It used to be that we thought earth’s climate and its underlying geology changed slowly and steadily over time, like the tortoise who beat the hare. But now we know the opposite to be mostly true. The earth’s geophysical make-up doesn’t tend to incrementally evolve; it jerks back and forth between different equilibriums. Ice age, then greenhouse. Glaciers covering the island of Manhattan in a thousand-foot-thick sheet of ice, then a city of eight million people in that same spot.
RISING, p. 50
April 22, 2019 at 10:54 pm (Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: environment, Mondays, nonfiction, science writing
My Love to Paris
April 15, 2019 at 9:34 pm (Surprises, Traveling)
Tags: grief, horror, Mondays, news, Paris
CNN Breaking News: People are mourning “the loss of a good part of Notre Dame Cathedral.”
The Other Book Self Is Reading: Thomas Cromwell, a Revolutionary Life
April 1, 2019 at 7:29 pm (Books)
Tags: England, history, Mondays, reading lists
p. 529:
On the day of Cromwell’s execution, 28 July 1540, the King took his mind off it by getting married to Katherine Howard.
Milkman, pp. 13 – 14
April 1, 2019 at 6:59 pm (Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Mondays, Northern Ireland, novel, politics, reading lists
Annaghmakerrig: November, 2018
The narrator, 18, runs. The milkman starts following her on her runs. He is much older, and seems to know her schedule: he knows where she reports to work, he knows that she likes to read. During one of their encounters, a bush to the narrator’s left emits a distinct “click.” The milkman then abruptly walks off.
Hey hey hey, Anna Burns: you are brilliant.
He doesn’t touch her, doesn’t address anything overtly sexual to her, but for a whole week, she doesn’t run. When she starts again, she asks her “third brother-in-law” to accompany her:
Should he take exception to brother-in-law accompanying me, he’d encounter not only the opprobium of the entire local community, but his reputation in it as one of our highranking, prestigious dissidents would plummet to the point where he’d be put outside any and all safe houses, into the path of any and of all passing military patrol vehicles, exactly as if he wasn’t one of our major influential heroes, but instead just some enemy state policeman, some enemy soldier from across the water, or even one of the enemy state-defending paramilitaries from over the way.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Lyndon B. Johnson, 11 December 1972
March 25, 2019 at 2:01 pm (Books, Memoirs, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: biographies, causes, history, inspiration, Mondays, reading lists, wisdom
Lyndon B. Johnson speaking at a Civil Rights Symposium in the LBJ Library on Dec. 11, 1972:
“Of all the records that are housed in this library, 31 million papers over a 40-year period of public life” . . . the records relating to civil rights “holds the most of myself within it, and holds for me the most intimate meanings . . . ” Until “blacks stand on level and equal ground,” we cannot rest.
— Leadership in Troubled Times, p. 351
The Cost of Living, p. 57: Déja Vu to Rachel Cusk
March 11, 2019 at 4:50 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Recommended, Surprises, Women Writers)
Tags: English writers, humor, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists
The main character, Deborah Levy (also the name of the author, lol), attends an editorial meeting in London. She decides to bike there and gets oil all over her hands. Then the meeting commences.
The Cost of Living, p. 57:
The executives sat around a polished oak table in a windowless room. They were intelligent, experienced, groomed, at the top of their game. I was offered a glass of water and accepted it gratefully. After a while, I realized I had an old-fashioned idea of what a meeting such as this one should be like, and I had acquired it from watching too many black and white movies. What I had in mind was an atmosphere in which we sipped negronis in a nightclub in Rome, plotting the main arc of the film while dancers adorned in feathers cavorted in the background.
Gender Politics
March 11, 2019 at 10:12 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: advice, causes, English writers, Mondays, nonfiction, readinglists
It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.
— The Cost of Living, p. 49
Luke Perry: Laid-Back American Hotness
March 4, 2019 at 6:51 pm (Artists and Writers, Surprises, television)
Tags: grief, memories, Mondays, transitions
A Poem About Donald Trump: FUGUE, Summer/Fall 2011
March 4, 2019 at 4:44 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Surprises, television)
Tags: Literary Magazines, Mondays, poetry
Self hangs on to everything. This is important. Why else would she have a copy of the literary journal Fugue in her closet? An issue from 2011?
Nevertheless, she picks up the issue, opens to a random page, and finds Mark Wagenaar’s poem:
That The Unified Field Theory Must Somehow Include Donald Trump’s Hair
(An Excerpt)
Add the video of the dog playing the accordion
to the List of Things That Remind Me of Seville,
right beneath rainwater baths & patios of bitter oranges.
I never found who was playing, though from the jaunty
tuneless songs the musician had a great sense of humour.
You could also add the dog to the List of Things I’d Watch
Instead of “The Apprentice,” which is a list that would reach
La Giralda from here. I’m not sure hair can be that bad,
whether it’s real or some sort of Trump l’oeil, but I’m sure
it falls somewhere in the Unified Field Theory, which includes
the zebrafish’ new eyes, & the ghostly hair of nebulae —
the theory of another way to count it all up, to name the world
around us, blackbird, thorns in deadfall, thirst sudden as flight.
From the Contributors’ Notes: Mark Wagenaar’s book, Voodoo Inverso, won the 2012 Pollak Prize. He lives in Denton, TX
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Now Reading RECORD OF A SPACEBORN FEW: Isabel (pp. 8 – 9)
February 25, 2019 at 5:45 pm (Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Mondays, novel, reading lists, science fiction
The rest of the Exodus Fleet was out there, thirty homestead ships besides her own, orbiting together in a loose, measured cluster. All was as it should be . . . except one, tangled in a violent shroud of debris. She could see where the pieces belonged — a jagged breach, a hollow where homes and walls had been. She could see sheet metal, crossbeams, odd specks scattered between. She could tell, even from this distance, that many of those specks were not made of metal or plex. They were too curved, too irregular, and they changed shape as they tumbled. They were Human. They were bodies.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
