I have way too many books, most currently in storage. But a few I brought to Texas for now. On New Years Day 2021 I replaced my copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations that I’d ‘”loaned” to my dear son. (Support local booksellers.) Order here is random.
William J. Strunk and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. (Third Edition.) MacMillan, New York, 1979.
“Omit needless words.”
“Style is an increment in writing. When we speak of Fitzgerald’s style, we don’t mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on paper. Every writer, by the way he [sic] uses the language, reveals something of his [sic] spirit, his [sic] habits, his [sic] capacities, his [sic] bias…No writer long remains incognito.”
“Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen.“
“Make every word count.”
Tony Judt. Ill Fares the Land. Penguin Press, New York, 2010.
“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.”
Michael Harrington. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1962.
“There are, one must assume, citizens of the other America who choose impoverishment out of fear of work…But the real explanation of why the poor are where they are is that they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of the country, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group. Once that mistake has been made, they could have been paragons of will or morality, but most of them would never even had a chance to get out of the other America.“
Dorothy Day. The Long Loneliness, Harper, San Francisco, 1952.
“Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are giving yourself away. But if you love you want to give yourself.“
Anne Lamott. Bird By Bird. Anchor Books, New York, 1994.
“For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”
Mark Twain. Letters From the Earth. Harper and Row, New York, 1938.
“Put into each individual, in differing shades and degrees, all the various Moral Qualities, in mass, that have been distributed, a single distinguishing characteristic at a time, among the nonspeaking animal world–courage, cowardice, ferocity, gentleness, fairness, justice, cunning, treachery, magnanimity, cruelty, malice, lust, mercy, pity, purity, selfishness, sweetness, honor, love, hate, baseness, nobility, loyalty, falsity, veracity, untruthfulness–each human being shall have all of these in him, and they will constitute his nature.”
Stephen Bachelor. Buddhism Without Beliefs. Riverhead Books, New York, 1997.
“An unawakened existence, in which we drift unaware on a surge of habitual impulses, is both ignoble and undignified. In the cessation of craving, we touch that dimension of experience that is timeless: the playful, unimpeded contingency of things emerging from conditions only to become conditions for something else. This is emptiness: not a cosmic vacuum but the unborn, undying, infinitely creative dimension of life.”
Patti Smith. Just Kids, Harper Collins, New York, 2010.
“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
Joko Beck. Everyday Zen, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1989.
“If we have any brains at all, it finally dawns on us: ‘I’ve done this before’.”
Thich Nhat Hanh. Living Buddha, Living Christ, Riverhead Books, New York, 1995.
“Interbeing. In the Psalms, it says, ‘Be still and know that I am God. ‘Be still’ means to become peaceful and concentrated. The Buddhist term is samatha (stopping, calming, concentrating). ‘Know’ means to acquire wisdom, insight, or understanding. The Buddhist term is vipasyana (insight, or looking deeply). ‘Looking deeply’ means observing something or someone with so much concentration that the distinction between observer and observed disappears. The result is true insight into the nature of the object. When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds there could be no rain, and there would be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements; it has no independent, individual existence. It ‘inter-is’ with everything else in the universe. Interbeing is a new term, but I believe it will be in the dictionary soon.“
Sylvia Plath. The Unabridged Journals, Anchor Books, New York, 2000.
“MY WRITING IS MY WRITING IS MY WRITING.”
Virginia Woolf. Three Guineas, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1938.
“‘And intellectual liberty may be defined for our purposes as the right to say or write what you think in your own words, and in your own way.”
Louise DeSalvo. On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again, Bloomsbury USA, New York, 2009.
“On March 5, 1905, Virginia and her siblings threw a house-warming party to introduce their friends and relations to their new home…Although during the celebration there were ‘moments of difficulty,’ Woolf believed it had been a successful house-warming–an important way station in settling into a home…But the next morning, as usual, though she felt lazy, it was back to her routine. On this day, Woolf translated portions of Aristotle’s Poetics. The work was difficult, but it was accomplished within the sanctity of her own room in her own home.”
Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1945.
“I am not I, thou art not he or she; they are not they.”
“A blow upon a bruise.”
Dorothy Parker. Not Sure Where, Not Sure When.
“I don’t like writing. I like having written.”
“What fresh hell is this?”
Amy Vanderbilt. Everyday Etiquette. Bantam Books, New York, 1956.
Be safe! Know the rules!
Patti Smith. Year of the Monkey, Knopf, New York, 2019.
“New Year’s morning in Santa Cruz, pretty dead…I grabbed my camera and walked down the hill toward the pier…The sign said Dream Inn, punctuated by a starburst reminiscent of the Sputnik era.
Thank you, Dream Motel, I said, half to the air, half to the sign. It’s the Dream Inn! The sign exclaimed. Oh yeah, sorry, I said, somewhat taken aback.”
Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson. Pragmatics of Human Communication, W.W. Norton, New York and London, 1967.
First of all, there is a property of behavior that could hardly be more basic and is, therefore, often overlooked: behavior has no opposite…there is no such thing as nonbehavior or, to put it even more simply: one cannot not behave. Now, if it is accepted that all behavior in an interactional situation has message value…is communication, it follows that no matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate. Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value: they influence others and these others, in turn, cannot not respond to these communications and are thus themselves communicating. It should be clearly understood that the mere absence of talking or of taking notice of each other is no exception.
C. Wright Mills. The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, London, 1959.
“You will have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and organize their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experiences is that, in the course of a lifetime…experience is so important as a source of original intellectual work.”
Abraham Kaplan. The Conduct of Inquiry, Chandler Publishing, San Francisco, 1964.
“The simplicity of any one reconstruction of any one method is not meant to deaden awareness of the complexity of the process of inquiry taken as a whole. If we are to do justice to this complexity, I think it is hard to improve on P.W. Bridgman’s remark that ‘the scientist has no other method than doing his damnest.’”
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Penguin Press, London, 2005.
“Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore to suppose it to be beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper…assume that it must fall within your own capacity.
“Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.“
A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all– that is myself.”
May Sarton. Journal of A Solitude. W.W Norton, New York and London, 1973.
Begin here. So…to work. It is not a non sequitur. Now and again I am made aware, odd though it seems, that my work does help people.
Eleanor Roosevelt. You Learn by Living, Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York, 1960.
“Know what you see and understand what it means.“
I brought David Carr’s The Night of the Gun and Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo with me here, am long overdue in finishing, but life got in the way of reading for a while. I was gifted Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and that’s next. Eat the Buddha and Time of the Magicians still checked out at the Austin Public Library by others but on my Goodreads list. And the new Sylvia Plath biography Red Comet…finally bought, wow, I’m awed, really floored, with Heather Clark’s portrayal of this real life woman and her real life work. Kind of a bit more than that lady who killed herself in the oven. Sylvia Plath was only 30 when she died and had accomplished more than most of us ever could imagine if we lived to two or three times her age. How that reading has helped me through my insignificant troubles this year.
On the first Saturday Weekend Edition of 2021, Scott Simon did his segment on The Great Gatsby, a masterpiece which figured large in my undergraduate studies, reread many times since. Simon’s comments weren’t focused on the parties, or the booze, or the beautiful people, because all that just is surface. He spoke instead about the novel’s more significant theme of humans’ fatal vast carelessness, despite all reason still evident around us in these devastating COVID times. Gatsby enters public domain this year. (Oh no, now I read some tweeting of a Muppets version. There, the complete degradation of American thought. “One of these things is not like the other. One of these things doesn’t belong.” And now I read that there are graphic Gatsby and zombie Gatsby coming. Who in the world would think these good ideas? New York Times headlined it The Gatsby Glut. A novel about Nick Carraway’s backstory doesn’t sound as bad. Not same as reading the text, but as film I thought the Baz Luhrmann movie version gorgeous to see.)
Never had cable television but on YouTube can’t resist every Amber Ruffin or Sam Bee link, Stephen (Colbert) and Jon (Batiste), Corden–if your soul doesn’t grin at the Les Mis crosswalk musical, or bop with Paul McCartney’s or Michelle Obama’s carpool karaoke, sorry, you have no soul (plus his rapport with his crew, all having such fun together)–and my crush John Oliver, pretty much everything he does but that interview with the Dalai Lama and the one with Edward Snowden, and the the dog Supreme Court. How can I still be laughing at these things? Yet I do. Trevor Noah “miss me with that bullshit.” Necessary to lighten up the raw truth of a dreadful (few) year(s). Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (my ring tone again, thanks dear son). Never a Woody Allen fan, but Midnight in Paris is my favorite movie except maybe Kedi about the cats of Istanbul, maybe All That Jazz and maybe Hard Days’ Night or maybe Motorcycle Diaries or maybe Slumdog Millionaire or or maybe Dogtown and Z-Boys or maybe Darjeeling Limited. Journalist films, Good Night and Good Luck. For a few years on New Years Day my family’s tradition was lazing around streaming Lawrence of Arabia. Yup, it’s long, but…Peter O’Toole atop that train. Brad Bird’s animated Iron Giant on the eve of my son’s beginning kindergarten. Slacker joyfully recalls my first embed to Austin. Saw Boyhood in Chicago and gasped with recognition of another place and time where I’d really been. Adam Driver singing “Being Alive” in Marriage Story, sob city, in a good way.
The Alamo Drafthouse theatre does not allow talking during films. Yay Alamo Drafthouse.
Over Texas brisket lunch at Blacks Barbecue in Lockhart, had fun sharing favorite Mad Men scenes with visitors from Germany, after a morning walking Palmetto State Park.
More seriously, Amanpour and Company. On the Media, WNYC. Radio Open Source, WBUR.
My 2020, now 2021, has been so much better than for so many, but not without its churn. Mozart’s Requiem, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and my best liked ballet, Stravinsky also, Petrushka, Beethoven’s Ninth, performed by CSO at Symphony Center on Michigan Avenue. (My excitable kitten Oliver is calmed by the Ode to Joy.) I’m not totally sure of memory but I think my mother and I saw Nureyev dance Debussy’s L’apres-Midi D’un Faune at Auditorium Theatre in Chicago decades ago. Ave Maria. Clair de Lune. Air on the G String (perfection). Rhapsody in Blue which I played (badly, didn’t practice) on the piano I bought with an inheritance from my grandmother and will keep as long as I can. Moon River, Audrey Hepburn’s one. Harrison’s genius All Things Must Pass (fifty years ago, goodness, and the gnome display in London this summer of 2021…gift to our poor world now) and Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life which consoled me when I needed comfort. And Pet Sounds, and Traveling Wilburys, and Austin band Timbuk Three (“The Future’s So Bright, You’ve Got To Wear Shades”), all gifts from my husband when we first were dating and then when when our son was born). Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Mavis Staples, Nico, David Byrne, Jimmy Cliff and Al Green, Otis Redding. (I used to try to wake my sleepy son for school with Ramones and Sex Pistols on the boom box at 6:00 in mornings. That did not work. But even in my dotage I still like the Sex Pistols.) (Get the concept but not a lot of patience for rap hip hop whatever unless it’s truly authentic….much is, some is not.)
Dayna Finet 