnake in your blanket. Either way you are out of the office."

--Leif Enger, in an interview about So Brave, Young, and Handsome

Anti-winking

2009-03-04T06:50:00.003-07:00

[There are at least four warnings in the Bible against winkers]
"[The Bible's anti-winking bias] does seem wise and ahead of its time, the wink being perhaps the world's creepiest gesture, with the winker coercing the winkee into being a part of his little cabal."
The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs, p. 205

I COULDN'T AGREE MORE! I've been waiting forever for someone to put into words the way I feel about winks.

The Book Thief

2009-02-13T06:51:00.002-07:00

There was also a rumor that later in the day, she walked fully clothed into the Amper River and said something very strange.

Something about a kiss.

Something about a Saumensch.

How many times did she have to say goodbye?

I really really loved this book.

Wisdom

2008-11-25T19:35:00.003-07:00

"Wisdom...entails not just intellectual apprehension of the true but also a willed practice of the good in conduct as well. Indeed, our capacity to seek the moral good, not our intellectual brainpower, is the defining human attribute that we all share in both possession and degree; it forms the basis of human equality."

--Appendix to The Oxford Guide to Library Research, Thomas Mann (p.275)

Verbal fatigue

2008-11-20T22:53:00.003-07:00

Excerpt from American Libraries Direct

Oxford Researchers List Top 10 Most Annoying Phrases
The great hierarchy of verbal fatigue includes:

1 - At the end of the day
2 - Fairly unique
3 - I personally
4 - At this moment in time
5 - With all due respect
6 - Absolutely
7 - It's a nightmare
8 - Shouldn't of
9 - 24/7
10 - It's not rocket science

The list appears in a new book, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, by Jeremy Butterfield.

Adding mine:
"Job security"
"It never ceases to amaze me"
"For those of you who don't know me"
"Hindsight's 20/20"
"In this economy..."

5 most influential books

2008-11-09T22:46:00.002-07:00

A tag from Cheryl. What are the 5 most influential books you've read?

1. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
2. The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
3. Bradbury Speaks and many other works by Ray Bradbury, esp. nonfiction afterwards to his short story books
4. English Words from Latin and Greek Elements by Donald Ayers
5. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

What are yours?

Memory

2008-10-26T20:25:00.003-06:00

The Rembrandt light of memory, finicky and magical and faithful at the same time, as the cheaper tint of nostalgia never is.

--The Whistling Season, Ivon Doig, p. 152

Banned Books Week

2008-09-27T12:46:00.006-06:00

(Kershisnik)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." --Ray Bradbury

Hee!

2008-09-19T07:07:00.004-06:00

Damp November

2008-09-19T07:07:00.002-06:00

"Some years ago I thought I would ride all the seas of wind that roam this world. Whenever it is a damp November in my soul, I know it is high time to brave the skies again."
-Ray Bradbury, Leviathan '99, ch. 1

(a play on Moby Dick, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.")

How Green Was My Valley

2008-09-07T20:40:00.005-06:00

"It has always seemed to me that there is something big to be felt by a man who has made up his mind to leave the things he knows and go off to strange places. I felt the same for the rose cuttings I took from the garden down to the cemetery. But men are different from flowers for they are able to make up their own minds about things. And that should make the feeling bigger, I think." (p. 1)

"When we sat down, with me in Mama's lap, my father would ladle out of the cauldron thin leek soup with a big lump of ham in it, that showed its rind as it turned over through the steam when the ladle came out brimming over. There was a smell with that soup. It is in my nostrils now. There was everything in it that was good, and because of that, the smell alone was enough to make you feel so warm and comfortable it was a pleasure to be sitting there, for you knew of the pleasure to come.

It comes to me now, round and gracious and vital with herbs fresh from the untroubled ground, a peaceful smell of home and happy people. Indeed, if happiness has a smell, I know it well, for our kitchen always had it faintly, but in those days it was all over the house." (p. 4-5)

"It is very strange to think back like this, although come to think of it, there is no fence or hedge round Time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough." (p. 12)

" 'Come on, my son,' he said, 'we will go up on the mountain and find peace'...

I got down from the table very thankful, and ran to get my cap and my father's stick. I loved walking with my father. I have often wondered whether the trouble in our family could have happened if my father had gone walking with the other boys as he did with me. If I had only known my father in the house, perhaps I could have spoken to him as the others had done, but knowing him as he was up on the mountains, I was never able to speak to him other than with respect and with love.

He never once as far as I remembered talked to me as though I were a child. I was always a man when I was with him... Everything I ever learnt as a small boy came from my father, and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless." (p. 39-40)

"The quiet troubling of the river, and the clean, washed stones, and the green all about, and the trees trying to drown their shadows, and the mountain going up and up behind, there is beautiful it was." (p. 41)

"It was then that I had thoughts about Christ, and I have never changed my mind. He did appear to me then as a man, and as a man I still think of him. In that way, I have had comfort. If he had been a God, or any more a son of God than any of us, then it is unfair to ask us to do what he did. But if he was a man who found out for himself what there is that is hidden in life, then we all have a chance to do the same. And with the help of God, we shall.

Indeed, I am going from this house to-night to try and find out what is the matter with me and the people I know, because there is something radically wrong with us all, to be sure." (p. 70)

"O, blackberry tart, with berries as big as your thumb, purple and black, and thick with juice, and a crust to endear them that will go to cream in your mouth, and both passing down with such a taste that will make you close your eyes and wish you might live for ever in the wideness of that rich moment." (p. 88)

"We kept good hens out in the back. Brown, and white, and some good layers that were black from my father's sister's. There is happy are hens. All day they peck for sweet bits in the ground, twice they come for corn, and in the mornings they shout the roof off to have you to come and see their eggs. And no trouble to anybody. I do like a little hens, indeed. A minder of her own business, always, and very dainty in her walk and ways." (p. 143)

"Beautiful were the days that are gone, and O, for them to be back. The mountain was green, and proud with a good covering of oak and ash, and washing his feet in a streaming river clear as the eyes of God. The winds came down with the scents of the grass and wild flowers, putting a sweetness to our noses, and taking away so that nobody could tell what beauty had been stolen, only that the winds were old robbers who took something from each grass and flower and gave it back again, and gave a little to each of us, and took it away again." (p. 164)

Excerpts from How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

Brooklyn Library quotes

2008-08-17T17:03:00.005-06:00

The Brooklyn Public Library is pretty great and it has cool book/library quotes all over the outside, on the sides and above the doors. I took photos of all of them and then typed them up!

“I go into my library & history rolls before me – I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingers on it – I see the pyramids building, I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.”

“Of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error.”

“He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book – he hath not eat paper, as it were – he has not drunk ink – his intellect is not replenished – he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.”

“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and to consider. Some books are to be tasted, some others to be swallowed & some few to be chewed and digested.”

“The spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect that one ought every day to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

“In books lies the soul of the whole past time, the articulate audible voice of the past, all the mankind has done, thought, gained or been – it is lying as in magic preservation on the pages of books.”

“Read with humility, simplicity, and faith, and seek not at any time the fame of being learned.”

“The spoken word perishes but the written word endures.”

“Come and take choice of all my library and so beguile thy sorrow.”

“With equal care weigh well the record of the wisdom and the folly of mankind.”

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world, the fit inheritance of generations.”

“Here are enshrined the longing of great hearts, and noble things that tower above the tide, the magic word that winged wonder starts, the garnered wisdom that has never died.”

“Farther than arrow, higher than wings, fly poet’s song and prophet’s word. While men have wit to read and will to know, the door to learning is the open book. The world for man, with all it may contain, is only what is compassed by the mind.” (Roscoe C.E. Brown)

Live forever!

2008-07-18T06:51:00.001-06:00

In his words, the story of Ray Bradbury's life calling from the magician Mr. Electrico, how he came to be a writer and therefore live forever.

Punctuation

2008-07-16T22:46:00.002-06:00

"For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word 'Book's' with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetuate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
It's tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. One almost dare not get up in the mornings."

"Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life' by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions. Being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda."

--Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, p. 1-4

Devils and angels

2008-07-08T20:19:00.003-06:00

"Saint Anthony once wrote about having gone into the desert on silent retreat and being assaulted by all manner of visions -- devils and angels, both. He said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company. If you are appalled, he said, then it was a devil who had visited you. If you feel lightened, it was an angel."

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love, p. 326

Change

2008-06-02T22:14:00.002-06:00

"Reflecting with an old friend this morning, he asked the question: When did you change? When did everything become different?

My mind hopped around my life history looking for that one moment. When did it happen?
There was my mission when I caught fire. That fire changed me.

There was and is Nancy, so gently and totally transformative. She continues to change me in subtle ways.

There was the time when I finished Les Miserables and felt overwhelmed with a mixture of compassion and goodness. I wanted to be a better man.

There was the time when I counseled a woman with a life in shambles. As God sent a message of love for her, I realized that He loved me. I stopped resisting His love.

There was that time when everything seemed to fall apart. I realized that I couldn't make my life what it needed to be. I turned to Him more earnestly than ever.

It is hard for me to assess how much my believing ancestors and dear parents have changed me. They are the water in which I have always swum.

There was Stephen Robinson's book that opened my heart to new vistas of the atonement of Jesus Christ. That book continues to bless me.

Of course there are the books of scripture. What would I be without them?

There have been thousands of flashes of insight along the way. Which is the definitive experience?

After some reflection I realized that the question doesn't fit my experience. While it is true that some transformative moments are bigger than others, I cannot find a single magical moment. All the pieces of life's puzzle must fit together. No piece makes sense independent of its context. Even a big piece needs all the other pieces in order to fit, to make sense, to add meaning.

And the One who assembles the puzzle of our lives knows exactly when to put each piece in place.

For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have. (2 Nephi 28:30)

Thank you, Father, for giving precisely what I needed exactly when I needed it. And for doing the same for each and every one of Your children."

--Wallace Goddard

Some thoughts on Rand

2008-05-23T07:11:00.002-06:00

I just finished Ayn Rand's Anthem which was our book club selection for June. I'd already read it so I knew what was up. The first time I read it I loved it until...the last two chapters. They were unsettling and distressing to me. I don't like the message. You need to read it to understand, and you probably need to be religious to agree with me.

So, did Lois Lowry rip off Anthem with The Giver?
Also, the foreword says that Anthem was originally denied publication in America (1937) for obvious reasons. Not obvious to me...wait. Is America Communist and I didn't know it?

Since it only took a couple hours to read Anthem, I picked up We the Living, also by Rand, her first novel in fact. It's big, and apparently has the same overall theme as Anthem. We'll see how I do.

I've spoken before about effective first lines. I like this one, from We the Living:
"Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid."

I also think that Rand invented the best book title ever with Atlas Shrugged. Such a great image.

Walking, Thoreau

2008-04-19T15:43:00.006-06:00

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, shich is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer the Holy Land from the Hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside form which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man - then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order - not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker - not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practiced this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled intot he aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me - to whom the sun was servant - who had not gone into society in the village - who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor - notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum - as of a distant hive in May - which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.

--excerpts from Walking, by Henry David Thoreau

Fleeting things

2008-04-19T15:31:00.000-06:00

Something of what we glimpsed lives on - the reddish wall of the Recoleta cemetery, the yellow wall of a jail, a couple of men dancing together at a right-angled street corner, a church courtyard with black and white tiles and a grilled iron fence, a railway gate crossing, my house, a marketplace, the damp unfathomable night - but none of these fleeting things, which may have been others, now matter. What really matters is having felt that our plan, which more than once we made a joke of, really and secretly existed and was the world and ourselves. Down the years, without much hope, I have sought the taste of that night; a few times I thought I had recaptured it in music, in love, in untrustworthy memories, but it has never come back to me except once in a dream. When we swore not to say a word to anyone, it was already Saturday morning.

--Jorge Luis Borges

Literary deal breakers

2008-04-08T21:10:00.001-06:00

Funny and true!
Article.

Moveable feast

2008-03-25T20:43:00.006-06:00

Excerpts I like from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife - second class - and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.
It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs, three wire-wrapped packets of short, half-pencil length pieces of split pine to catch fire from the twigs, and then the bundle of half-dried lengths of hard wood that I must buy to make a fire that would warm the room. (p. 4)

I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in once place you could write about it better than another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. (p. 5)

With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rain kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed. (p. 45)

"What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we'd better have lunch."
"I'm very hungry," I said. "I worked at the café on a café crème."
"How did it go, Tatie?"
"I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?"
"Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart."
"And we're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them."
"Would that be honest?"
"Sure."
"Does she have Henry James too?"
"Sure."
"My," she said. "We're lucky that you found the place."
"We're always lucky," I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too. (p. 38)

No sooner

2008-03-20T07:02:00.002-06:00

No sooner do we think
we have assembled a comfortable life
than we find a piece of ourselves
that has no place to fit in.

-Gail Sheehy

Solitude

2008-03-20T07:00:00.002-06:00

But your solitude will be a support
and a home for you,
even in the midst of very
unfamiliar circumstances,
and from it you will find all your paths.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Creation

2008-01-21T21:24:00.001-07:00

I wrote poems, too. Looking through some old journals, I came across several. There was one, notable for its arrogance, if nothing else:
We lived on 82nd Street and the Metropolitan Museum was my short cut to Central Park. I wrote:

I go into the museum
and look at all the pictures on the walls.
Instead of feeling my own insignificance
I want to go straight home and paint.

A great painting, or symphony, or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of creation behind the universe. This surge of creativity has nothing to do with competition, or degree of talent. When I hear a superb pianist, I can't wait to get to my own piano, and I play about as well now as I did when I was ten. A great novel, rather than discouraging me, simply makes me want to write. This response on the part of the artist is the need to make incarnate the new awareness we have been granted through the genius of someone else.

I used the word "arrogant" about those verses. I take it back. I don't think it's arrogance at all. It is beauty crying out for more beauty.

--Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p. 147

Trumpets and stars

2008-01-21T21:18:00.001-07:00

I do not think that it is naïve to think that it is the tiny, particular acts of love and joy which are going to swing the balance, rather than general, impersonal charities. These acts are spontaneous, unself-conscious, realized only late if at all. They may be as quiet as pulling a blanket up over a sleeping baby. Or as noisy as the night of trumpets and stars.

--Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p. 124

Art

2008-01-21T21:13:00.001-07:00

I felt ...[a] sense of irrationality in the world around me...Whenever this occurs I turn to the piano, to my typewriter, to a book. We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn. Paul Keel said, 'Art does not reproduce the visible. Rather, it makes visible.' It is not then, at its best, a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisions but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings. We are a generation which is crying loudly to tear down all structure in order to find freedom, and discovering, when order is demolished, that instead of freedom we have death.

--Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p. 120-121

Emerson

2007-12-11T16:58:00.001-07:00

These are some fictional quotes by the character of Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl.

"I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another."

"Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly American poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the American is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame - the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams. When I read Longfellow, I feel utterly at ease - I am safe. This shall not yield us our future."

Cities

2007-11-04T18:43:00.002-07:00

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer. More than mountains or the shore-devouring sea, a city retains its character, imperturbable, cynical, holding behind apparent changes its essential purpose. Though Babbitt had deserted his family and dwelt with Joe Paradise in the wilderness, though he had become a liberal, though he had been quite sure, on the night before he reached Zenith, that neither he nor the city would be the same again, ten days after his return he could not believe that he had ever been away.

From Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis, p. 247

Liberty

2007-11-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

"And let no one offer me the foolish objection that such an organization* would be an attack upon liberty. Liberty has not come upon the face of the earth to wring the neck of common sense. It is precisely because some have wished to employ it in such an enterprise, because they have pretended to make of it the chief instrument of madness, that liberty is having a bad time in the world at present." (p. 153)

*Referring to "the collective organization of book production," as described here.
From: Ortega y Gasset, Jose. (1961). The mission of the librarian. Antioch Review, 21, 133-155.

Choose your mission

2007-10-25T20:43:00.000-06:00

Among the few papers that Descartes left after his death there was one written when he was twenty in which we read: "Quod vitae sectabor iter?" What way shall I choose in my life? This is a quotation taken from a verse of Ausonius, who in turn was translating an old Pythagorean poem entitled De ambiguitate eligendae vitae -- concerning the perplexity in the choice of life.

Apparently man receives the inescapable impression that his life, and consequently his being, is something that he must choose. This is a stupefying fact, for it means that man--differing from all other entities of the universe which have their beings fixed in advance and exist precisely because of that--man is the unique and almost inconceivable reality who exists without having his being irremediably prefixed, who is not from the beginning what he is, who must choose his own being. And how shall he choose it? While calling to mind and considering the various kinds of life possible to him, a man observes that one of them attracts him more than the others--draws him, claims him, calls to him. This appeal that a certain kind of life has for us, this imperative cry, is called vocation.

In vocation, what is necessary for a man to do is not imposed upon him, but proposed to him. That is why life takes on the character of the realization of an imperative. It depends upon us to wish or not to wish to realize it, to be faithful or unfaithful to our vocation. But the vocation itself is not in our hands. That is why every human life has a mission. A mission is just this: the consciousness that every man has of his most authentic being, of that which he is called upon to realize. The idea of mission is, therefore, a constitutive ingredient of the human condition; and as I said a while ago, without man there is no mission. We may now add that without mission there is no man. (pp. 134-135)

From: Ortega y Gasset, Jose. (1961). The mission of the librarian. Antioch Review, 21, 133-155.

Mission of the Librarian, according to...

2007-10-25T20:29:00.000-06:00

Every society of the West today needs a certain number of doctors, magistrates, soldiers, and librarians--to cure their citizens when sick, to administer justice to them, to defend them, and to make them read.....

Furthermore, the librarian of the future must direct the nonspecialized reader through the selva selvaggia of books. He will be the doctor and the hygienist of reading. On this point also we find ourselves in a situation quite the reverse of that in 1800. Today people read too much. The condition of receiving without much effort, or even without any effort, the innumerable ideas contained in books and periodicals has accustomed the common man to do no thinking on his own account; and he does not think over what he has read, the only method of making it truly his own. In addition, there is that gravest and most radically negative character of the book, and we must dedicate our utmost effort of attention to it. A large part of today's terrible public problem proceeds from the fact that ordinary minds are full of ideas received in inertia, ideas half understood and deprived of their virtues. Ordinary minds are thus stuffed with pseudo-ideas. In this aspect of his profession, I imagine the librarian of the future as a filter interposed between man and the torrent of books. (pp. 137, 154)

From: Ortega y Gasset, Jose. (1961). The mission of the librarian. Antioch Review, 21, 133-155.
Speech given in 1934.
I had to read this for my LIBR 200 class; not quite sure what I think of it. I like some of it, but it's also strong stuff!

You have opened the library and let me breathe my past. Am I taller? Straighter? Is my voice clear?

2007-10-19T20:39:00.000-06:00

"There are no mere readers," said the old man. "You are either out of a library or safely in. Book dust fills that air. Inhaled, it firms a man's bones, brightens his eye, tunes his ear. Thus a man is renewed breath by breath, when he swims the library deeps where multitudinous blind creatures wait. Your mind says rise and they swarm, overbrim, drown you with their stuffs. Drowned but alive, you are the atoll it floods without end. Thus, you are no mere reader, but a survivor of the tides that surf from Shakespeare to Pope to Molière. Those lighthouses of being. Go there to survive the storms."

"This joy breaks me! Hold!"

--Excerpt from "The F. Scott/Tolstoy/Ahab Accumulator" by Ray Bradbury, One More For the Road....spoken by the character Herman Melville

Driving Blind

2007-10-13T12:42:00.000-06:00

In a long life I have never had a driver's license nor have I learned to drive. But some while back one night I dreamed that I was motoring along a country road with my inspirational Greek muse. She occupied the driver's seat while I occupied the passenger's place with a second, student's, wheel.
I could not help but notice that she was driving, serenely, with a clean white blindfold over her eyes, while her hands barely touched the steering wheel.
And as she drove she whispered notions, concepts, ideas, immense truths, fabulous lies, which I hastened to jot down.
A time finally came, however, when, curious, I reached over and nabbed the edge of her blindfold to peer beneath.
Her eyes, like the eyes of an ancient statue, were rounded pure white marble. Sightless, they stared at the road ahead, which caused me, in panic, to seize my wheel and almost run us off the road.
"No, no," she whispered. "Trust me. I know the way."
"But I don't," I cried.
"It's all right," she whispered. "You don't need to know. If you must touch the wheel, remember Hamlet's advice, 'Use all gently.' Close your eyes. Now, quietly, reach out."
I did. She did. "There, see?" she whispered. "We're almost there."
We arrived. And all of the tales in this new book were finished and done.

As you can see, when the Muse speaks, I shut my eyes and listen. In Paris once, I touch-typed in a dark room, no lights, and wrote 150 pages of a novel in seventeen nights without seeing what I put down. If that isn't Driving Blind, what is?

--Ray Bradbury, April 8, 1997, afterward to Driving Blind

Metaphors, the Breakfast of Champions

2007-10-13T12:35:00.002-06:00

Every year in Paris, coming from the airport I have my driver pause at the Trocadero, a vast esplanade that overlooks the entire city with a splendid view of the Eiffel Tower.
I run out on this plaza, spread my arms, and cry, silently, "Paris, I'm home!"
When I leave, weeks later, I return to the plaza and, somewhat tearfully, say, "Paris, goodbye."
A few years ago when I crossed that twilight esplanade, it was raining.
My driver ran, shielding me with his umbrella. I fended him off with: "You don't understand, I want to get wet!"
So it is with these stories. Late in life I find I have been running a gauntlet downpour of metaphors. People try to shield me from this surprising storm, but my cry continues: "Don't! I want to drown!"
So, I've never worked a single hour in my life. For years metaphors bombarded me, but I never knew what they were, never having learned the word.
The recognition of metaphors came late when I found that ninety-nine percent of my stories were pure image, impacted by movies, the Sunday funnies, poetry, essays, and the detonations of Oz, Tarzan, Jules Verne, Pharaoh Tutankhamen, and their attendant illustrations.
In scanning this book I again realize how fortunate I was to live catching metaphors on the run.

--Ray Bradbury, afterword to One More For the Road

An Introduction to Some Poems

2007-09-26T07:07:00.000-06:00

I saw this poem on someone's blog and I liked it.

An Introduction to Some Poems
by William Stafford

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.

Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.

We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.

The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
Strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,

Or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.

Book club blog

2007-09-12T22:58:00.001-06:00

I started a new blog for the book club I am in with a bunch of girls from work. The book club was started long before I got there. Some of the members had been talking about getting a blog or Wiki or something online, so I volunteered to whip one up. This blog, Girls Who Can Read, has the lists of the books that have been discussed over the past almost 4 years. I hope I can get the others to participate in the blog, so far it's lonely on there! Feel free to stop by and check out our discussions and book lists if you're in need of reading ideas.

Other people blog about books, too

2007-09-09T22:28:00.001-06:00

There have been several book-related posts that I have enjoyed lately.

Marta's favorites shelf
Her question about our favorite classics
Ali's mint green shelf
Color-coding posted by Jordan a while back

I am really tempted to try the color-coding idea, because of course I love putting things in rainbow order. But my bookshelves have an organization of their own, and I hate to mess it up.

Little letterpress books

2007-08-22T17:57:00.000-06:00

I love the quotes inside this little letterpress book found here. Unfortunately the website doesn't sell them directly--you have to find a retailer that sells them. And there are none in Utah :(. It's so cute, and the quotes are unique.

How Long She'll Last

2007-08-14T00:14:00.001-06:00

How Long She'll Last in This World, a collection of poetry by Maria Melendez. I haven't read the poetry, but I want to just because of the title. I think it's the best title I've heard in a while.

The technique of Ray B.

2007-08-09T20:02:00.000-06:00

I don't know how many times I've sung the praises of Ray Bradbury, but I have to say a little bit more. He writes the best introductions and afterwords. I almost enjoy them more than the book itself. I love it when he tells about how he comes up with his ideas and how he lives his life. He has a way of writing that makes everything seem possible. Here is some from the intro of Dandelion Wine.

"This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like very beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.
I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.
First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.
Then I took a long look at the green apple trees and the old house I was born in and the house next door where lived my grandparents, and all the lawns of the summers I grew up in, and I began to try words for all that.
What you have here in this book then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer....
Thus I fell into surprise. No one told me to surprise myself, I might add. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true."

And some from his afterword, "Make Haste to Live," from Quicker Than the Eye.

"I don't write these stories, they write me. Which causes me to live with a boundless enthusiasm for writing and life that some misinterpret as optimism.
Nonsense. I am merely a practitioner of optimal behavior, which means behave yourself, listen to your Muses, get your work done, and enjoy the sense that you just might live forever.
I don't have to wait for inspiration. It jolts me every morning. Just before dawn, when I would prefer to sleep in, the stuff speaks between my ears with my Theater of Morning voices...
In other words, I do not greet each day with a glad cry but am forced out of bed by these whispering nags, drag myself to the typewriter, and am soon awake and alive as the notion/fancy/concept quits my ears, runs down my elbows and out my fingers. Two hours later, a new story is done that, all night, hid asleep behind my medulla oblongata.
That, don't you agree, is not optimism. It's behavior. Optimal.
I dare not oppose these morning voices. If I did, they would ransack my conscience all day. Besides, I am as out of control as a car off a cliff. What began as a numbed frenzy before breakfast, ends with elation at noon lunch....
My final advice to myself, the boy magician grown old, and you?
When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits.
Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real.
Make haste to live.
Oh, God, yes.
Live. And write. With great haste."

Dandelion Wine

2007-08-06T20:20:00.001-06:00

What a good book. Although I find it highly unlikely that any 12-year-old boy would ever think and talk like Douglas Spaulding.

Favorite excerpts:

"And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below."

"He wanted to say, 'You're still there, aren't you? All of you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I can't believe I was ever among you. When you are away from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living . . . "

"Young man," she said to Bill Forrester, "you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of thing as lime-vanilla ice."

He bowed his head solemnly to her.

"Come sit with me, both of you," she said. "We'll talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for. Don't be afraid; I'll foot the bill."

"You should have written books."

"My dear boy, I have written. What else was there for an old maid? I was a crazy creature with a headful of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over a thirty-year weekend."

Poetry is not a luxury

2007-07-26T20:57:00.000-06:00

"As human beings we need to write, because writing allows us to understand our lives."
--Lucy Calkins

I have done a lot of writing in my years, but not much of it has been for myself. I have written a lot of papers for school, talks for church, or the compulsory journal entry....but in the past year or so I have found that writing can be a sort of therapy for me. This writing is not always for others to read. It is mostly a way to sort through my thoughts, express them, make sense of them and confront them, and then move on. I discovered this ability one time when I was fuming mad about a guy I was dating. I had thoughts swirling in my head all morning and I was unable to concentrate on my work. What I did was take out my notebook and pen and fill 7 pages with my thoughts, just as they came. As I wrote, the anger dissolved, my head cleared, and I felt so much better. Then I threw the papers away and didn't need them again. Writing what I was feeling made me understand it better than just thinking about it did. I've done this a few times lately and now I think it's pretty necessary for me to just write my heart out when I need to resolve something.

This reminds me of an essay by Audre Lorde - "Poetry is Not a Luxury." This essay was brought up a couple of times in my lit classes and I ended up using it in my final paper. She makes the argument that while some people consider poetry to be a fluffy or luxurious pastime, she and other women consider writing poetry as necessary to their existence. I am not a feminist or a real poet, but I love the idea behind her words:

"...poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt."

"As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us."

"I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion . . . so necessary for survival . . . I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. . . For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives."

"As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. . . We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."

"Kept around us as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core - the fountain - of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.
For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt - of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead - while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths."

Lorde, Audre. "Poetry Is Not a Luxury." Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984.
First published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3 (1977).

Picks for summer

2007-07-12T22:55:00.000-06:00

Summer is a good time for me to lighten up the content of my reading. Books that don't fry the mind; that blend in easily with the relaxed pace a summer should have. Still intelligent, mind you, but let's just say there won't be a 10-page paper due when you're done. Here are some old and new favorites that I recommend for summer.

The Chosen - Chaim Potok
The Promise - Chaim Potok
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - Kiran Desai
*The Man Who Ate the 747 - Ben Sherwood
Any short stories by Ray Bradbury - especially Quicker than the Eye, The Martian Chronicles, or Dandelion Wine
Peace Like a River - Leif Enger
A Girl Named Zippy - Haven Kimmel
*Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood - Rebecca Wells
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros
*Woman Hollering Creek - Sandra Cisneros
Over Sea, Under Stone - Susan Cooper (1st in the Dark is Rising series, a little YF fantasy I particularly enjoyed)
Holdfast - Kathleen Dean Moore (essays about nature and family relationships)
Into the Wild - John Krakauer
When the Emperor Was Divine - Julie Otsuka
Power - Linda Hogan
A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket (love them!)
Beyond Perfection - Erin McBride and Juli Caldwell (this is a joke. do not read this lame book or you will plead for your wasted two days back:)

Happy summer reading!
*Some adult material...

Love the questions

2007-07-07T15:28:00.001-06:00

I posted part of this quote earlier. I didn't know there was more to it. Here it is; I think it's wonderful.

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything...you need to live the question, perhaps you will gradually without even noticing it. Find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
-Ranier Maria Rilke

First impressions are so important

2007-06-27T21:31:00.000-06:00

One thing I look for when I'm deciding my opinion of a book is how effective its first line or first paragraph is. I think a mark of a good writer is one who can grab the reader's attention on the first page. I like a first line that makes me think "What the?" and decide I need to know more. An interesting first line tells us that the author is hiding a little something that made them say what they just said, and we should not be able to rest until we find out why.
These are some of my favorite first lines or sections of first paragraphs.

"This book was born as I was hungry. Let me explain." Life of Pi

"O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody was quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I'm starting off the story with." A Clockwork Orange

"It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed." Fahrenheit 451

"I was not sorry when my brother died." Nervous Conditions

"I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley." How Green Was My Valley

"124 was spiteful, full of a baby's venom." Beloved

"Lucy Anguiano, Texas girl who smells like corn, like Frito Bandito chips, like tortillas, something like that warm smell of nixtamal or bread the way her head smells when she's leaning close to you over a paper cut-out doll or on the porch when we are squatting over marbles trading this pretty crystal that leaves a blue star on your hand for that giant cat-eye with a grasshopper green spiral in the center like the juice of bugs on the windshield when you drive to the border, like the yellow blood of butterflies." Woman Hollering Creek

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." 1984

Doesn't this make you want to go read these books?

Life of Pi

2007-06-19T20:51:00.000-06:00

I know it's been kind of a trendy book over the past year or so, but Life of Pi by Yann Martel is actually one of the best books I've ever read. A couple weeks ago I finished reading it for the second time. The book is happy, sad, imaginative, realistic, and a little bit mind-blowing. It breaks your heart and then heals it at the same time. There are layers. Two of my favorite quotes deal with belief:

I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. (p. 28)

I can well imagine an atheist's last words: "White, white! L-L-Love! My God!"--and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain," and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story. (p. 64)

And that's just it. For any of you who haven't read this book, I'll give you a hint. This is a story about a story. And a wonderful one at that.

Librarian quotes

2007-06-06T16:44:00.000-06:00

Evelyn: Look, I... I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am.
Rick: And what is that?
Evelyn: I -- am a librarian.
-"The Mummy"

We are librarians and therefore the elect of God. To read is human, to catalogue, divine.
-from "Dewey Death" by Charity Blackstock

[Librarians] are subversive. You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them.
-Michael Moore

People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. Librarians are all-knowing and all-seeing. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. They preserve every aspect of human knowledge. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise.
-{I don't know, it was in an e-mail from my grad school}

Quotes to make me feel good

2007-06-03T21:56:00.000-06:00

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
-Muriel Rukeyser

Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes . . . swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.
-Barbara Brown Taylor

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.
-Emerson

Heaven forbid! Do you really think I'd let you go to a place where you couldn't find new friends, laughter, health, and abundance of every sort? Where you couldn't be happy about something every single day? Where you would be limited, stuck, or unable to change your circumstances?
Do you even think such a place might exist?
Not in a zillion years, Robin.
Your Michelin Tour Guide to the Cosmos - The Universe
-my personalized Notes from The Universe

More book quotes

2007-05-29T18:10:00.001-06:00

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
-Anatole Broyard

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
-Eudora Welty

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
-Joseph Joubert

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads but what he re-reads.
-Francois Mauriac

Those who read great works...will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.
-C.S. Lewis

There is no worse robber than a bad book.
-Italian proverb

If you want to write

2007-05-18T21:14:00.000-06:00

Memorable parts from this book which came highly recommended.

"Be Careless, Reckless! Be a Lion! Be a Pirate! When You Write. . . . Though everybody is talented and original, often it does not break through for a long time. People are too scared, too self-conscious, too proud, too shy. They have been taught too many things about construction, plot, unity, mass and coherence. . . That is because they have been taught that writing is something special and not just talking on paper . . . For many years it puzzled me why so many things I wrote were pretentious, lying, high-sounding, and in consequence utterly dull and uninteresting." (p. 63)

"Now to have things alive and interesting it must be personal, it must come from the "I": what I know and feel. For that is the only great and interesting thing. That is the only truth you know, that nobody else does . . . whatever is bogus, put on, isn't good and a bore. At least so it seems to me." (p. 71, 84)

". . . truth is more important than all the fancy skillful words, than belles lettres. I, personally, don't like writing where the package is fancier and more important than the contents . . . You must feel when you write, free. You must disentangle all thoughts . . . write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are. You try to be and everybody sees through it like glass, and on top of that knows you are lying and putting on airs . . . In other words, don't write like an advertising writer. . . if you feel a thing the more simply you say it the better, the more effective." (p. 113-115)

"Keep a Slovenly, Headlong, Impulsive, Honest Diary. Now this is an inevitable truth: whatever you write will reveal your personality, and whatever you are will show through in your writing . . . Oh, this over-explaining! It is the secret of all boredom. It is like this: You, the writer, go slowly and laboriously with many words, while the reader gropes through it, saying impatiently: Yes, yes, hurry, hurry up! I see it - I get it! Go on to the next.' The secret of being interesting is to move along as fast as the mind of the reader can take it in . . . writing is talking, thinking, on paper." (p. 133-138. 140)

"I have said that art is a generosity, i.e., you tell somebody something not to show off but because you want to share it with them." (p. 163)

"If it is true to you, it is true. Another truth may take its place later. What comes truly from me is true, whether anybody believes it or not. It is my truth. Therefore when you write, speak with complete self-trust and do not timidly qualify and feel the ice of well authenticated literary usage and critical soundness - so afraid when you have finished writing that they will riddle you full of holds. Let them. Later if you find what you wrote isn't true, accept the new truth. Consistency is the horror of the world." (p. 175)

The Solace of Leaving Early

2007-05-12T09:27:00.000-06:00

I just finished this novel by Haven Kimmel, author of the memoir A Girl Named Zippy. I have to say, I prefer the memoir. The Solace of Leaving Early has an amazing title and is actually very well-written. But my favorite kinds of books are those that just let themselves be. That say what they say and let the reader take what they will. Zippy was excellent at this. But Solace, I felt like it was . . . I don't know, there was too much existential philosophy for my taste, and characters who were not quite believable. However, there are some satisfying reconciliations of extremes, and some beautiful writing. I'll give it that.

My favorite quote:
". . . and he thought, as he thought many times a day, Thank you, Thank you. He couldn't imagine how he earned this little piece of luck. She was just another possibility in the mind of God, one of many potential universes, and somehow, in a trick, a tug, she arrived. Love, Amos thought, didn't always harvest the world's riches. It didn't happen often, but sometimes two people woke up, and they were home. And sometimes they just walked away free."
(p. 258)

Scripture typo

2007-05-10T10:02:00.000-06:00

Luke 7:39 - "sinner" has 3 n's. "...for she was a sinnner."

This only occurs in the small-size snap-shut quad.

Story of the heart

2007-05-10T10:00:00.000-06:00

Our life is a story. A rather long and complicated story that has unfolded over time. There are many scenes, large and small, and many “firsts.” Your first step; your first word; your first day of school. There was your first best friend; your first recital; your first date; your first love; your first kiss; your first heartbreak. If you stop and think of it, your heart has lived through quite a story thus far. And over the course of that story your heart has learned many things. Some of what you learned is true; much of it is not. Not when it comes to the core questions about your heart and the heart of God. Is your heart good? Does your heart really matter? What has life taught you about that? Imagine for a moment that God is walking softly beside you. You sense his presence, feel his warm breath. He says, “Tell me your sorrows.” What would you say in reply?

(Waking the Dead: The Glory of a Heart Fully Alive by John Eldredge)

Why I read

2007-05-03T17:22:00.000-06:00

I was inspired to write this post because of an e-mail from my friend Zach. In it he said to me, "You read for pleasure and the art of thought. That is awesome. I read for different reasons. Mostly because I am confused about so many things and I feel like I have got to get a grip of what is going on in this crazy world. I guess, more than anything else, I read more for life management midst the chaos (note: this doesn't mean I indulge in self-help books)."

I like his reasons. I have a few things to say in response. First of all . . . there's nothing wrong with self-help books. I have read The Shyness Solution and If the Horse is Dead, Get Off! with much benefit to myself. And yes, I do read for pleasure and the art of thought. But also so much more. I have been thinking about it all day, and I have come up with a bunch of the reasons I read. Here they are.

I read because:

I need to get out of my mind. I am in my mind all day
it's a guilty pleasure I don't feel guilty about
there is a multitude of information and imagination out there that I can't ignore
I love language and words. I like to see interesting phrases and usages
I admire the writer's mind
I must counteract brain rot
I like to find examples in print of what I'm feeling or experiencing
my pride demands that I be considered well-read
it is a universally respected hobby
it calms me down
I like when a paragraph gives me tingles all over
blondes may have more fun but brunettes can read
I know the difference between your and you're
words are food for my hungry mind
if someone refers to a "chellovek" or a "malchick" I can nod in complete understanding
I can insult a girl by calling her Daisy Miller
I know what bildungsroman means
guys dig smart chicks (or so I've been told)
buying books is not a waste of money, plus books always make great gifts
the more books I read, the more people trust me to give them recommendations, and I love giving recommendations
it makes me awesome at spelling words
I fear for a world like in Fahrenheit 451
classics are even better when you have been trained to look for the ridiculous in anything
I know where the line "Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink" comes from
I have found out more about myself, my taste, my likes and dislikes
I have honestly wept for Tess, Jo-the-crossing-sweep, and Jeremiah Land
I am justified in saying, "You'll just have to read the book"
I don't want to inhabit a tiny world
because of these quotes and these quotes
I just love a wonderful story, and even more, I love a so-so story told wonderfully

More from May

2007-04-25T13:27:00.000-06:00

A few more of my favorite May Swenson poems.

THE TRUTH IS FORCED (I wrote a 12-page paper on this poem in college)

Not able to be honest in person
I wish to be honest in poetry.
Speaking to you, eye to eye, I lie
because I cannot bear
to be conspicuous with the truth.
Saying it--all of it--would be
taking off my clothes.
I would forfeit my most precious properties:
distance, secrecy, privacy.
I would be exposed. And I would be
possessed. It would be an entire
surrender (to you, eye to eye).
You would examine me too closely.
You would handle me.
All your eyes would swarm me.
I'd be forever after hotly dressed
in your cloying, itching, greedy bees.
Whether you are one or two or many
it is the same. Really, I feel as if
one pair of eyes were a whole hive.
So I lie (eye to eye)
by leaving the core of things unvoiced
or else by offering a dummy
in place of myself.

One must be honest somewhere. I wish
to be honest in poetry.
With the written word.
Where I can say and cross out
and say over and say around
and say on top of and say in between
and say in symbol, in riddle,
in double meaning, under masks
of any feature, in the skins
of every creature.
And in my own skin, naked.
I am glad, indeed I dearly crave
to become naked in poetry,
to force the truth
through a poem,
which, when it is made, if real,
not a dummy, tells me
and then you (all or any, eye to eye)
my whole self,
the truth.

QUESTION

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

THE EXCHANGE (this poem is carved on the bench that is her grave in Logan)

Now, my body flat, the ground
breathes. I'll be the grass.
Populous and mixed is mind.
Earth, take thought. My mouth, be moss.
Field, go walking. I, a disk,
will look down with seeming eye.
I will be time, and study to be evening.
You, world, be clock.
I will stand, a tree, here,
never to know another spot.
Wind, be motion. Birds, be passion.
Water, invite me to your bed.

Earth your dancing place

2007-04-23T22:11:00.000-06:00

In honor of National Poetry Month.

Earth your dancing place

Beneath heaven's vault
remember always walking
through halls of cloud
down aisles of sunlight
or through high hedges
of the green rain
walk in the world
highheeled with swirl of cape
hand at the swordhilt
of your pride
Keep a tall throat
Remain aghast at life

Enter each day
as upon a stage
lighted and waiting
for your step
Crave upward as flame
have keenness in the nostril
Give your eyes
to agony or rapture

Train your hands
as birds to be
brooding or nimble
Move your body
as the horses
sweeping on slender hooves
over crag and prairie
with fleeing manes
and aloofness of their limbs

Take earth for your own large room
and the floor of earth
carpeted with sunlight
and hung round with silver wind
for your dancing place

--May Swenson

I get a kick out of Zippy

2007-04-20T22:00:00.000-06:00

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel is a really great book. I laughed out loud more than several times. Even in public. This memoir of a girl growing up in a very small town was so refreshing and innocent. It's hard for me to imagine such hilarious things going on in someone's childhood. I also can't believe how good her memory is . . . My own childhood seems so boring in comparison. I think I must have been a very dull child. One of my favorite passages:

"I had some disappointments with Santa, but not many. The only clear one I remember is the year I asked for a Skipper doll, who was an early, extra-perky friend of Barbie. Nobody had Barbies in Mooreland, and this could have posed a problem for the social Skipper, which might have been what Santa was thinking. Skipper was not the kind of girl to thrive in solitude. She wasn't doing much looking inside." (p. 266)

Another part that had me laughing out loud during lunch yesterday was the part where Zippy is so hungry and no one is home to make her lunch. She is too scared to go in the kitchen, but she grabs a bag of carrots and eats the whole thing to keep from starving to death. Then she finds her mom at work and throws up a bunch of plain carrots and feels a lot better.

My Demon, not afraid of happiness

2007-04-09T22:04:00.000-06:00

I was captivated by the title of the first essay in Ray Bradbury's book Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon From the Cave, Too Far From the Stars: Essays on the Past, the Future, and Everything in Between. I love this book and the author. I already posted about the wonderfulness of Ray Bradbury here. So, in this book's first essay, "My Demon, not afraid of happiness*," he writes about his muse, his motivation, the "Demon" that is constantly pushing him to be a better writer, be more successful. This Demon is not afraid of the work it takes to make something that is just a spark of an idea into something much larger.

"What we have here, then, is a very unusual approach to writing and discovering, not knowing the outcome. To move ahead on a blind journey, running fast, putting down thoughts as they occur.
And along the way my inner voice advised:
If you must write of assassinations, rapes, and Ophelia suicides, speak the speech, I pray thee, poetry in your breath, metaphors on your tongue. Remember how glad Iago was to think on Othello's fall. How, with smiles, Hamlet prepared his uncle's death.
Shakespeare and my Demon schooled me so: Be not afraid of happiness. It is often the soul of murder."

I love this so much. Allowing yourself to become how great you are supposed to be. I want to have a Demon not afraid of happiness.

*Bradbury got this phrase from a Frederick Seidel poem. I never could find what poem it was in and didn't much care for the Seidel poetry I did look through.

Oh my

2007-04-09T21:51:00.000-06:00

Just finished Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy. I was cracked up (and slightly annoyed) at this description of the heroine, Fancy Day.

We gain a good view of our heroine as she advances to her place in the ladies' line. She belonged to the taller division of middle height. Flexibility was her first characteristic, by which she appeared to enjoy the most easeful rest when she was in gliding motion. Her dark eyes - arched by brows of so keen, slender, and soft a curve that they resembled nothing so much as two slurs in music - showed primarily a bright sparkle each. This was softened by a frequent thoughtfulness, yet not so frequent as to do away, for more than a few minutes at a time, with a certain coquettishness; which in its turn was never so decided as to banish honesty. Her lips imitated her brows in their clearly-cut outline and softness of bend; and her nose was well shaped - which is saying a great deal, when it is remembered that there are a hundred pretty mouths and eyes for one pretty nose. Add to this, plentiful knots of dark-brown hair, a gauzy dress of white with blue facings; and the slightest idea may be gained of the young maiden who showed, amidst the rest of the dancing-ladies, like a flower among vegetables. And so the dance proceeded. (pt. 1, chap. 7, p. 78-79)

How is this managed? These heroines always seem to be perfectly balanced in every way. This reminds me of the description of an ideal wife in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, but Kiran Desai was definitely being sarcastic while Hardy I think is not. But actually I ended up liking Fancy more than I expected to. She had a very believably girly personality.

Desiderata

2007-03-30T22:56:00.001-06:00

I read this yesterday. It says it was found in Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore, dated 1692. But I just searched and found out it was written in 1927 by Max Ehrmann; it was used in a service in that church, which was founded in 1692. I think it's nice. It's famous but I had never heard of it before.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, & remember what peace there may be found in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly & clearly; and listen to others, even the dull & ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud & aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain & bitter; for always there will be greater & lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity & disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue & loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees & the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors & aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery & broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.

Peace Like a River

2007-03-21T17:34:00.000-06:00

This is the kind of book I hug after I'm done with it, and the kind of book that I pray is actually a true story. I finished it during my lunch break today. People were probably thinking, "Oh boy, there's that girl again who always cries during lunch." It's true, I was covering my mouth with my hand and wiping away tears. It was so wonderful and beautiful. It was happy, sad, inspiring, funny, heart-breaking, poignant. Full of nature imagery and religious symbolism. With splashes of Western adventure if you like that sort of thing. And Leif Enger, what a great name. I was attracted to this book because of its title and the author's name. When I read the jacket, I wasn't sure if I was in the mood to read a story about a family trekking across the Badlands to find their jail-escaped brother, but when I saw the dedication page: "To Robin - The country ahead is as wild a spread / As ever we're likely to see / The horses are dancing to start the advance - / Won't you ride on with me?" (Turns out, Robin is the name of Leif's wife.) I said OKAY, I'm giving it a try right now. And oh am I ever so glad I did. I love the style of writing - very unflowery but beautiful all the same, clear, crisp, written the way you'd talk if you're an 11-year-old boy born and raised in Minnesota. I love it when the narrator speaks to the reader with phrases like "Stay with me now" or "Make of it what you will." This was Enger's debut novel; I hope hope hope he has others or will have others in the near future.

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

2007-03-11T17:37:00.000-06:00

It's not about the Civil War. This book is set in England during the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1850s). It's about a young woman who is uprooted from her home in the south of England and moves with her parents to the northern manufacturing town of Milton. The book shows the contrast between the northern and southern lifestyles and mindsets. I think it does a great job showing the value of each, although I think the north really wins out. Margaret Hale as a heroine . . . I didn't love her at first, but I grew to like her more as I read. She became a more sympathetic character as she faced more trials than any 19-year-old should have to deal with. The love story . . . pretty okay, but it wrapped up SO quickly - which is due to the fact that Gaskell published the story in 20 installments when I think she was promised 22 (in Dickens's serial paper Household Words). This book also deals with issues of social reform, employee rights, and male/female roles. It kept me interested, which is more than I can say for some other books of this time period.

A line I liked: "Come! poor little heart! be cheery and brave." (p. 321)

Best of World Novels

2007-03-11T17:06:00.000-06:00

I need to be fair to the great works of literature out there that aren't British or American. So here is MY list of great world novels that I have read and know to be worth reading.

French
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Pere Goriot, Honore de Balzac
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (I haven't read it, though)

Russian
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dead Souls, Nicolai Gogol
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Anthem, Ayn Rand

African
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga

Mexican
House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
Woman Hollering Creek, Sandra Cisneros
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel

Indian
Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai
Life of Pi, Yann Martel (okay, this is not written by an Indian, but a Canadian - but it's about an Indian boy so I wanted to put it here)
The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Irish
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
The Dubliners, James Joyce

Hungarian
Embers, Sandor Marai

Those ancient classics
The Republic, Plato
The Inferno/The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
The Aeneid, Virgil
Candide, Voltaire
The Prince, Machiavelli
Makers of Rome/The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Plutarch (only if you're way into history)

Best American Novels

2007-03-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

Another list from Richard Cracroft's Classics Corner....this time it's the best of American novels, for your enjoyment.

The List: The 112 Best of the American Novelists, Novels
Indulge me now as I once again stick out my tender neck and present the definitive, absolutely correct, only True and Living List of The Best American Novelists and Novels of All Time and Eternity (Kind Of). Again, admission to highest degree of the Telestial Kingdom is reserved for those who have read (and can pass a multiple-choice examination on) this list. After all, most of the writers will be on hand in the Telestial to answer any questions; it will be a pleasant way for some of us to while away Eternity-since we won't be doing much else. (Cracroft)

Agee, James. A Death in the Family
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women
Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio
Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye, The Handmaid's Tale, The Robber Bride
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It On the Mountain
Barth, John. The Floating Opera, Giles Goat Boy
Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, The Dean's December
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man
Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine I have read a million of his short stories, though
Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood
Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Seventh Son
Cather, Willa. Death Comes to the Archbishop, My Ántonia, O, Pioneers!, One of Ours, The Professor's House, Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage
Cronin, A.J. The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom
Dos Passos, John. U.S.A. (Trilogy)
Douglas, Lloyd A. The Robe, The Big Fisherman
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy
Drury, Allen. Advise and Consent
Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man
Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, Absolom, Absolom!, The Bear, Go Down Moses
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night
Flagg Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes
Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain
Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men
Guterson, David. Snow Falling on Cedars
Guthrie, A.B., Jr. The Big Sky
Haley, Alex. Roots
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon
Hamilton, Jane. A Map of the World
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Marble Faun, Twice-Told Tales
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea
Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Modern Instance
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Irving, John. Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Irving, Washington. The Sketch-Book
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl; I am adding The Turn of the Screw because I think it's amazing
Johnson, James Weldon. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Jones, James. From Here to Eternity
Kennedy, William. Ironweed
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird
L'Engle, Madeleine. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door
Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street, Babbitt
Lockridge, Ross, Jr. Raintree County
London, Jack. The Call of the Wild
Lund, Gerald N. The Work and the Glory
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It
Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead
Malamud, Bernard. The Assistant, The Fixer
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain
McCullers, Carson. Ballad of the Sad Café, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, "Bartleby the Scrivener"
Michener, James.The Novel, Hawaii
Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn
Morrison, Tony. Beloved
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind
Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War
Norris, Frank. McTeague
Oates, Joyce Carol. Foxfire
O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato
O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away
O'Hara, John. Appointment in Samarra
O. Henry [William S. Porter]. The Four Million
Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio
Percy, Walker. The Moviegoer
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher,""The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Black Cat"
Porter, Katherine Anne. Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Potok, Chaim. The Chosen, The Promise, My Name Is Asher Lev
Price, Reynolds. Kate Vaiden
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye
Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels
Shaw, Irwin. The Young Lions
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony
Smiley, Jane. The Greenlanders
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row, The Pearl, The Winter of Our Discontent
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife
Tarkington, Booth. The Magnificent Ambersons
Taylor, Samuel W. Heaven Knows Why
Theroux, Paul. The Mosquito Coast
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (unclassifiable masterpiece)
Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens]. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventure of Tom Sawyer, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Mysterious Stranger, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist
Updike, John. Rabbit Run (series)
Uris, Leonard. Exodus
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple
Wallace, Lew. Ben-Hur
Warren, Robert Penn. All the King's Men
Waters, Frank. The Man Who Killed the Deer
Welty, Eudora. Losing Battles
Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust
Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Wister, Owen. The Virginian
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel, You Can't Go Home Again, The Web and the Rock
Wouk, Herman. The Winds of War
Wright, Richard. Native Son

It looks like I need to get cracking on my American novels.

Best British Novels/ists

2007-03-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

This list comes from Richard Cracroft, former English professor at BYU and contributor to Meridian Magazine. I've had a hard copy of this list for a few years and have been highlighting the books I've read as I go along. I figured as long as I'm in the book list mode, I might as well post this on here. Once again, books I've read are in green.

The Forty All-Time-Best British Novelists
Being Cracroft's Only True-and-Living List of the Forty All-Time-Best-British-Novelists

Austen, Jane, Emma; Pride and Prejudice
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, The Last Days of Pompeii
Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Progress
Butler, Samuel, The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim
DeFoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield; Great Expectations; The Pickwick Papers there are more Dickens not on this list that I have read
Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Durrell, Lawrence, The Alexandria Quartet
DuMaurier, Daphne, Rebecca
Eliot, George, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner
Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones
Forster, E.M., A Passage to India; Howard's End; A Room with a View
Galsworthy, John, The Forsyte Saga
Golding, William, Lord of the Flies
Graves, Robert, I, Claudius
Greene, Graham, The Power and the Glory
Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; The Mayor of Casterbridge
Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World
Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Kipling, Rudyard, Captains Couragous, Kim
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers
Lewis, C.S., The Chronicles of Narnia
Maugham, W. Somerset, Of Human Bondage
Orwell, George, 1984; Animal Farm
Scott, Sir Walter, Ivanhoe
Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
Smollett, Tobias, Humphrey Clinker
Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William Makepeace, Vanity Fair
Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings
Trollope, Anthony, Barcester Towers
Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Grey
Wolfe, Virginia, To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway

How many out of 100?

2007-03-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

I saw this on a blog called Sassymonkey Reads and I wanted to do it because I love book lists and marking which ones I've read. Rules are:

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read (but since I don't think the bold will show up very well on mine, I'm going to turn them green), italicize the ones you want to read, put a minus (-) in front of the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a plus (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. + Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. +To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. +Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) It's not here, but I think it's at my parents' house
5. + The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. + The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. + The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. * Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. *A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. * The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. + The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. + Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. + Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. - The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. + 1984 (Orwell)
35. * The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. * The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. * The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. * I Know This Much is True(Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. *The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. *-Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. + Bible
46. + Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. + The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. *She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling) don't ask me why these Harry Potter ones aren't in order
58. * The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. * The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. * The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. + Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. - The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. + Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. + The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. *The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. + Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. *Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. + The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. *A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. *The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) I tried one time but then settled for the Cliffs Notes

I don't know how or why the books on this list were chosen, but it's interesting at least.

Thoughts from Mom on books

2007-02-24T10:23:00.000-07:00

My mom has a post on her quote blog with several good thoughts about books and reading. I don't want to copy them all, so just check them out here. Another good post here. How does she get all her good information?

Painful but true

2007-02-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

I just came across this quote! Clive Staples, this is a little harsh! But I like it anyway.

"Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world."
--C.S. Lewis

Hope + Faith

2007-02-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but certainly that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
--Vadav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then....
live along some distant day
into the answer.
--Raine Maria Rilke

"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."
--C.S. Lewis

"We avoid suffering only at the great cost of distancing ourselves from life. In order to live fully we may need to look deeply and respectfully at our own suffering and at the suffering of others. In the depths of every wound we have survived is the strength we need to live. The wisdom our wounds can offer is a place of refuge. Finding this is not for the faint of heart. But then, neither is life."
--Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings, p. 138

Ah yes...

2007-02-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

"And now, with God's help, I shall become myself."
--Soren Kierkegaard

"Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessing."
--Thomas Carlyle

A poemlet

2007-02-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.
--Robert Browning

Motivate me

2007-02-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

"If you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, the time is short, how it would break the spell! How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do!"
--Phillips Brooks

"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
--Abraham Lincoln

"She had made the best of time, and time returned the compliment."
--Unknown (I love this one!)

"Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart."
--Rumi

"If we are not careful, we can be injured by the frostbite of frustration; we can be frozen in place by the chill of unmet expectations. To avoid this we must - just as we would with arctic coldness, keep moving, keep serving, and keep reaching out so that our own immobility does not become our chief danger."
--William Law

"Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action."
--Orison Swett Marden (remind anyone of a certain DVD?)

"Man is made so that whenever anything fires his soul impossibilities vanish."
--Jean de la Fontaine

Miscellany

2007-02-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

"O terque quaterque beati!" (trans. "O three and four times blessed!")
--Aeneas, The Aeneid 1.94

Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.
--Song of Solomon 2:5

There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen

Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.
--Hippocrates

Caminante no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar.
Traveler, there is no path. Paths are made by walking.
--Antonio Machado

We are made and yet are more than what made us.
--Arthur Miller

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves into crystal clearness.
--Matahma Gandhi

Book friends

2007-02-07T18:08:00.000-07:00

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate . . . peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends, let them be your aquaintances.
--Winston Churchill

Beloved

2007-02-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
--Raymond Carver, Late Fragment

A word from May

2007-02-04T17:02:00.000-07:00

"My theory : That the universe begain to exist at the point when human language was born. That it begain simultaneously with its expression through thought & word."
--May Swenson, journal

My excuse

2007-02-04T16:54:00.000-07:00

"The sages of old live again in us."
--Glanvill

"It is fit for the beginner and learner to study others and the best. For the mind and memory are more sharply exercised in comprehending another man's things than our own; and such as accustom themselves and are familiar with the best authors shall ever and anon find somewhat of them in themselves."
--Ben Jonson

"Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."
--Francis Bacon

"Students, in some things it is better to be intellectual uncertain than superficially sure."
--Arthur Henry King

"Let knowledge grow from more to more."
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Yeah

2007-02-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

"We do stand for something, do we not, we who love English, who have come to consciousness and culture through this language, who have found in it not merely a medium of expression but a vocation, a calling, the professional center and public justification of our lives? . . . We stand for whatever dignity this language can afford the human beings who find expression in and through it. We stand, above all, for sharing the powers and pleasures of this language with one another and with all those who seek our guidance in attaining those powers and pleasures. That is what I believe we stand for . . ."
--Robert Scholes, The Rise and Fall of English, p. 72

The masters speak

2007-02-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
-- John Milton

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
--Aldous Huxley

"The true university is a collection of books."
--Thomas Carlyle

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."
--C.S. Lewis

"The man that does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
--Mark Twain

"A classic is something everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
--Mark Twain

"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves."
--Highet

"A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us."
--Franz Kafka

"Books are the main source of our knowledge, our reservoir of first faith, memory, wisdom, morality, poetry, philosophy, history and science."
--Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress emeritus