libros junio

bird by bird: some instructions on writing & life by anne lamott
i just found a new 'i'll-read-anything-they-write' author. bird by bird is the first anne lamott book i've read & i liked her style so much that i already got & read operating instructions. i also got traveling mercies & plan b. i also wrote anne lamott a letter. so yeah, i like this book. go get something by anne lamott right now & read it.
making a literary life: advice for writers & other dreamers by carolyn see
this book was great. my favourite bit was this idea of writing 'charming notes' to authors, editors & other literary-ish people you admire. alot of good ideas.
black like me by john howard griffin
in 1959, this guy who was a novelist & racial specialist decided he wanted to really find out what life was like in the deep south. so he figured out a way, with medication, to turn his white skin black & spent the next 6 weeks traveling around new orleans, alabama, mississippi... this is his journal of the experience.
the history of love by nicole krauss
i haven't quite finished this one but so far i like it. i just found out from an interview i was reading that the author, nicole krauss, is married to jonathan safran foer, who wrote 'everything is illuminated,' (which i haven't read but the movie is good), & 'extremely loud & increadibly close' (which i read a few months ago & loved).
i like it when books have good first lines. how's this for the start of a book...
'When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT.'
maybe that doesn't do it for everyone, but it caught my attention.

we have seen grace

this is grace akallo, from uganda. when she was 15, she was abducted from her school in the middle of the night by the lord's resistance army. she is one of roughly 30,000 children that have been kidnapped & forced to serve as soldiers. a few months ago she testified about it.

'in the dark times, will there be singing? yes. there will be singing about the dark times.'
~bertolt brecht

impossible is nothing

from the mind of albert einstein...

'the world is too dangerous to live in --
not because of people who do evil,
but because of people who sit & let it happen.'

sunday scribblings: bed

i just looked up the sunday scribblings prompt for today. it's BED. which... seems weird to me. what the heck am i going to write about beds? nothing.

but then i got to thinking about how the bed i slept in last night is in a different city then the bed i was sleeping in last month, & how so much of my life has been like that, traveling, never in the same place for long. and i started to think about how my idea of home doesn't exist in any certain place, but seems somehow to travel around with me, seems to exist in people more than places. i am homesick for my rickety bed in a castle in england, am homesick for my airmattress in a tent in a valley in switzerland, much more often then i am homesick for the town i grew up in. sometimes i do wish i could have had the chance to live in the same house my whole life, to have one of those lives where no matter what happens or where you go, you can always go back to that one same place that never changes, where your childhood room is just like you left it, with posters on the walls & junk in the closet & old stuffed animals on the bed. sometimes i want that. but then i remember all the stuff i would have missed. i would have missed sleeping in...

a house in seattle.
an apartment in minneapolis.
a guest room in ireland.
a bed & breakfast in edinburgh.
a tent in paris, lauterbrunnen, berlin, venice, krakow, prague.
a youth hostel in spain.
a hotel in morocco.
a basement in spokane.
an airport in north london.
a dorm room in chicago.
a tent in a hayfield in illinois (on a cot.)
a church in london (on an airmattress.)
a gym in a school in missouri.
a church in south africa (on the floor.)
& of course,
a castle in england.



where thou art
that
is home.
~emily dickinson

careen

last week jenny & i decided to spend a day in the city. and we went to easy street. and while wandering around among the phone booths, jenny stumbled upon crash couture. good old portland band. good old drew.

mystery

some questions i have:

who thought 'the nine to five' was a good idea?
how does the international dateline work?
what is the point of mosquitos?
why does the radio play the same 10 songs over & over?
where will i live next?
why am i always planning the next thing & never living where i am?
why do people think beauty means being perfect?
why does where you live determine whether you live?
why do so many brilliant artists, writers, scientists... kill themselves?
what should i do with my life?
what should we be doing about iraq?
why don't we realize what we have 'til it's gone?
when does real life start?









'be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart & try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms & like books that are written in a foreign tongue. do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.'
~rainer maria rilke, 'letters to a young poet'

for more sunday scribblings go here.

for lack of something else to say...

after a burst of blogging everyday, i suddenly stopped posting for a week. aaaaaannnd at the moment i still don't have anything that i want to say. so in lieu of writing something interesting myself, i'll give you some stuff i've been looking at...

postsecret. one of my favourites. i'd seen the book about this but i really became a fan after reading a post about it on sharelle's blog. (they put up new postcards every sunday.)

sunday scribblings & poetry thursday. i just found these a few weeks ago & love them. maybe this will inspire me to get posting again...

ink on my fingers. random blog i've been reading of a journalist in the uk. i never understood why you would bother reading the blog of someone you don't know... until i started finding some really good writing out there.

so there you go. consider this a stop gap so my large, awaiting readership (all 3 of you), won't think i fell off the face of the earth.

postsecret

..

'ironically, our society tends to portray artists as dreamers. but those who suppress their creativity are actually the ones living in a dream. an artist is someone who sees & feels reality very intensely. creativity doesn't mean just making things up out of thin air. it means seeing & feeling the world so vividly that you can put together connections & patterns that help to explain reality. it means you see the beauty in the world rather than trying to hide from it.' ~danny gregory, 'the creative license'