Tag: uncategorized

I’ve been intending to post about a whole raft of books, a trip to Seattle, spiritual rumblings, and a birthday adventure, but the summer heat and humidity sap most of my initiative. Soon!

If you can wade through the absolute twaddle inside the interviewer’s mind, Dawn French has some interesting things to say in this Guardian Observer interview

‘You mustn’t lie to yourself or have any shame about anything to do with your body. I really don’t know why I don’t. I have attributed it in the past to my dad, because of his cherishing of me. I might have done that because he died quite early, because I hero-worshipped him a bit. Possibly there’s that, but also I always moved away from people who made me feel bad and slightly swum towards people who are unafraid of it, who want me to be who I feel happy to be.’

Ten languages I’ve at times thought I’d like to be able to make myself understood in (or to understand, in the case of dead languages):

1. English (not, unfortunately, always a given)
2. French
3. Dutch
4. Yiddish
5. Swahili
6. Mandarin
7. Icelandic
8. Old English
9. Latin
10. Hebrew

See, I’ve always had this vague, unrealized dream of being a polyglot. Unfortunately, it has remained a dream, as even my six years of instruction in French (lo these many years ago) have come to naught.

Brought to you by Doc Smartypants’ Friday Tenâ„¢.

OK, so they’re only light flurries, but the very fact that it’s flakes and not a bit of mist is noteworthy.

As is the forecast for tomorrow and Monday: 57, then 63.

The weekend before the one just past, we went to the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouthport to see the exhibit of the original artwork for the Gashleycrumb Tinies. It was delightful to visit the house a second time, and the Tinies are truly amazing to see. The exhibit has been extended into December, and I highly recommend taking it in if you’re anywhere near the Cape. His house has a magnificent magnolia tree growing beside it.

And this past Sunday we were showing around a new two-stepping friend, so we went to two favorite spots, Walden Pond in Concord and Halibut Point on Cape Ann.

Thanks to The Revealer for this link: StopLandmines.org.

The video ad (which The Revealer said was rejected for US television) is strong medicine.

Alberto Manguel. I loved his A History of Reading, so this was a must-read for me. Manguel re-reads twelve favorite books over the course of a year, keeping a commonplace book as he goes.

I don’t like people summing up books for me. Tempt me with a title, a scene, a quotation, yes, but not with the whole story. Fellow enthusiasts, jacket blurbs, teachers and histories of literature destroy much of our reading pleasure by ratting on the plot. And as one grows older, memory, too, can spoil much of the pleasure of being ignorant of what will happen next. I can barely recall what it was like not to know that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were one and the same person, or that Crusoe would meet his man Friday. [Argh, there, you’ve ruined those books for me, Alberto!]

Questions that in themselves delight: Why and how has this happened? Who is responsbile? What plan lies behind this confusion of facts? The reader assumes the role of a detached Job, in which sentiment is a mere adornment or distraction.

The rain has stopped. For several weeks now I’ve followed a certain routine: working on one book in the morning, on another in the afternoon. This is easier now that the days are getting colder. Two different voices or tones: the first tries to be coherent and follows the thread of a narrative or an argument; the second (this diary) is fragmented, haphazard. The second allows me to think without an established direction.

The reader contradicts the writer’s method, whatever that may be. As a reader, I’ll follow a carefully plotted story carelessly, allowing myself to be distracted by details and aleatory thoughts; on the other hand, I’ll read a fragmentary work (Valéry, for instance, or Pío Baroja) as if I were connecting the dots, in search of order. In both cases, however, I look for (or imagine) a link between beginning and end, as if all reading were, in its very nature, circular.

Thanks to Philocrites for sending me after this page: Official UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Home Page.

I’m trying to play with new designs for the blog, and this is just a little piece of that effort.