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Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.

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	2010.12.26 23.51 "Same Difference," Derek Kirk Kim Dialogue excerpted from "Same Difference" by Derek Kirk Kim: "What's up with everyone getting married anyway? One by one, all my peer are falling by the wayside..." "You're just at that age, Simon. It's inevitable." "Do you know how I felt when I saw Eddie and Jane?" "Sure. If you're anything like me, you felt like gouging out your eardrums." "I was... I was jealous. Jealous of them." "Are you high?! I thought you never wanted to get married!" "No no, not because of that! Well, I guess because of that, but not that specifically... what I mean is-- It's just that their lives have changed and... progressed since high school. They're going somewhere. Their lives are taking them to new places and experiences. True, maybe not to the places that I might want to go personally, but they're moving nonetheless. And look at me. What have I done since high school? Nothing! What do I have? Nothing! I'm really scared that I'm still the exact same pathetic loser weaving juvenile lines those 7 years ago. Am I any different now? Have I matured at all? I really don't know... And look at Eddie and Jane-- they're having children, for chrissakes! They're taking on the ultimate responsibility, and I'm sitting here still drawing Woody Woodpecker into the sand. And worse, I'm making fun of them for the effort!" Mood: cold



	2010.11.02 16.19 Excerpts from Once Upon a Time... To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Reading is Fundamental, Putnam published a collection of illustrations and brief thoughts by children's and young reader's authors on the subject of reading: "'Ahaa!' I respond. 'And do you know what the most important questions of all? They've interviewed people all over the world and these seem to be the two most important and often asked questions: Who am I? and Why am I? In other words, what kind of a person am I? Why am I here in this world? How is my own story going to turn out? What's my plot?' Books give us some of the clues we need to answer those questions. Sometimes the clue is buried in a character we meet in a story, a trait we might like or dislike." (Jim Trelease) ~ "W. Somerset Maugham wrote that people aren't always born at home. We can see the world through books, and the books will be our tents." (M.B. Goffstein) ~ "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." (Dr. Seuss) ~ "Each of us has to live, finally in her own little piece of the world, doing many things in the same way day after day, seeing the same old face in the mirror. But with books added to the day, you can be quite content. With books, your inner world has no walls. And in reading -- and writing -- stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life... Readers are lucky -- they will never be bored or lonely." (Natalie Babbitt) ~ "There is a poem by the Senagalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor in which he unites childhood to Eden, present to past, life to death, with the line, 'Un pont de douceur les relie' (a tender bridge connects them)." (Ashley Bryan) Mood: happy



	2010.10.11 16.10 Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein This is a moment of realization for the novel's protagonist, Michael, a human brought up by Martians at a future time and who was trying to learn to behave and think like a human being: ( Don't read this if you don't want to find out how Michael learned to laugh ) Mood: cold



	2010.01.23 19.01 Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration. ( The final paragraph of Tortilla Flat ) Mood: pleased



	2009.12.04 23.54 Charles Dickens, Christmas Festivities On the back of this edition, it describes all of Dickens's Christmas stories as a collection that "celebrates the season as one of geniality, charity, and remembrance." I can think of no better description of Christmas than that. Happy holidays, everyone. Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused -- in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened -- by the recurrence of Christmas. There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be -- that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope or happy prospect of the year before, dimmed or passed away -- and that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes -- of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortunes. Never heed such dismal reminiscences. There are few men who have lived long enough in the world who cannot call up such thoughts any day in the year. then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire -- fill the glass, and send round the song -- and, if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago, or if your glass is filled with reeking punch instead of sparkling wine, put on a good face on the matter, and empty it off-hand, and fill another, and troll off the old ditty you used to sing, and thank God it's no worse. Look on the merry faces of your children as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty -- one slight form that gladdened the father's heart and roused the mother's pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past -- think not that, one short year ago, the fair child now fast resolving into dust sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gay unconsciousness of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and a contented heart. Our life on it but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one. Mood: Full of holiday spirits



	2009.09.19 15.36 Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, "A Guide to Elegance" Excerpt from Genevieve Antoine Dariaux's A Guide to Elegance: PERSONALITY To be elegant is first of all to know oneself, and to know oneself well requires a certain amount of reflection and intelligence. Consequently, a woman who is utterly stupid will always find it extremely difficult to become truly elegant. She will imitate any fashion that happens to strike her fancy, without attempting to adapt it to her particular case, to her particular figure, or to her particular life -- even when the fashion in question was obviously created for a type of woman entirely different from herself. It requires a certain strength of character in order to disengage your own personality from the setting or the entourage that may confine it, often out of an affectionate desire to offer you protection. Some women enver do succeed in liberating themselves, or else only very late in life. But nowadays, even very young girls are free from parental supervision, and they tend to be attracted by everything that is the opposite of what they have known at home. This form of conditioning is perhaps just as valid as another, and probably results in exactly the same proportion of elegant and slovenly women as before, because I have often noticed that the daughter of a very fashionable woman usually likes to dress like a tramp; while the daughter of a mother who is always dressed in blue jeans, will dream of nothing but lace and ruffles! Personality is not only a revolt, but also the recognition of all of one's physical defects and qualities, as well as one's moral and financial resources... In short, developing a personality means knowing everything about oneself and, above all, avoiding the ostrich method of refusing to recognize what is most disagreeable in one's life or in one's physical appearance, but instead, trying to remedy it. Once a woman has defined her personality -- or, if she has more character, moulded it to her taste -- she will find it easier to achieve not only elegance but also happiness. Mood: amused



	2009.08.16 17.01 Proust, Swann's Way From Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One: Swann's Way, as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin: And I should have required also that they should be the same women, those whose costume interested me because, at the time when I still had faith, my imagination had individualised them and had provided each of them with a legend. Alas! in the acacia-avenue -- the myrtle-alley -- I did see some of them again, grown old, no more now than grim spectres of what they had once been, wandering, desperately searching for heaven knew what, through the Virgilian groves. They had long since fled, and still I stood vainly questioning the deserted paths. The sun had gone. Nature was resuming its reign over the Bois, from which had vanished all trace of the idea that it was the Elysian Garden of Women; above the gimcrack windmill the real sky was grey; the wind wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake; large birds flew swiftly over the Bois, as over a real wood, and with shrill cries perched, one after another, on the great oaks which, beneath their Druidical crown, and with Dodonian majesty, seemed to proclaim the inhuman emptiness of the deconsecrated forest, and helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed... The places we have known do not belong only the the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but a regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. Mood: studious



	2008.12.05 10.29 On the Road, Jack Kerouac Excerpt from Part One of On the Road, by Jack Kerouac: "There's one last thing I want to know--" "But, dear Sal, you're listening, you're sitting there, we'll ask Sal. What would he say?" And I said, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all." "No, no, no, you're talking absolute bullshit and Wolfean romantic posh!" said Carlo. And Dean said, "I didn't mean that at all, but we'll let Sal have his own mind, and in fact, don't you think, Carlo, there's a kind of a dignity in the way he's sitting there and digging us, crazy cat came all the way across the country--old Sal won't tell, old Sal won't tell." "It isn't that I won't tell," I protested. "I just don't know what you're both driving at or trying to get at. I know it's too much for anybody." "Everything you say is negative." "Then what is it you're trying to do?" "Tell him." "No, you tell him." "There's nothing to tell," I said and laughed. I had on Carlo's hat. I pulled it down over my eyes. "I want to sleep," I said. "Poor Sal always wants to sleep." I kept quiet. They started in again... And on, on into the night they talked like this. At dawn I looked up. They were tying up the last of the morning's matters... "Stop the machine," I said. They looked at me. "He's been awake all this time, listening. What were you thinking, Sal?" I told them that I was thinking they were very amazing maniacs and that I had spent the whole night listening to them like a man watching the mechanism of a watch that reached clear to the top of the Berthoud Pass and yet was made with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in the world. They smiled. I pointed my finger at them and said, "If you keep this up you'll both go crazy, but let me know what happens as you go along." - - - - - (This passage, in a nutshell, is how I feel most of the times when I observe people and write about them in my head.) Mood: exhausted



	2008.06.16 15.45 Excerpt from A Sport and A Pastime - James Salter "Life is composed of certain basic elements," he says. "Of course, there are a lot of impurities, that's what's misleading." ... "What I'm saying may sound mystical, but in everybody, Ame, in all of us, there's the desire to find those elements somehow, to discover them, you know? Sometimes I think they're the same for all of us, but maybe they're not. I mean we look at the Greeks and say, ah, they built this civilization, this whole brilliant world, out of certain simple things. Why can't we? And if not a civilization, why can't each of us, properly directed, build a life, I mean a happy life? Believe me, the elements exist. When you enter certain rooms, when you look at certain faces, suddenly you realize you're in the presence of them. Do you know what I mean?" "Of course I do," she says. "If you could achieve that, you'd have everything." "And without it you have..." he shrugs, "a life." "Like everybody's." "Just like everybody's," he says. "I don't want that." "Neither do I."



	2008.01.04 02.43 From Cary Tennis' Salon.com column 01-03-08 http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2008/01/03/racist_friend/index.html) ... We all have junk in our heads. Most of us don't think all that clearly or all that deeply. How can we? We have jobs to do that tire us out and we work with people who have junk in their heads and we were raised by people who had junk in their heads. All our lives people tell us stupid things and put junk in our heads. They put junk in our heads and once it's there it's hard to get it out. Me, I get to sit here all day and try to figure out what is the junk and what is the good stuff, and even with all that time to sit here and try to sort it out I'm pretty hopeless. So what about a guy who works hard every day for 45 years with people putting junk in his head and telling him things that are groundless and wrong? How's he supposed to rearrange his head once he turns 65? How's he supposed to change his beliefs? We should all do something about it, of course, all of us, of course we should, of course. Yes, we should. We should be kinder, smarter and more on time. The racists among us, the sexists, the unkind, the selfish, the mean, the crude, the hateful, the spiteful, the bitter, the unenlightened and the just plain average should all get to work right now to try to get better, to be more on time, kinder, less racist, more socially active, calmer and more meditative, and more careful in their choice of words; I myself should try harder ... I ought to pick a presidential candidate and work for his election, and volunteer at a food bank three times a week. I ought to cleanse my mind of all the dirty, oppressive, angry, unenlightened thoughts that crowd out my virtuous thoughts like crows crowding out the sparrows of springtime -- which will not be far off now, by the way, springtime that is, with its annual tease. Can you love someone who is deeply flawed? Do you have the courage to do that? Can your love be tinged with disapproval and still be love? Can you heatedly dispute on matters of social beliefs and still remain friends? I hope so. I hope you can do that. I also hope you can find persuasive materials to show that the beliefs of your friend are groundless and pernicious, for that is today's correct belief, and it is the one true belief, and it is the belief that everyone should have. Meanwhile, in my heart of hearts, I'd like it if even the best of us and the purest could get the hell over ourselves. There is much work to be done every single day. There are sick people to be cared for and children to be taught...



	2007.12.31 14.26 Excerpt from The Liberation of Gabriel King, by K. L. Going This excerpt is from a grade school level chapter book about a white boy named Gabriel King who was afraid of everything and his best friend, Frita Wilson, a black girl who was afraid of nothing. The story, set in Georgia during Carter's first election, is centered on Frita "liberating" Gabriel from his fears so that he would be brave enough to move up to fifth grade. "What are you going to do?" I asked Frita when we were outside knocking moss off the trees with two big sticks. I was nervous, so I kept missing. "Nothing," Frita said. "I'm just going to make sure you and Terrance [Frita's older brother] get to talk. Momma always says things would be all right if black people and white people could just sit down and talk over a fine dinner." I stopped swiping at the moss. Huh. I sure hadn't thought about me and Terrance as black people and white people. I'd thought about us as a big, pounding, scary person and a little wimpy person who doesn't want to get pounded. The way Frita put it made it seem like a big deal, and that couldn't be good. By the time Mrs. Wilson called us in to dinner, I was wishing I'd said no, even if we were having bread pudding. Then, when we went inside to wash our hands, Terrance was already at the sink, only he wasn't standing right next to it, so when me and Frita ran in full blast, we took his spot. Terrance narrowed his eyes. "Twerps," he growled. He stormed out of the bathroom. I gulped, and Frita looked over at me. "He don't mean anything." Maybe, I thought, or maybe not... ( Scenes from the dinner table ) Mood: awake



	2007.11.21 12.55 Dionne Brand: "Harold Sonny Ladoo" If you came from the same place as Harold Sonny Ladoo, you were likely to think, as he probably did, that books held the possibility of changing your life, that they could take you to other places, that they would free you of any reality, that reading them was not an impassive act, that the person who entered them was not the same person who emerged from them, that they changed some tissue in your brain, revealed some truth that clarified your condition, and that rescued you, and that the best of them called you into a communion with other human beings against solitude, against torment, against misery. You were likely a boy or a girl walking a rice paddy or a cane field or a cluttered street or a crowded yard suspended by a kind of joy that emanated from the half-read book under your arm; you likely forgot some parental order, stumbled on a stone, spilled precious water or milk in the thought that someone had so precisely put the person you thought you were in a book. Or that they had gotten it so wrong, nevertheless, that when you could, you would do it yourself; and, when you had, someone else walking along in the same way would be equally suspended by the sublime truth of it. excerpt, 'Harold Sonny Ladoo' by Dionne Brand. Brick, Winter 2003



	2007.09.26 21.45 Excerpt from A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley ( Cut for spoilers; major plot point revealed ) Mood: accomplished



	2011.09.15 14.47 Incandesco Members' Book Meme Incandesco Book Meme There is another book meme floating around LJ at the moment and I thought it would be a good idea to make one for this community, that current members can fill out so that we get to know each other (and maybe you will find people who have the same interests as you) and new members can fill out when they join. If you fill out the meme in the comments, I will leave this post at the top of the entry and people can add to it when they like. Does that sound good? Also, I know this community is also for artwork, etc, so you can just add appropriate answers about those things if you like. Anyway, here are the questions. It's sort of long but you don't have to answer them all. Feel free to add your own. ( click )



	2007.08.22 14.17 Excerpt from Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon Sara would read anything you handed her--Jean Rhys, Jean Shepherd, Jean Genet--at a steady rate of sixty-five pages an hour, grimly and unsparingly and without apparent pleasure. She read upon waking, sitting on the toilet, stretched out in the backseat of the car. When she went to the movies she took a book with her, to read before the show began, and it was not unusual for her standing in front of the microwave, with a book in one hand and a fork in the other, heating a cup of noodle soup while she read, say, At Lady Molly's for the third time (she was a sucker for series and linked novels). If there was nothing else she would consume all the magazines and newspapers in the house--reading, to her, was a kind of pyromania--and when these ran out she would reach for insurance brochures, hotel prospectuses and product warranties, advertising circulars, sheets of coupons. Once I had come upon the spectacle of Sara, finished with a volume of C. P. Snow while only partway through one of the long baths she took for her bad back, desperately scanning the label on a bottle of Listerine. She'd even read my first book, long before she ever met me, and I liked to think that she was the best reader I had. Every writer has an ideal reader, I thought, and it was just my good luck that mine wanted to sleep with me. Mood: studious



	2007.08.19 17.52 Excerpt from A Separate Peace, by John Knowles This is how the following passage struck me: It's as if the years of America's involvement in WWII -- with all the Big Band music and Victory Gardens -- were preserved, like the last good pickle, in a nostalgic jar of sentimentality. Whether or not it's delicious depends entirely on whether or not the diner enjoys pickles in general. From Chapter 3: Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever. For me, this moment--four years is a moment in history--was the war. The war was and is reality for me. I still instinctively live and think in its atmosphere. These are some of its characteristics: Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the President of the United States, and he always has been. The other two eternal world leaders are Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. America is not, never has been, and never will be what the songs and poems call it, a land of plenty. Nylon, meat, gasoline, and steel are rare. There are too many jobs and not enough workers. Money is very easy to earn but rather hard to spend, because there isn't very much to buy. Trains are always late and always crowded with "servicemen." The war will always be fought very far from America and it will never end. Nothing in America stands still for very long, including the people, who are always either leaving or on leave. People in America cry often. Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of this world.d When you are sixteen, adults are slightly impressed and almost intimidated by you. This is a puzzle, finally solved by the realization that they foresee your military future, fighting for them. You do not forsee it. To waste anything in America is immoral. String and tinfoil are treasures. Newspapers are always crowded with strange maps and names of towns, and every few months the earth seems to lurch from its path when you see something in the newspapers, such as the time Mussolini, who had almost seemed one of the eternal leaders, is photographed hanging upside down on a meathook. Everyone listens to news broadcasts five or six times every day. All pleasurable things, all travel and sports and entertainment and good food and fine clothes, are in the very shortest supply, always were and always will be. There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them. All foreign lands are inaccessible except to servicemen; they are vague, distant, and sealed off as though behind a curtain of plastic. The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors risk being unpatriotic. It is this special America, a very untypical one I guess, an unfamiliar transitional blur in the memories of most people, which is the real America for me. Mood: thoughtful



	2007.08.17 09.53 Excerpt from Skinny Bitch, Rory Friedman and Kim Barnouin I recently finished reading Skinny Bitch, which is more or less vegan propaganda disguised as a sassy diet book. It's surprisingly well-written and funny -- and I really liked this image of eating sunlight. From the chapter You Are What You Eat: Can you remember back to your grade-school days when you learned about photosynthesis? Plants store the sun's energy, which you receive by eating them. If you can, just picture the light energy from the sun beaming down to the vegetables and the fruits, and as we eat those foods, imagine that energy being transmitted into our bodies. Our nervous systems are maintained and stimulated by this light. Mood: hungry



	2007.07.31 10.53 'How sad I was...' by Paul Verlaine Hi, I'm new here. 'How sad I was...' Paul Verlaine (translated by Martin Sorrell) How sad I was, how sad, Because of a woman, because. The suffering endures Although I've gone, Heart, body and soul, A world away from her. No consolation, Though in my heart I've gone. My heart's long pain asks: How can this be so, How can it be? - Is this proud, Sad exile just a dream? I answer: I don't know Why we're caught in this web, This warp of time and place, This here and now and there and then?



	2007.07.18 15.57 excerpt from 'My Day' column, April 1 1939, Eleanor Roosevelt When you love people very much, isn't it grand to be able to join in their happiness? Like everything else in the world, however, there is a price to pay for love, for the more happiness we derive from the existence and companionship of other human beings, the more vulnerable we are when there is any cause for apprehension. It takes courage to love, but pain through love is a purifying fire for which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.



	2007.07.13 10.47 Poet's Choice (excerpt from the Introduction), Edward Hirsch Poetry is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift. There has never been a civilization without it. That's why I consider poetry---which is, after all, created out of a mouthful of air---a human fundamental, like music. It saves something precious in the world from vanishing. It sacramentalizes experience. It is am imaginative act that starts with the breath itself. It arises from breathing. It is a living thing that comes from the body, from the heart and lungs, and thus seems hardwired into us. It enters our bodies through the material stream of language. It moves and dances between speech and song. These words rhythmically strung together, these electrically charged sounds, are one of the ways by which we come to know ourselves. A poem beats out time. Poetry speaks with the greatest intensity against the effacement of individuals, the obliteration of communities, the destruction of nature. It tries to keep the world from ending by positing itself against oblivion. The words are marks against erasure. I believe that something in our natures is realized when we use language as an art to confront and redeem our mortality. We need poems now as much as ever. We need these voices to restore us to ourselves in an alienating world. We need the sounds of the words to delineate the states of our being. Poetry is a necessary part of our planet.



	2007.07.08 19.26 Excerpt from Letters to a Young Poet I want to talk to you again a while, dear Mr. Kappus, although I can say almost nothing that is helpful, hardly anything useful. You have had many and great sadnesses, which passed. And you say that even this passing was hard for you and put you out of sorts. But, please, consider whether these great sadnesses have not rather gone right through the center of yourself? Whether much in you has not altered, whether you have not somewhere, at some point of your being, undergone a change while you were sad? Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out; like sicknesses that are superficially and foolishly treated they simply withdraw and after a little pause break out again the more dreadfully; and accumulate within one and are life, are unlived, spurned, lost life, of which one may die... They are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent. I believe that almost all of our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more,--is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way, in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, step forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary... we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them... The future stands firm, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space... -Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letter Eight," Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by M.D. Herter Norton. Mood: overwhelmed



	2007.07.08 16.53 Excerpt from "Drinking: A Love Story" by Caroline Knapp One of the first things you hear in AA--one of the first things that makes core, gut-level sense--is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale. When you drink in order to transform yourself, when you drink and become someone you're not, when you do this over and over and over, your relationship to the world becomes muddied and unclear. You lose your bearings, the ground underneath you begins to feel shaky. After a while you don't even know the most basic things about yourself--what you're afraid of, what feels good and bad, what you need in order to feel comforted and calm--because you've never given yourself a chance, a clear, sober chance to find out. Alcohol offers protection from all that, protection from the pain of self-discovery, a wonderful, cocooning protection that's enormously insidious because it's utterly false but it feels so real, so real and necessary. And then, tragically, the protection stops working. The mathematics of transformation change. This is inevitable. You drink long and hard enough and your life gets messy. Your relationships (with nondrinkers, with yourself) become strained. Your work suffers. You run into financial trouble, or legal trouble, or trouble with the police. Rack up enough pain and the old math -- Discomfort + Drink = No Discomfort -- ceases to suffice; feeling "comfortable" isn't good enough anymore. You're after something deeper than a respite from shyness, or a break from private fears and anger. So after a while you alter the equation, make it stronger and more complete. Pain + Drink = Self-Obliteration.



	2007.06.24 17.07 Those Who Walk Away (excerpt), Patricia Highsmith 'What are you worried about?' asked Elisabetta. She was smiling, a little merry on the champagne. 'I don't know. Nothing.' He felt faint, blank, dead or perhaps dying. Distant, high-pitched bells rang in his ears. The girl was saying something that he could not hear, looking off to one side now, and her unconcern at his condition made him feel quite alone. He breathed deeply, one deep breath after another of the tobacco-laden air. The girl did not notice. The faintness passed. A few moments later, they were out on the street, walking. The girl said it was not far back to where they lived, and there was no boat that could be of any help. The lanes were moist under their shoes. The girl held his arm and chattered on about last summer's vacation. She had gone to visit relatives in the Ticino. They had cows and a big house. They had taken her to Zurich. She thought Zurich was much cleaner than Venice. Ray could feel the warmth of the girl's arm next to his. He did not feel faint now, but he felt alone and lost, without purpose, without identity. Wouldn't it be strange, he thought, if he really were dead, if he were dreaming all of this, or if by some strange process - which was the assumption on which nearly all ghost stories were based - he was a ghost visible to a few people, like this girl, a ghost who tomorrow would not be in the room at Signora Calliuloi's, would have left not even an unmade bed behind him, only a strange memory in the minds of the few who had seen him, a few whom other people might not believe when they spoke him? But the dark canals were very real, and so was the rat that crossed their path twenty feet ahead, running from a hole in the stone parapet that bordered the canal, where a barge stirred sleepily against its rope mooring, making a piggish sound like schlurp. The girl had seen the rat, but had interrupted what she was saying only by a brief 'Ooh!' and gone on. A light, fixed on the corner of a house so it would illuminate four streets, seemed to burn with impatience, waiting for persons not yet arrived, persons who would carry out some action below it. 'How long are you really going to be here?' asked Elisabetta. Ray saw that they had entered their street. 'Three or four days.' 'Thank you for this evening,' Elisabetta said in her doorway. She looked quickly at her watch., but Ray doubted if she could even see the time on it. 'I think it's before eleven. We are very good.' He had reached a state of not hearing what she said, and yet he did not want to leave her. 'Something worries you, Filipo. Or are you just very tired?' She whispered now, as if in her own street she did not want to disturb the neighbours because she knew them. 'Not very tired. Goodnight, Elisabetta.' He squeezed her left hand in his for an instant, had no desire to kiss her or to try to, yet he felt that he loved her. 'You've got your key?' 'Oh, but certainly.' She opened the door softly, and waved him goodbye before she closed it. An old woman in black, whom Ray had never seen before, opened the door for him. Ray murmured an apology for his lateness, and she assured him cheerfully that she never slept, so it was no trouble for her. Ray climbed the stairs quietly. Never slept? Never undressed then? The mother of Signora Calliuoli? Ray leaned over the stairwell at his floor. The light below was extinguished now, and he heard not a sound.



	2007.06.13 00.10 du Bellay, Joachim - 'Rome', trans Ezra Pound O thou newcomer who seek’st Rome in Rome And find’st in Rome no thing thou canst call Roman; Arches worn old and palaces made common Rome’s name alone within these walls keeps home. Behold how pride and ruin can befall One who hath set the whole world ’neath her laws, All-conquering, now conquered, because She is Time’s prey, and Time conquereth all. Rome that art Rome’s one sole last monument, Rome that alone hast conquered Rome the town, Tiber alone, transient and seaward bent, Remains of Rome. O world, thou unconstant mime! That which stands firm in thee Time batters down, And that which fleeteth doth outrun swift Time.



	2007.06.07 01.52 The Cobra's Heart (excerpt), Ryszard Kapuscinski - 2 The malaria attack is not merely painful, but like every pain is also a mystical experience. We enter a realm about which a moment ago we knew nothing, though it now turns out that it had existed alongside us all the while, finally capturing and incorporating us: we discover within ourselves icy crevasses, chasms, and abysses, whose presence fills us with suffering and fear. But this moment of discovery, too, passes, the spirits desert us, depart, and disappear, and that which remains, under the mountain of the most bizarre coverings, is truly pitiful. A man right after a strong attack of malaria is a human rag. He lies in a puddle of sweat, he is still feverish, and he can move neither hand nor foot. Everything hurts; he is dizzy and nauseous. He is exhausted, weak, limp. Carried by someone else, he gives the impression of having no bones or muscles. And many days must pass before he can get up on his feet again. Each year in Africa malaria still affects tens of millions of people, and in those areas where it is most prevalent - in wet, low-lying, marshy regions - it kills one child out of three. There are many types of malaria; some, the gentler ones, you should be able to recover from as you would from the flu. But here, even those who can lay waste whoever succumbs to them. First, because in this murderous climate one endures with difficulty even the slightest indisposition; second, because Africans are often malnourished, attenuated, hungry. Time and again you encounter here drowsy, apathetic, benumbed people. They sit or lie for hours on end on the streets, by the roadsides, doing nothing. You speak to them and they do not hear you; you look at them and have the impression that they do not see you. It is unclear if they are ignoring you, if these are just idle lazybones and do-nothings, or if they are being ravaged by a malaria that is slowly and inexorably killing them. You do not know how to behave towards them, or what to think. -- (On explaining tribal beliefs regarding curses): Evil is the curse of the world, and that is why I must keep wizards, who are its agents, carriers, and propagators, as far away from myself and my clan as possible; their presence poisons the air, spreads disease, and makes life impossible, turning it into its opposite - death. The wizard, by definition, lives and practises among others, in another village, in another clan or tribe. Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt towards the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune. Pain, fire, disease, drought, and hunger did not come from nowhere. Someone must have brought them, inflicted them, disseminated them. But who? Not my people, not those closest to me - they are good. Life is possible only among good people, and I am alive, after all. The guilty are therefore the Others, the Strangers. That is why, seeking retribution for our injuries and setbacks, we quarrel with them, enter into conflicts, conduct wars. In a word, if unhappiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others.

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