It appears self’s books have been available on kindle for a few years. She never knew!
Two of the four:
The cover of The Lost Language is a detail of a painting by the late, great Filipino artist Santiago Bose.
Category: Writing
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Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
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From the very beginning of his run for the presidency, and throughout his four years in office, Trump’s instinct was to govern like an authoritarian strongman rather than a democratically elected president . . . As president, Trump quickly made it clear that his appointees should be loyal to him personally, rather than to the law. When James Comey, the director of the FBI, was invited to a one-on-one dinner with the new president, Trump repeatedly asked him to proclaim his “loyalty.” Comey demurred and was fired a few months later. The letter sacking him was hand-delivered by a man who understood what the president meant by loyalty — Keith Schiller, Trump’s former bodyguard. At his first full Cabinet meeting, Trump extracted embarrassing pledges of loyalty from his cabinet members in front of the television cameras. Mike Pence, the vice president, set the slavish tone by proclaiming: “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the man who’s keeping his word to the American people.” Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, thanked the president and called it a “blessing to serve your agenda.” “It’s an honor to be able to serve you,” declared Jeff Sessions, the attorney general.
— The Age of the Strongman, Chapter 7: Donald Trump, American StrongmanQuestion: Chris Krebs was fired by tweet. Why does Comey get the special treatment (letter hand-delivered by Keith Schiller)
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Self was at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in November. It was cold. First thing every morning, she’d open the windows of her room and marvel at the view.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
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When self says “lake,” there’s only one lake she can be referring to: that’s right, it’s Lake Annaghmakerrig, in Co. Monaghan, Ireland, where she spent the second half of November while she did furious revision on a novel-in-progress. (You don’t see the lake in this picture; believe me, it is there, just on the other side of that tree)
Posting for Alive & Trekking’s Which Way Photo Challenge.
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Is there anything as singularly impressive and affecting to the imagination as when, in a perfectly calm tropical sea, under a vertical sun, one is able to look down through a depth of thousands of fathoms of clear water and see on the ocean bottom glimpses of the City and all its strange and wonderful objects?
— “Residents of the Deep” by Marianne VillanuevaRead the whole story here.
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In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously . . . even if he had no idea what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.
He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally, there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 79Claire Tomalin, wow. Just wow.
This is a re-read. The first time she read it, she was on her way to Berlin to give a reading. She had it on her lap the whole flight, but it turned out her seatmate was a young Finnish architect who was going home after making a bid on behalf of his architectural firm for a building in Beijing. He ended up explaining Berlin to her, making little drawings on her notebook: here’s the Brandenburg gate, here’s Oranienstrasse, this street has the best Turkish food, etc.
She remembered being amazed, not just by Berlin, but by the book. Who knows why she decided to re-read it now (motives will be examined, later, in her journal, lol). She didn’t expect her re-read to evoke the same spark of excitement that it did on first read, 15 years (!) ago, but for some reason the above passage read really fresh.
(To be continued)
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All right. Spoiler if you haven’t read The Sweet Hereafter.
This is wisdom:
- I looked across to Billy Ansel and realized that what frightened and saddened me most about him was that he no longer loved anybody. All the man had was himself. And you can’t love only yourself.
The whole town up and claps for Nichole Burnell, lone survivor of the school bus accident (but secretly sexually abused by her Dad, how nice) Is that pervert Daddy of hers ever going to jail? Newp? Then pardon me, I’m sitting on my hands. This is not redemption. A thousand clapping people don’t make it redemption. Silly me, I want revenge. I’m talking JAIL TIME.
I’m bequeathing my copy of this book to one of the artists here at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (which, btw, has helped me reach another level of writing. AGAIN. Don’t ask me how or why, it just does)
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There are some gorgeous walks that people have shared for Life of B’s Walking Squares challenge, this month.
Happy that I’m in Ireland and can document the winter phase of Lake Annaghmakerrig.
Took these pictures with my laptop — yes, really. I just carried it around, open, screen pointed at the lake. I wake veeeery early to write, and sometimes I end up walking to stretch my back. But I find I’ve let my camera or cell behind. I am still clutching my laptop, though. So, why not.
Kanlaon 