Indoors Outdoors

Thanks to my friend Nikki for sharing this one:
Sunshine in the Living Room, 1910–1912
by Peter Ilsted (1861 - 1933)

So beautiful to read indoors on a late Spring day . . .
equally lovely to sit outside . . .

Springtime or The Reader, 1872
by Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)

Taurus ~ Shakespeare's Birthday

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Gemini ~ My Birthday
An excellent birthday quote that most likely remains
true no matter what the ages in question:

"The truth is, your mother doesn't know any more
about being forty than you do about being twenty."
from A: A Novel ~ by Alan Lindsay

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Reading selection for a lush afternoon:
Rules of Civility ~ by Amor Towles

A few favorite passages:
93: "'Absolutely.'

"A neutral observer would probably have raised an eyebrow at my answer. There wasn't much jingle in my delivery, and one-word responses just have that way of not sounding very convincing. But the thing of it is, I meant it. Every one word of it."

156: "Dicky . . . took relative pride and absolute joy in weaving together the strands of his life so that when he gave them a good tug all the friends of friends of friends would come tumbling through the door."
[Similar to Mrs. Dalloway!]

323-24: "Life doesn't have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics. To have even one year when you're presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course -- that's by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn't come without a price. . . . I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss."

P.S.
"You have learned something.
That always feels at first
as if you have lost something." 

from Major Barbara
by George Bernard Shaw

Flat Stanley

Flat Stanley takes Little Darby for a Walk

Many thanks to my great - nephew Judah for asking me to participate in the The Flat Stanley Project. Similar to the travels of my Panama Bag or the famous travelling gnomes who are kidnapped and taken on trips around the world, the idea is to send Flat Stanley out to meet new people and see new places. Then he returns to the schoolchildren to share his various adventures of life beyond the classroom.

If this is the first you've heard of the Flat Stanley books by Jeff Brown, now is the time to add these fun titles to that all - important summer reading list! Summer vacation is the perfect time to check out Stanley's Original Adventure, as well as the entire series of sequels. (You can also watch on youtube.)

Here's what Flat Stanley and I got up to
when he came for a visit in my neck of the woods:

First, meeting the pets . . .

Flat Stanley get a kiss From Darby.

Flat Stanely pets the cats, Lester and Fuqua.

Flat Stanley encounters another kind of cat --
and admires the very creative sidewalk art!

Second, some local highlights . . .

Flat Stanley has breakfast at our favorite restaurant:
Town & Gown Bistro.

Historic Amtrak Station in Lafayette, Indiana.

Flat Stanley crosses the pedestrian bridge
over the Wabash River. Lafayette on one side,
West Lafayette on the other (Indiana).

Welcome to the Renewable Energy House --
a perfect fit for Flat Stanley!

Third, a visit to campus . . .

Flat Stanley flies the flag at Purdue University,
West Lafayette, Indiana.

Flat Stanley goes for a “Spin” around the campus!

Flat Stanley has a chat with Neil Armstrong,
sitting by the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering

American Astronaut
Neil Armstrong
BS Aeronautical Engineering 1955
Honorary Doctorate 1970

Fourth, a well - earned rest . . .

After a busy afternoon, Flat Stanley
takes a nap in the stroller with Baby Ellie.

Biobooks from Friends

'Oh time where are you?'

Self Portrait ~ Time Flies ~ Frida Kahlo

Looking through some old reading journals,
I recently came across this line from 1981:

"So many things to read!
Or, as my dear, wise friend Diane says,
'Oh time where are you?' "

Thanks to my readerly friends who sent me the following
selections, life stories from various times and places,
which have enriched the first quarter of 2021:
Shuggie Bain (2020)
by Douglas Stuart (b 1976)

" . . . every single one of her children was as observant and wary as a prison warden" (51).

"Now, as the taxi pulled out into the main road, Agnes made a show of looking back and waving mournfully through the rear window with a long, heavy blink. She thought it was a cinematic touch, like she was the star of her own matinee" (90).

" 'Why the f--k did you bring me here?'

'I had to see.'

'Had to see what? . . . I thought this is what you wanted.'

'I had to see if you would actually come.'

She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good" (110).

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)
by Trevor Noah (b 1984)

" . . . Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.

"I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don't have that the Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that's really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It's harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren't counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal?

"So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he's just another strongman from the history books . . . (195 - 96).

George S. Kaufman [1889 - 1961]: An Intimate Portrait (1972)
by Howard Teichmann (1916 - 1987)

"Edna said she's rather work with George than anyone else . . . Later in their collaboration Miss Ferber acquired a country house, and for a while they worked there. Frequently, however, an impatient buzzer would sound; Edna would excuse herself and leave the room. A few minutes later, she'd return, work would resume, and then the buzzer would sound again.

"Infuriated by these interruptions, George demanded an explanation. 'Well, here in the country, help is so hard to get that I don't ring for the servants,' she said. 'When they want something, they send for me.'

"'They're acting like actors, Edna,' he bristled. 'Pretty soon they'll want their names above the title of this play'" (89).

"'Edna,' he once said, 'reminds me of a Confederate general. And I'm from Pittsburgh'" (90).

"Another time, when things weren't going too well with Strike Up the Band, Ira Gershwin saw two elegant Edwardian - looking gentlemen buying tickets at the box office.

"'That must be Gilbert and Sullivan coming to fix the show,' Gershwin quipped.

"'Why don't you put jokes like that in your lyrics?' Kaufman countered" (108).

"'You've heard of people living in a fool's paradise?' Kaufman inquired. 'Well, Leonora has a duplex there'" (125).

Five People in Heaven (2003)
by Mitch Albom (b 1958)

"Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. . . . You need to forgive" (141 - 42).

Carnival

Mardi Gras . . . Ash Wednesday . . .
"The farewell to flesh.
I dressed in feathers. Pointed beak and glitter.
How we danced, through lights and confetti.
The good-bye to the body.

Not forever, but for now." (66)

~ Carole Maso ~ from AVA ~

[More on The Quotidian Kit]

Mardi Gras ~ Cat Mask ~ Previous Post

"'CARNAGE!,' the headline screamed above a full - color picture of a train carriage that was almost broken in two. Carnage from the Latin caro, carnis, meaning 'flesh,' Same root as carnival. 'The taking away of the flesh.' You couldn't really get two more different words than carnival and carnage. Everywhere -- well, perhaps not everywhere, not in Bangladesh, for example, but certainly in an awful lot of places -- they had some kind of carnival before Lent, but in Britain all you got were pancakes. (171)

"When he woke up, they told him about the train crash again. A nurse showed him the front page of a newspaper. 'CARNAGE!' it said. He couldn't remember what the word meant. Nothing to do with cars, he supposed. . . . It was mere luck that he was alive when others weren't, a momentary lapse in concentration from the Fates that had led to him surviving and not someone else. (182, 310)

"Reggie wanted to say that it was nothing to do with her, but it would have sounded churlish given the circumstances -- carnage, et cetera. (187)

" . . . a wedding ring that strangled your finger . . . Strangled, estranged . . . the words were very similar." (322)

~ Kate Atkinson ~
from When Will There Be Good News?

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P.S.
2023

The Kiss (1870)
Auguste Toulmouche (1829 – 1890)

See also Raoul & Marguerite

Some Old Things for the New Year

Plus a new little avid reader!
Sometimes a baby just needs to catch up
on her favorite magazines!

So far, Little Ellie has only new favorites,
but I have a lot of recurring favorites.
Here is a random list of things that have re-
crossed my mind lately or come up in conversation:

"Although speakers and listeners, writers and readers, are in one sense engaged in a cooperative effort to understand one another, they are also in conflict over the amount of effort that each will expend on the other.  That is, the speaker or writer wants to say what he has to say with as little energy as possible and the reader or listener wants to understand with as little energy as possible. . . . Thus anything that facilitates the transfer of  meaning is important in this tight economy of energy."

Mina P. Shaughnessy (1924 - 1978)
from Errors and Expectations, pp 11 - 12
1. More about writing:
"On Keeping a Notebook" by Joan Didion

2. About spirituality:
Nearly anything by Richard Rohr

3. About reminiscing:
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

4. About the meaning of life:
The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead
by David Shields

5. About de-cluttering:
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
by Margareta Magnusson

6. About reincarnation:
The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell's Psychic Lives
by Jess Stearn

7. About visions:
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman

"She knew that it was better to have a dream, and pay a price for it, than to be lukewarm. Sometimes the price of following a dream includes confusion. . . . Sister John thought: I can't bear the thought of going back to who I was before. I prayed and scrubbed and went through the motions with no feeling of love, only a will to keep busy. If the surgery were to take my dream away, everything I've goone through up to now would seem meaningless. I wouldn't even be able to draw inspiration from the memeory of it; I couldn't face that desert again, not this late in my life." (137 - 38)

8. While we're on the topic, a great poem that goes
along with the theme of the novel Lying Awake:

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights of Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
German born American poet
Pultizer Prize for Poetry, 1997

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Ironically, a year ago we joked that 2020
was going to the year of clearer vision,
as in 20 / 20. Haha!
But, alas, it was not to be.

Here's to better luck in 2021!

Re-read some old favorites and
may our minds be stronger tomorrow!

Power of Reading

Suggested reading for
end - of - the - year perception checking:

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations
By Kim Stanley Robinson

Why do I find this to be one of the most interesting lines
in the article --

"Still, if you read science fiction, you may be
a little less surprised by whatever does happen"?

Because if you read just about ANYTHING AT ALL -- not just science fiction, but also Louisa May Alcott, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, you name it -- you'll be a little less surprised by life and death!

And now for some fun visuals
on the joy and power of reading,
with many thanks to imaginative readerly
friends, Curtis, Barbara and Igor:

Keep Out! Haha!

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Come On In!
2021, here we come!

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See also Uniquely Magic

Location, Location, Location

From
"What They Did Yesterday Afternoon"
By British Poet Warsan Shire

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In each of the following stories, location is practically a character, with time and place dominating each narrative. The small - town despair of Olive Kitteridge reminded me of Kent Haruf's fictional Holt Colorado - the setting of all of his novels - but with perhaps less hope. Ordinary Grace falls into the same category - but with somewhat more hope.

Check out the place names and locales, each so unique, plus a favorite passage from each:

1.
"In any quiet town you can find
a street, a field, a stand of trees,
which breaks into the dreams of its citizens
years after the dreamers have left home for good." (93)

from
Things Invisible To See (1985)
by Nancy Willard
setting: Ann Arbor, Michigan (1940s)


2.
"Safe house. Saying the words to myself in secret.
For safe house made me smile.
Safe house made me feel warm.
Safe house was something small you could hide in, I thought.
Like a dollhouse where if you were small enough to fit inside
you would be so small nobody would come looking for you." (61)

from
Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
Joyce Carol Oates
setting: Schuylersville, Pennsylvania
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania (1974 - 1975)

3. "It was early September and the maples were red at their tops; a few bright red leaves had fallen onto the dirt road, perfect things, star-shaped. Years earlier when his sons were small, Harmon might have pointed to them, and they'd have picked them up with eagerness...

"The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.

"By November, the leaves were gone, the trees along Main Street were bare, and the sky was often overcast. The shortening days made Harmon recall a soberness of heart that he had felt off and on for a long time..." (77-78, 89, 91)
from
Olive Kitteridge (2008)
by Elizabeth Strout
setting: Crosby, Maine (1970s - present day)

4. "There's a math problem everyone is familiar with. It involves two trains. One leaves from one location, New York, for example, and theother from another location, say San Francisco. The trains are traveling toward each other at different speeds. The idea is to calculate how far each train will have traveled by the time they meet. I was never any good at math and didn't waste time trying to solve this problem but I did spend a lot of time thinking about it. Not about how many miles the trains would have covered but about the travelers on them. Who were these people and why were they leaving New York and San Francisco and what were they seeking at the other end of the line? Most especially I wondered if they had any idea what awaited them when the two trains met. Because I thought of them as traveling on the same set of tracks, I imagined their meeting as a catastrophic collision. So it always struck me not as a math problem but rather a philosophic consideration of life, death, and unhappy circumstance.

"In my own life, the two trains of this problem are the summer of 1961 and the present. And they collide every year on Memorial Day in the cemetery in New Bremen." (301)
from
Ordinary Grace (2013)
William Kent Krueger
setting: New Bremen, Minnesota (1961)

5. "It was quiet out in the suburbs; the views were open, with no tenements or high-rise blocks to obscure the distant hills. The light was soft and gentle—summer was drifting ever onward and the evening seemed delicate, fragile. We walked in silence, the kind that you didn't feel the need to fill.

"I was almost sad when we arrived at the squat, white clubhouse. It was halfway to dark by then, with both a moon and a sun sitting high in a sky that was sugar almond pink and shot with gold. The birds were singing valiantly against the coming night, swooping over the greens in long, drunken loops. The air was grassy, with a hint of flowers and earth, and the warm, sweet outbreath of the day sighed gently into our hair and over our skin. I felt like asking Raymond whether we should keep walking, walk over the rolling greens, keep walking till the birds fell silent in their bowers and we could see only by starlight. It almost felt like he might suggest it himself." (162)
from
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017)
by Gail Honeyman
setting: Glasgow, Scotland (present day)

6.
" . . . he could spin the web
between what he had read
and what had happened in the supermarket,
or what he had heard on the radio."

from
The Guest Book (2019)
by Sarah Blake
setting: New York City
Crockett's Island, Maine (1930s - present day)

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Not forgetting the option of a more exotic locale . . .

Where'd You Go Bernadette, 2012)
by Maria Semple
setting: Seattle & Antarctica (present day)

~ or ~

A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)
by Amor Towles
setting: The Metropole Hotel, Moscow (1922 - 1952)

“For all the varied concerns attendant to the raising of a child — over schoolwork, dress, and manners — in the end, a parent's responsibility could not be more simple: To bring a child safely into adulthood so that she could have a chance to experience a life of purpose and, God willing, contentment.” (p 309)

“For pomp is a tenacious force. And a wily one too. How humbly it bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street. But then, having quietly bided its time, while helping the newly appointed leader on with his jacket, it compliments his appearance and suggests the wearing of a medal or two. Or, having served him at a formal dinner, it wonders aloud if a taller chair might not have been more fitting for a man with such responsibilities. The soldiers of the common man may toss the banners of the old regime on the victory pyre, but soon enough trumpets will blare and pomp will take its place at the side of the throne, having once again secured its dominion over history and kings.”

P.S. Click for more on
Gentleman in Moscow & Ordinary Grace