Saturday, December 31, 2022

Nerve

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

Margaret Atwood 

Friday, December 30, 2022

Rebecca Solnit: conversations between strangers could be a gift

Solnit writes about San Francisco with a special affection, particularly about her first apartment in a mostly black neighborhood where she felt a sense of belonging. There were many churches nearby and “you were never far from devotion.”  She cherished the vibrancy that surrounded her, which stood in stark contrast to the deadness of the suburban sprawl of her childhood. She loved the way “conversations between strangers could be a gift and a sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessing, humor, that spoken words could be a little fire at which you warmed yourself.”

Dream

I dreamed I was hiding and then captured and taken to prison, a nightmare that woke me up and kept me awake for a while. Then this morning I dreamed my band mate was also in prison and after he played a gig with us he had to return.

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Brenda Ueland Tell me More

It is when people really listen to us, with quiet fascinated attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to accelerate in the most surprising way.

I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party I would think anxiously,“Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things. Talk. Don’t let down.” And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up.

Now before going to a party I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject. No. My attitude is, “Tell me more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive.”

Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. It is not because people are conceited and want to show off that they are drawn to me, the listener. It is because by listening I have started up their creative fountain. I do them good.

Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too — you can tear them up afterward — for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively. So it is with people who have not been listened to in the right way — with affection and a kind of jolly excitement. Their creative fountain has been blocked. Only superficial talk comes out — what is prissy or gushing or merely nervous. No one has called out of them, by wonderful
listening, what is true and alive.

source http://physics.uwyo.edu/~ddale/research/REU/2016/Tell_Me_More.pdf

Brenda Ueland

“We have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first – at least, for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

Keeping Hydrated to Relieve Nausea

Can post-nasal drip cause nausea? Yes, common symptoms of post-nasal drip include nausea and vomiting caused by extra mucus in the stomach. Patients may find relief from post-nasal drip induced nausea by drinking herbal teas...

 Drink fluids especially hot fluids

Drink a lot of fluids to thin out mucus. The thinner the mucus, the easier it can pass through your nasal cavities.

Drinking fluids will also moisturize your nasal lining. Hot drinks, like tea or broth, are the best choice. The warmth of these beverages will thin your mucus.

Avoid caffeinated drinks like coffee, caffeinated tea, or soda. Caffeine has a diuretic effect, which may increase your risk of dehydration.

Laurie Colwin

 “No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”

Laurie Colwin

“To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.”
Laurie Colwin

“The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.”
Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.”
Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim

“At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.”
Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object

“For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.”
Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.”
Laurie Colwin

“Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.”
Laurie Colwin, More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

“There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.”
Laurie Colwin

“To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.”
Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.”
Laurie Colwin, Happy All the Time

“Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.”
Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

“In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.”
Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking

“Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.”
Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment.”
Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Their first actual kiss was a one-celled organism which, after they had been standing on the stairway kissing for some time, evolved into something rather grander--a bird of paradise, for example.”
Laurie Colwin, Another Marvelous Thing

“We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes.”
Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“I put my lilies in front of Sam’s plaque. I didn’t want him to rest in peace. I wanted him to bounce around in death as he had in life, fearless, goofy, and fleet.”
Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

“When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge.”
Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

“Anxiety, she thought, was like a flock of birds on a telephone line. When people came around they flapped off, and when the people went away they hopped back on.”
Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness

“How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications.”
Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked It Over

Allysen Callery Music

Treat yourself to a magnificent musical experience.

Allysen Callery Music

Million Tongues Festival  

Lyrics

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

66 Laps

 I swam 62+4=2 swimmer's miles yesterday.

Heartland by Sarah Smarsh

 AMAZING!!! book.

Mark Haddon

Use your imagination, and you’ll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

Mark Haddon

I never quite know what I’m going to write until I write it—and then I’m not sure where it came from.

 “Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?” Gustave Flaubert wondered. Most artists know this feeling—that we’re being led by something outside ourselves. We all choose our styles, our materials, modes, means, tools, and so on, but the work we create isn’t entirely a matter of conscious choice. I never quite know what I’m going to write until I write it—and then I’m not sure where it came from. This is art’s otherness. It’s so powerful that you might sometimes wonder if art is using us to reproduce itself—if art might be a self-replicating cosmic force (or a fungus?) that has colonized us into symbiotic service. This can be thrilling. It can also be unsettling. “It’s like a ghost is writing,” Bob Dylan said, “except the ghost picked me to write the song.” Don’t let this creep you out. Instead, learn to trust it.

Jerry Saltz

Receive-Mode

I've been anxious about being in receive-mode because my energy is LOW. Facing the holiday only exacerbated the anxiety. But then my intuition reminded me the gift of receive-mode is being able to receive. Be as you are and receive. It was good advice and I had an enjoyable day.

Vicarious Vice-ness 

I've inherited gallbladder disease from my family. After a childhood of stomach aches I discovered ways to eat that do not cause me pain. I forgot how far away from typical holiday foods this has brought me. When I try to participate even a little as I did recently, sampling the homemade cakes, meats, and pies, I spent the following day in bed with a heating pad on my tummy. So I have developed what I call vicarious vice-ness. I watch others enjoy wine, butter, meat and sugar. 

My grandfather and mother had their gallbladders removed. For me it's also necessary to avoid rich fatty oily things. The blessing is, I love vegetables and whole grains and small bits of lean meat like a garnish. It works.
 
We must thank our bodies for the warning lights. Thank our bodies for shouting back about what is not good for us. It's a blessing in disguise.

 Carl Jung

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

 Carl Jung

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Chris Abani

I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school, and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels.

Chris Abani

I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.

Chris Abani

We Stand in our own Light

My grand uncle was a traditional priest, and he would always say to me as a kid, 'We stand in our own light,' which essentially for him meant we were entirely responsible for a lot of what happens to us and for the ways in which our lives play out.

Chris Abani

I am honored to share the recipe

I am honored to share the recipe of the brussels sprouts, broccoli (insert favorite veggie!)

Prepare the broccoli or brussels sprouts, green beans  (etc). by rinsing or trimming. I use broccoli stems too by peeling and chopping thin. I slice the stem knob off the brussels sprouts and slice in half. Sometimes I add fresh peeled and chopped garlic. Sometimes I add red chili flakes. Sometimes I add Sriracha!

Okay place the rinsed  broccoli (or favorite veggie) in the pan cast iron or heavy bottomed pan. THEN turn on heat. You will hear sizzling. Stir with wooden spoon. The greens will sear and have brown areas. You want this! This is roasting and it brings out a lot of flavor. You can roast veggies in the oven too but this is faster.  Save oven for another situation. Okay then pour in some olive oil (maybe 1/4 cup) and stir madly. The greens will get greener! Keep stirring. They are roasting and steaming at the same time. After a few minutes pour in about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of water or stock for flash steaming to finish off the cooking. Then add a dash of  soy sauce, or Adobo, salt or both! A drop of toasted sesame oil. Sooo good.

the difference between reading and writing

Writing is a process that’s entirely totalitarian. A writer is a tyrant, a dictator. He has complete power over every comma, every sentence, every character. When I’m writing, I’m the boss — I’m in charge. When the book is published, the political nature of it changes completely. People can read my books in whatever way they want to. I don’t want any control over the process of reading, it’s democratic: and furthermore, between the reader and the book there opens up a space of complete freedom, which is also private. In a democracy, we have a private voting booth. It’s secret. So the difference between reading and writing is the difference between democracy and tyranny. 

Phillip Pullman

Barbara Holtzman

We all need structure – children have meltdowns when their structure is disrupted. Adults also feel unsettled, restless, logy, more emotional.  This is exactly what we don’t need when we’re trying to deal with change and uncertainty. So how can we create a structure that balances work and family life, household chores, rest breaks, fun – and nourishing food?

https://barbaraholtzman.net/

https://barbaraholtzman.net/resources-2/blog/

Monday, December 26, 2022

Sam Shepard: I feel my great strength as a writer is being alone.

I feel my great strength as a writer is being alone. Aloneness is a condition of writing. You look at all the writers that have come up with something worth it’s own salt and they’re utterly alone, you know...all of them.

Sam Shepard

persisted beyond all odds.

When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.
Sam Shepard, True West 

I love the smell of toast.

"Well it is like salvation sort of. I mean the smell. I love the smell of toast. And the sun's coming up. It makes me feel like anything's possible. Y'know?

Sam Shepard, True West 

risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side

Look it - you start out as an artist, I started out when I was nineteen, and you’re full of defenses. You have all of this stuff to prove. You have all of these shields in front of you. All your weapons are out. It’s like you’re going into battle. You can accomplish a certain amount that way. But then you get to a point where you say, “But there’s this whole other territory I’m leaving out.” And that territory becomes more important as you grow older. You begin to see that you leave out so much when you go to battle with the shield and all the rest of it. You have to start including that other side or die a horrible death as an artist with your shield stuck on the front of your face forever. You can’t grow that way. And I don’t think you can grow as a person that way, either. There just comes a point when you have to relinquish some of that and risk becoming more open to the vulnerable side, which I think is the female side. It’s much more courageous than the male side.
Sam Shepard 

Walkable Liveable City

 Article

Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi translation by Coleman Barks

When life gets you down do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.

from Finding Nemo

Develop an interest in life as you see it: Henry Miller

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.  Henry Miller

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

Henry Miller, Sexus

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that, as I said therein, if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing.

Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin Henry Miller, 1932-1953

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.

Henry Miller, Plexus

 The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

Henry Miller, Sexus

When one door of happiness closes, another opens

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

Sunday, December 25, 2022

discover it

Part of the process of writing is not so much to explain your vision but to discover it. I think that’s what you do when you write: You find out what you think. Robert Towne

a small act of resistance

Every work of literature is a great victory over oneself and a small act of resistance against the world.

David Gordon, The Serialist p334

Saturday, December 24, 2022

At the core, each person is unknowable.

We'll never penetrate the secrets of the living, let alone the dead. I've spent my whole life trying to understand people, and all I've learned is that the deeper we look, the greater the mystery. At the core, each person is unknowable. Maybe that's the soul? I have to respect that. The mystery, in fact, is what I've loved the most, in people and in stories as well.”
Sandra Scofield, Plain Seeing 

Sandra J Scofield

Ignore the noise.

Walk a lot.

Just do it. Don’t get caught up in expectations, or slogged down in doubt. Don’t think about writing; write. If it doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know why you would keep at it. Life is too short to create your own suffering. But if you are plagued by thinking about stories, then read, study, write, revise. Look out at the world and ask yourself: What is speaking to me? What do I care about? What needs to get said? What is inside me? Really. Listen to your heart. Sandra J Scofield interview

Painting, like writing, is about passion and meaning; about observation and composition; about vision, persistence, and the joy of process. Sandra J Scofield

Friday, December 23, 2022

You're always in a rush

“You're always in a rush, or else you're too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.”
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go 

I keep thinking about this river

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart.”
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go 

I loved words

I truly believed in the transformative therapeutic benefits of creation. I loved words. They had power. I wrote a poem about my high school principal titled “Mr. Pencil Head.” It got published in the school journal. The principal called me in to rebuke me for what was obviously an attempt to make him look foolish and otiose. That's when I knew I wanted to be a writer. That's when I realized I had found my creative medium for personal transformation. Rex Pickett interview

Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?

My favorite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of Live and Let Die, James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proof-reader suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say “Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?” to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.

Ian Flemming

Thursday, December 22, 2022

Raisin Cinnamon Bread by Deanna Patterson, Greenville, Texas

Raisin Cinnamon Bread

 Makes 2 loaves (16 slices each)
Here's my version of the time-honored cinnamon swirl bread. Confectioners' sugar icing makes it even more special. The recipe makes two loaves, perfect for sharing with the neighbors. —Deanna Patterson, Greenville, Texas

Ingredients

  • 1 package (1/4 ounce) active dry yeast
  • 1/4 cup warm water (110° to 115°)
  • 2 cups warm milk (110° to 115°)
  • 1/3 cup plus 1/2 cup sugar, divided
  • 1/4 cup canola oil
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 5-3/4 to 6-1/4 cups all-purpose flour* (I like to add rolled oats+sourdough starter)
  • 2 cups raisins
  • 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 tablespoon water
  • GLAZE: optional
  • 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
  • 1 tablespoon milk

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Add milk, 1/3 cup sugar, oil, salt and 2 cups flour. Beat until smooth. Add raisins and enough remaining flour to form a soft dough.
  2. Turn onto a floured surface; knead until smooth and elastic, about 6-8 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, turning once to grease top. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1-1/4 hours.
  3. Punch dough down. On a lightly floured surface, divide in half. Roll each into a 15x7-in. rectangle. Combine cinnamon and remaining sugar; sprinkle over dough. Sprinkle with water. Starting with a short side, roll up tightly, jelly-roll style. Pinch seams and ends to seal. Place, seam side down, in two greased 9x5-in. loaf pans. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour.
  4. Preheat oven to 350°. Bake 30-35 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from pans to wire racks to cool completely. Combine glaze ingredients; drizzle over warm loaves.

Vicki Baum

I felt and still feel that a writer should always have some profession which brings him into close contact with the realities of life.

Curious, how each one of us secretly carries his private cemetery around with him and watches it filling up with ever new graves. The last one to be our own...

Worries are the most stubborn habits in the world. Even after a poor man has won a huge lottery prize, he will still for months wake up in the night with a start, worrying about food and rent.

Courage comes and goes. Hold on for the next supply. 

People don’t speak of hunger when they know what it is to be hungry. 

There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.
Vicki Baum 

The Woman with Five Heads

I have run into her for years while out walking my dog. No matter what the topic of conversation is she'll start arguing with herself. This makes conversing impossible. She believes she's being logical and thorough in her thinking. I see her as demonstrating a total inability to think. Ultimately she can't get past her emotionally agitated barrage of fear. This fear is entertainment for her. I think it's dreadful. I told my husband, Dierdre has five heads! And they all contradict each other no matter the topic. Who are these other people? Her dead mother, her dead father, her first husband, her current husband and herself. Just a guess. She does have a good heart although lately I dread bumping into her. Last time we both smiled and waved and kept walking.

When you go in search of honey, you must expect to be stung by bees

Joseph Joubert
“Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.”
Joseph Joubert

“The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.”
Joseph Joubert
“We may convince others by our arguments, but we can only persuade them by their own”
 ― Joseph Joubert

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

 ― Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

 ― Joseph Joubert

“Close your eyes and see.”
Joseph Joubert

“Imagination is the eye of the soul.”
joseph joubert

“He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.”
Joseph Joubert 

“To teach is to learn twice.”
Joseph Joubert

“Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.”
Joseph Joubert

“It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.”
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert 

“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.”
Joseph Joubert

“Misery is almost always the result of thinking.”
Joseph Joubert

“You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.”
Joseph Joubert
“Everything has its poetry.”
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

 “The breath of the mind is attention.”
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

 Joseph Joubert

Few Minds are Spacious

“Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.

All those short-sighted minds see clearly within their little ideas and see nothing in those of others; they are like those bad eyes that see from close range what is obscure and cannot perceive what is clear from afar. Night minds, minds of darkness.”
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

Opera is all about saying goodbye, Virgil Thomson is reputed to have said, and ballet is all about saying hello.

Let your mind alone, and see what happens.
I look at you and I write down what I hear.

Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.

I don't have to worry No matter what they do to it, it works.

I don't care what other critics say, I only hope to be played.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can. 

You explain how it went, and as far as you can figure out how it got that way.

Musicians own music because music owns them.

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down. 

Virgil Thomson 

A writer’s notebook becomes a record, or the objectification of a mind.

Every story Lydia Davis writes begins in a notebook, but how does she know when they are ready

This morning I walk around the house feeling happy and I’m struck by what I’m doing. Actually, I’m struck by only one gesture I happen to make, but that one gesture inspires me to write a sentence describing what I have just been doing. This is usually an effective approach in writing because one striking element can be the culmination of a series of more familiar elements that would not stand on their own.

So I go to my notebook, which is lying open beside my “official” work – a typed and nearly finished story that needs three or four changes. My notebook always lies beside my “official” work because I write in it most when I am supposed to be doing something else. So today I write down a sentence about what I have just been doing. I write it in the third person. I write about myself sometimes in the third person and sometimes in the first. Thinking about it now, I realise what determines this: If it matters that I’m the one doing something, if I am truly the subject, then I write in the first person. If it does not matter who is doing it but I’m simply interested that a person is doing this, then I write in the third person – that is, I’m using myself as a source of material and I’m more comfortable writing in the third person because then I (the writing I) don’t get in the way of the character that may evolve from this action. (Sometimes, the “I” has tended to become a “he” in the stories – the “he” being a slightly overweight, feminine sort of man, gentle, androgynous. More recently, the “I” usually becomes a “she.”)

So I write it down and then immediately revise it. In revised form it reads: “She walks around the house balancing on the balls of her feet, sometimes whistling and singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position.” Today I have revised this sentence immediately; sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Maybe it depends on how interested I am in what I write down, or maybe I don’t revise it if the writing is so simple or brief that it comes out exactly right the first time. Today it isn’t quite right and I must be interested because I revise it: I want it to be exactly right. I will work on it until it is exactly right, whether or not the observation is important and whether or not I think I’ll ever “use” it. In fact, I don’t often use notebook entries in a story unless the entry turns into the story.

I don’t generally use these entries because my stories tend to be written in one uninterrupted “breath” and they usually don’t work if I start piecing them together. Then why do I revise the notebook entries? I’m not sure, but I will guess. For one thing, it is hard for me to let a sentence stand if I see something wrong with it. Even when I’m writing a grocery list it is hard for me not to correct a misspelling. For another, I tend to follow my instinct in writing – I don’t question my impulses. So if I want to revise, I don’t tell myself there is no point in revising. I follow my instinct: there may be a reason for my doing something, a reason that I don’t understand at the moment but that will become clear later on. There may come a day when I will use one or more of these separate notebook entries in a larger written work. I may turn back a few years in the notebook, read an entry, and see how it could become something larger. And if it is poorly written, if it is left unrevised, I will have more trouble seeing what it wants to be.

There is also the constant practice I get from revising notebook entries. And it may be that what I have worked out in the final version of one notebook entry will inspire another sentence in a new story without my even realising it. Or maybe the notebook is a place to practise not only writing but also thinking. After all, when you revise a sentence, you are revising not only the words of the sentence but also the thought in the sentence. And more generally, by getting a certain description exactly right, I am sharpening the acuteness of my observation as well as my ability to handle the language. So there are many ways to justify working hard on one sentence in a notebook, a sentence that you may never use. But most of all, as I said, I follow my impulses in writing (in the notebook) without asking whether what I am doing is sensible, efficient, even moral, etc. I do it because I like to or want to – which is where everything in writing should begin anyway. (As for the question of morality – I won’t publish something if it seems to me morally wrong to publish it, but the act of exploration that is writing is very different from the finality and publicness of publishing. Writing is still private until it is made public.)

The notebook is also where I write stories. Every story I write begins in the notebook and in fact is usually written entirely in the notebook. There is a good reason for that, though it took me a while to realise it: in the notebook nothing has to be permanent or good. Here I have complete freedom and so I am not afraid. You can’t write well – you probably can’t do anything well – if you feel cornered. I am not afraid because what I write in here doesn’t have to become a story, but if it wants to, it will. In some sense, I don’t deliberately set out to write stories any more. I used to, and I started them on clean sheets of typing paper in the typewriter (this was actually at the time when I took my one writing workshop, which was with Grace Paley – I must have felt more professional working this way). Now the stories force themselves on me. It took years for this to happen, and I’m not sure how I got it to happen, except by pushing myself – if the stories weren’t occurring to me, then I sat down and thought them up and wrote them no matter how uncomfortable and forced that felt and despite the fact that the stories were not entirely satisfactory to me.

First I wrote long stories because I thought a story had to be long. My characters were based on people I did not know very much about, and sometimes I guessed right about human nature. At least the settings were sometimes good, because I knew the settings well. Then I realised I did not have to write long stories – in fact I could write in whatever way I wanted, and for a while I pushed myself out of a dry spell by writing two paragraph-long stories every day. Most of them were not wonderful, but a few were good, and that was enough. For a while after that, I wrote only very short stories in short, neat sentences.

Eventually I didn’t have to search for ideas; a story would impose itself on me or well up in me – now I feel I must write the story, I must get rid of it. Nabokov said he never set out to write a novel but to get rid of it. Maybe the notebook is also, for me, a place to get rid of everything, and the more exactly I put it down the more completely I get rid of it. Some sentences want to be stories right away. The latest one that grew immediately into a story – still in rough form at the moment – was “It took the Queen of England to make my mother stop criticising my sister.” This happens to be true.

Sometimes the notebook entry becomes a story; in other cases, it is nothing more than a sentence or a few sentences and will never be more, or not for the foreseeable future; and sometimes it seems to want to be a story and I go back to it from time to time, but it won’t grow. It may be just too limited 
(or too absurd) to make a developed story, even though it is striking. Or maybe I haven’t quite got the idea yet, and I’m trying to develop the story in the wrong direction.

Speaking of not being afraid when you write, I see that I have evolved quite involuntarily two habits that make me not afraid. One is the habit of starting every story in the notebook, where it is under no pressure to be a story; the other is that quite often I do what I did today: I sit in front of the typed pages of a story that is nearly finished and that I am not trying to finish, and instead of working on it, I begin another story in my notebook and write that out until nothing more occurs to me. It is easier to do that – to begin a story – when that is not what I had planned to do. My unconscious, or whatever part of the brain works hardest in writing something new, is very relaxed and comfortable because there is a clear-cut task to go back to when I have nothing more to add, for the moment, to the new story.

Meanwhile the typed story just sits there. The same thing may happen the next day. Sometimes I have four or five, or more, stories in progress at once. It is nice to feel that there is too much to work on rather than nothing at all – the blank page. Some stories, not quite finished, may get pushed out of the way in all this activity and may be forgotten for a while – even months. But sooner or later I come back to them and finish them, and it does not hurt them to let this time pass. I see them more clearly.

On the day I’m talking about, my plan had been to finish the last story of a collection of stories. I did work on it for a while, then I noticed my behaviour walking through the house, then I recorded what I was doing, then I stopped to think how the process of writing and revision worked for me, and then I decided to write down this description of it.

Of course, there is much more to say about notebooks. Many writers have kept notebooks. Kafka kept a notebook full of ideas for stories, beginnings of stories, complete stories, accounts of evenings he spent with friends in cafés, and then also complaints about his family, landlady, neighbours, etc. His complaints about his neighbours’ real noises on the other side of the wall became written fantasies about unreal people on the other side of the wall. A writer’s notebook becomes a record, or the objectification of a mind. There were painters, like Delacroix, who kept wonderful notebooks. And then there were writers who never published anything else but their notebooks, like the 18th-century Frenchman Joseph Joubert.

I can always get someone to open a window in Paris.

(email from schoolmate about learning French)

Lydia Davis

A New Biography of George Balanchine by Jennifer Homans

Dancing pared the body, honed the musculature, subtly shifted bones. Training was transformation, and working with Balanchine involved a kind of metamorphosis entangled with pain, self-destruction and shame, but also with desire and joy. External form could even harmonize a fractured inner life, at least in the moment of dancing. It didn’t erase a person’s faults or dull her anxieties, but it did hold out the promise of a more ordered soul. At peak the dancer felt fluid and strong, integrated, coordinated, and above all clarified. Less mass and less food clogging the system (more blood to muscles) added to the feeling of the body as “true light” and a well-lubricated machine. Even the salty sweat purged through the ritual exercise of daily class felt like an unburdening, a purification that set a dancer apart from her unholy and civilian self. She was a different creature, part of a tribe, a chosen member of art. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/jennifer-homans-george-balanchine.html

I see better and feel more when I write it down. Jennifer Homans

I became a writer by being a shy person and a dancer.

I am very internal and have always liked to sit alone in dark theaters watching dance and scribbling thoughts. Or performing, which is also a very private experience, even (or because) it is for a public. 

Writing is always for me a way of thinking – I don't know what I am going to “say” before I write it. 

Dance mattered because, somehow, the direct connection between seeing or moving and the task of describing my own thoughts in the moment, as a thing, but also as an effect on my own being, is something private and natural to me. 

I see better and feel more when I write it down.

 I have ideas when I move to music, and often took a pen and paper with me to dance classes. The process was so private that I never imagined I would share my writing, and to this day, I feel oddly surprised when I see my work in print.

When I am writing, no one else is there, just me (barely) and the material. In this sense, it is very much like dancing.

Write about something you care about and want to know more about. 

Curiosity and delight in learning is for me a key; it takes me out of myself.  

Jennifer Homans (interview)

Trust your own interest.

Always work (note, write) from your own interest, never from what you think you should be noting, or writing. Trust your own interest.

I have a strong interest, at the moment, in Roman building techniques, thus my notation above, taken down in the Cluny Museum in Paris.

My interest may pass. But for the moment I follow it and enjoy it, not knowing where it will go.

Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write about, be tested by time, not by other people—either real other people or imagined other people.

This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.

Lydia Davis (more)

Sarah Smarsh

I do not wish to valorize the working class or demonize those who are better off. Both groups vote in droves for politicians who cater to massive agricultural corporations, the fossil fuel lobby and other powerful entities that destroy our planet. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/opinion/farm-meat-butchering.html

Sarah Smarsh is the author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.

an unusual aspect of brain chemistry

Its producer, Riviera Farms in the state of Victoria, said it believed its product had been “contaminated with a weed.”

What weed could make spinach hallucinogenic? The health department of the state of Victoria has said that the symptoms suggested “anticholinergic syndrome,” a type of poisoning mainly caused by plants in the Solanaceae family, which includes nightshade, jimson weed and mandrake root.

Anticholinergic plants and drugs inhibit the action of a brain chemical called acetylcholine, which is linked to memory, thinking and the visual system, according to Dominic ffytche, a professor of visual psychiatry at King’s College London, who specializes in visual hallucinations (and who really does lowercase his last name). Acetylcholine can also be lost naturally and is linked to Alzheimer’s, some type of dementias and other neurodegenerative diseases, he said.

Hallucinations caused by a suppression or loss of acetylcholine tend to be “formed,” Professor ffytche said, that is concrete and recognizable, usually taking the form of people, objects and landscapes. This is distinct from “unformed” hallucinations, when people might see shapes, patterns and colors.

Furthermore, hallucinations caused by a lack of acetylcholine are linked to the memory system, so they tend to involve people the sufferer knows or recognizes, he said. “It could be deceased relatives, or people that are vaguely familiar to them in some way.”

Those experiencing more extreme symptoms can have difficulty determining what is real, he said.

“When you lose an understanding that they are hallucinations, they tend to become distressing,” he added. “You become sucked into the story where something bad is going on and people are trying to hurt you or harm you in some way.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/world/australia/spinach-hallucinations.html

One should learn even from one's enemies. 

 ― Ovid, Metamorphoses

A new idea is delicate

“I am the poet of the poor, because I was poor when I loved; since I could not give gifts, I gave words.”
Ovid

“A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.”
Ovid

Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses

 ― Ovid

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.

 ― Ovid

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

― Ovid, Heroides 

“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”
Ovid, Heroides

“God himself helps those who dare.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses 

“Love will enter cloaked in friendship's name.”
Ovid

“If you would be loved, be lovable”
Ovid

“Happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.”
"Be patient and tough; one day this pain will be useful to you.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Happy are those who dare courageously to defend what they love.”
Ovid

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”
Ovid

“Nothing is stronger than habit.”
Ovid  

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Youth

“Youth eats all the sugared fancy cakes and regards them as its daily bread. But there'll come a time when you'll start asking just for a crust.”
Ivan Turgenev 

Diary of a Superfluous Man

“ I had absolutely lost all sense of personal dignity, and could not tear myself away from the spectacle of my own misery.”
Ivan Turgenev, Diary of a Superfluous Man 

What a magnificent body

 “What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.”
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

Every man hangs by a thread

“Every man hangs by a thread, any minute the abyss may open under his feet, and yet he must go and invent for himself all kinds of troubles and spoil his life.”
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons 

Take for yourself what you can, and don't be ruled by others; to belong to oneself - the whole savour of life lies in that.

  ― Ivan Turgenev, Spring Torrents

We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.

 ― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

If we wait for the moment

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
Ivan Turgenev

this mathematical point

“Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something... What chaos! What a farce!”
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons 

“You get home and you’re tired and Scruff will come up and put a ball in your lap,” David said. “We probably walk five miles a day with him, through the woods and fields near where we live. It’s always a fun adventure to go out with him.”

 This dog has collected more than 1,000 littered plastic bottles ‘Finding plastic bottles is his focus and passion,’ said Yvonne Faulkner-Grant, adding that he drops them at her feet during walks so she can recycle them

Writing Is a Risky, Humiliating Endeavor

Life, in other words, is unpredictable, sometimes even risky. And inner life — the realm of emotions, memories, dreams and unconscious urges — is not much better. But if we were totally aware of this, then going to the grocery store would be impossible, so we keep that stuff out of mind while we go about our days. Writing involves thinking all the unthinkable stuff while still taking care of business.

Writing then, must feel risky in order to feel like life. I used to cringe when people talked about “brave” writing. I’d think, calm down, it’s not like you’re a fireman or a Special Forces commando. If the mission fails, just toss it in the wastebasket. But I do think, upon reflection, that there is a need to generate emotional risk, a sense of imminence, of danger, in order to transmit that aliveness to the page. This needn’t mean personal revelation or offensive language. Sometimes quiet, dense writing is the most deeply and complexly honest. Sometimes intellectual discourse is brave in our Twitter culture. Genuine and sincere emotion can be risky in a world of snark and irony. So can making silly jokes about matters our society regards with sanctimonious seriousness. Sometimes it is just a matter of a writer doing what she does not yet know how to do, speaking about something he does not yet understand. The risk of ambitious failure.

That’s why I decided to write this essay. Because, of all the topics that crossed my mind, it was the one that made me squirm. Because, when I told that same writer-friend, the one who hates being talked about, that my ex-wife had unfriended me, and I said, “I suppose it’s like getting a one-star review,” she wisely replied: “Or a five.”

writing can be a way of creating a kind of live emotional experience

I do think that, ideally, writing can be a way of creating a kind of live emotional experience which is transmittable, sharable with other people, who then read the words and have a personal and unique experience of their own, one at a time. This to me is amazing and one of the things that fiction still does so well.

I am just a guy with a book to sell, but if you want my actual real advice? Help someone else. Think about someone or something else besides oneself. This is the only way to connect with others and be free from ourselves that I have seen work. I haven't come across any others. But then I am probably a more desperate character than most.

David Gordon

Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code 

“My lawyers will fricassee your testicles for breakfast. And if you dare board my plane without a warrant, your spleen will follow.”

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code 

“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.”
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code 

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation

 “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” ― Audre Lorde

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”  ―Audre Lorde

“Your silence will not protect you.”
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
Audre Lorde 
 
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
Audre Lorde

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ― Audre Lorde

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."

I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
Audre Lorde 

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
Audre Lorde 
 
“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”
Audre Lorde