what i'm reading

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (#5), J. K. Rowling

still a good one

"Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice -- it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!"
--Ronny Cammareri (Nicolas Cage), Moonstruck

my latest addiction

Sudoku!

red and blue

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."
--Kurt Vonnegut

mirabelle

"Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely heart turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her identifies with all that darkness."
--Steve Martin, Shopgirl

happy halloween

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
--Shakespeare, Macbeth

i love book lists

Time Magazine book critics made a list of the top 100 novels since 1923. I've only read 20, so I love having another list to work through (another incentive to read many of these books, many of which are already sitting on the shelf).

I'm also working on the Modern Library 100 list. I've only read 19 of these. Many of the same books are on both lists.

riding dinosaurs to church

"A new poll this week revealed that 66% of Americans think that President Bush is doing a poor job with the war in Iraq. And the remaining 34% percent think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."
--Tina Fey, Weekend Update, SNL

to rosa parks

Thanks for not staying in "your place," even when everything and everyone in the world told you to shut up and go to the back of the bus.

the priceless moment

"If I could have looked down the years then and seen everything from beginning to end -- the good times, the best times, the bad times, the bad decisions, the indecision, and then finally the divorce -- I still would not have traded anything for that moment."
--Kingbird Highway, Kenn Kaufmann

unbelievable

"Also, it is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner. Gievn (sic) that Baton Rouge is back to normal, restaurants are getting busy. He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes. We now have traffic to encounter to get to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc."
--Sharon Worthy, Michael Brown's press secretary, in an email to Cindy Taylor, FEMA deputy director of public affairs, and others, Aug. 31, 2 p.m. via

reckless

"Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with those who are reckless with yours."
--Mary Schmich

what i'm reading

Kingbird Highway, Kenn Kaufman
Sex Wars, Marge Piercy
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (#4), J. K. Rowling

thinking in herds

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
--Charles Mackay

Case in point.

i failed the allegiance test

"The George W. Bush Loyalty Quiz
10 Questions to Test Your Allegiance to President Bush

Your score is 0 on a scale of 1 to 10. You hate Bush with a writhing passion. You think he is an idiot, a liar, and a warmonger who has been a miserable failure as president. Nothing would give you greater pleasure than seeing him run out of the White House, except maybe seeing him dragged away in handcuffs."

--------------------------

They said it. Take the quiz yourself.

surely canst go, girl

The Hokey Pokey Written by Shakespeare

"O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about."

ether hour

Some friends of mine started a new band, and they are very talented. Check out their website to get free music.

the power of forgetting

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

liquidation

"You begin to liquidate a people ... by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write books for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster."
--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

cyborg name

I am "Wireless Electronic Neohuman Designed for Yelling."
Oddly ... very appropriate.
What are you?

adrift

"For Tamina is adrift on a raft and looking back, looking only back. Her entire being contains only what she sees there, far behind her. Just as her past contracts, disintegrates, dissolves, so Tamina is shrinking and losing her contours.
She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
--The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera

forbidden

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
--Voltaire

much-needed comic relief

For Napoleon fans everywhere.

what i'm reading now

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (#3), J. K. Rowling
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Executive Intelligence, Justin Menkes

president "the buck doesn't stop here" bush

Jon Stewart on Hurricane Katrina

blame the victims?

"Disaster sociology according to Bill O'Reilly. Or, Two views on who didn't get out.

From today's Times: "Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's 'low-mobility" population - the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people.'"

O'Reilly, on his show last night: "A lot of the people -- a lot of the people who stayed wanted to do this destruction. They figured it out. And that's -- I'm not surprised."
-- Josh Marshall via

hurricane housing

Check out this website and this website for connecting people dislocated by Hurricane Katrina with people able to open their homes.

1000 questions

New Orleans Time-Picayune Blog: Open Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks?
Read More >>
Via

trust no man

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."
-- John Adams

shattered balance

"Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing."
--The Stranger, Albert Camus

why he'll never go away

"'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind."
--King Lear, William Shakespeare

why?

"I want to ask the president, why did he kill my son? He said my son died in a noble cause, and I want to ask him what that noble cause is."

"I want him to honor my son by bringing the troops home immediately ... I don't want him to use my son's name or my name to justify any more killing."

--Cindy Sheehan, mother of 24-year-old son -- Army Spc. Casey Sheehan of Vacaville, California -- who was killed in Baghdad's Sadr City on April 4, 2004.

preposterous assumptions

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed."
--Herman Melville

no cognitive dissonance, please

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."
--Don Marquis

live and let live

"... it came to me how some Christians seemed to always need to have something or somebody to be against. If it wasn't desegregation, it was women's lib. If it wasn't sex education, it was secular humanism. And if it wasn't one-worlders, it was just plain Democrats. Now it was abortionists and homosexuals who were ruining the country and destroying Christianity. Well, I had more faith in the Lord of Calvin and Knox than to get carried away over that unlikely possibility. He'd been running things since the beginning, and I didn't figure He'd have much trouble keeping a lid on things this day and age."
-- Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, Ann B. Ross

help!

"The graduating class of 2005 can claim, with perhaps more credibility than any other class in history, that during its four years of college the world went crazy. In the fall of 2001, our planet earth and the United States of America were different sorts of places – in tone, in tolerance, in peace and war, in ideas and in ideals - than they are on this spring day in 2005. These past years have been extraordinary in the express rate of change, well beyond the usual standards of culture, well above the personal watermarks you have stamped as college students. As college graduates, you now live in a brand new world, with new versions of political upheaval, global pandemic, world war and religious polarization, the likes of which have rarely visited our planet all at once – and thank God for that.
...
We need help. Your help. You must help. Please help. Please provide Help. Please be willing to help. Help… and you will make a huge impact in the life of the street, the town, the country, and our planet. If only one out of four of each one hundred of you choose to help on any given day, in any given cause – incredible things will happen in the world you live in.
Help publicly. Help privately. Help in your actions by recycling and conserving and protecting, but help also in your attitude. Help make sense where sense has gone missing. Help bring reason and respect to discourse and debate. Help science to solve and faith to soothe. Help law bring justice, until justice is commonplace. Help and you will abolish apathy – the void that is so quickly filled by ignorance and evil."

--Tom Hanks, Vassar College Commencement Speech, 2005

bird buddies

"Please don't feed the birds."
--Sign in Steamers, Seattle seafood eatery -- I wondered why this sign was inside the restaurant, until I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a bird casually walking by my table.

blue plans for happiness

"We had collected in our years together a sizable library of books and a large set of record albums, neither of which were readily available in those days. Guests had brought us gifts discreetly, knowing our tastes ... We were very proud of our home: books in Hungarian, English, German, French, recordings of classical and jazz music ... We could never, and certainly not at this late date, hope to carry our treasures out of the country with us. Hungary was closing its every border, every gap in its skin, with terrible speed. We had to accept this fate, that our treasure would be stolen from us, and there was terrible regret over this. But my beautiful husband was clever to the very end. He had an idea, you see, because ... he saw me weeping -- it is ridiculous to say now -- over Alice in Wonderland. Not the Bible, not Petofi or Arany or Kis, not even Tolstoy. I could not bear to lose my Alice. He saw me on the floor, holding it like a baby ... he did not scold me for wasting time. He understood at once why I was crying, and he told me what we would do, and we did it. We spent one long night making a catalog of our literature and music. Of our life and pleasures. We took turns with the pen. One of us recited; one of us wrote. You must think of this beautiful scene ... There are tanks rolling up the streets of your home. Where you grew up ... And behind a blackened window, by candlelight, my husband and I scribble and whisper ... We knew there was a risk, of course, we were not fools, we were merely excited and sure that this was worth it and that we would survive and have this tale to tell later, elsewhere, to very impressed admirers like you and that we would have the pleasure of rebuilding this collection ... We were laughing because we were escaping with the blue plans, the design for our happiness, and if they exploded our building, if they burned our books, if they melted our records with their flame-shooters, if they fouled my piano, they will still not hurt us.
--Prague, Arthur Phillips

superficiality of days

"I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless passe move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends."
--The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

graham greene

"I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying 'Yes, Henry?' and then 'You?'"
...........................
"I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her. For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, esepcially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me. I don't know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical."
--The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

discomfort

"We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
--Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

the only truth that matters

"Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

married bliss?

"Marriage is a curious institution ... I cannot quite see how it can be possible. People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together. Those outside the cage can, to their own taste, satisfy their need for society by more or less organized dashes in the direction of other human beings. But the unit of two can scarcely communicate with others, and is fortunate, as the years go by, if it can communicate within itself."
--The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch

flagrant violations of reality

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
--1984, George Orwell

then and now

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population ... could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated ... the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. And yet -- !"
-----------------
"To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
--1984, George Orwell

baldwin

"... Before him, then, the slope stretched upward, and above it the brilliant sky, and beyond it, cloudy, and far away, he saw the skyline of New York. He did not know why, but there arose in him an exultation and a sense of power, and he ran up the hill like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself headlong into the the city that glowed before him.
But when he reached the summit he paused; he stood on the crest of the hill, hands clasped beneath his chin, looking down. Then he, John, felt like a tyrant who might crush this city beneath his heel; he felt like a long-awaited conqueror at whose feet flowers would be strewn and before whom multitudes cried, Hosanna! He would be, of all, the mightiest, the most beloved, the Lord's anointed; and he would live in this shining city which his ancestors had seen with longing from far away. For it was his; the inhabitants of the city had told him it was his; he had but to run down, crying, and they would take him to their hearts and show him wonders his eyes had never seen."
--Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin

pod envy

Word of the day: iSnob
"An iSnob is someone who walks the halls carrying their iPod, like they are above the rest of us."
--coworker (apparently I am the first iSnob)

always in flux

"People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities."
--------------------------------------
"It was not permanence alone that made what the Anglo Saxons called home, he thought. It was continuity, the flux of fashion and decoration moving in and out again as minds and purses altered, but always within the framework of the established and recognizable outline. Even if the thing itself was paltry and dull, the history of the thing was not."
--The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner

he flunks

"In the wake of successful Iraqi elections, President Bush's job approval rating has jumped up to 57%, or, as high school teachers call it, an "F."
--Tina Fey, SNL

untitled

"I'm beginning to believe all engineers are liars."
--coworker

random acts of creativity

Participant quotes from a creative writing workshop:
"I have intimacy issues with my characters."
"When do bat girls bloom?"
"OK, here's the woo woo part."

why read

"Someone who is engrossed in literature has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality. ... Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them ... If we had learned this one lesson our society would have been in much better shape today."
--Iranian student in Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

groundhog bush

"Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address.

It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a hideous little creature of marginal intelligence for prognostication.

The other involves a groundhog."
--anonymous

nationalized religion

"... women of her mother's generation could walk the streets freely, enjoy the company of the opposite sex, join the police force, become pilots, live under laws that were among the most progressive in the world regarding women ... in the course of nearly two decades, the streets have been turned into a war zone, where young women who disobey the rules are hurled into patrol cars, taken to jail, flogged, fined, forced to wash the toilets and humiliated, and as soon as they leave, they go back to do the same thing. Is she aware ... of her own power? Does she realize how dangerous she can be when her every stray gesture is a disturbance to public safety?

Whoever we were--and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not--we had become the figment of someone else's dreams. A stern ayotollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land. He had come in the name of a past, a past that, he claimed, had been stolen from him. And he now wanted to re-create us in the image of that illusory past. Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?"
--Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

station wagon

"Don't they know I am only a station wagon?"
--anonymous writer in creative writing workshop

media jumps the shark

"A Century of News Milestones
2000: Too Close to Call!
Major news networks prematurely 'call' Florida for Al Gore, then prematurely 'call' Florida for George W. Bush, then sit quietly waiting for America to fall asleep. Media officially jumps the shark."
--America: The Book, the Daily Show With Jon Stewart

black thursday

"I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
--Thomas Carlysle

eat your fear

"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one's own pleasure, that fear may be mild--timidity is the word I've used here. If, however, one is working under deadline--a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample--that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him."
--On Writing, Stephen King

altruistic corporations

" ... Congress must heed the will of the people. The astute reader may rightly wonder, 'But didn't you just say the people were busy?' Touche. This minor glitch in our representative government is rectified by the white knights of democracy--corporations. These altruistic entities hire lobbyists whose sole job is to insure, through persuasive argument and financial remuneration, that Congress never forgets the people's wishes. Especially the people's wishes for deregulation."
--America: The Book, the Daily Show With Jon Stewart

middle-aged US

"The Ages of Democracy: A Guide
Middle Age: One day, your democracy will look in the mirror and behold a scary sight: Voter turnout is thinning, your welfare system is bloated, you're completely dominated by corporate interests, and you haven't had a proper election in years. When this happens, a nation may go through a mid-life crisis, seeking solace in superficial 'toys,' like satellite-based lasers to shoot down missiles or action stars turned politicians. Don't be surprised if old allies decide to leave you and start referring to you as a 'once great' nation. Ultimately, you will have to decide whether to quietly make peace with your declining power, or to go out in a blaze of glory, taking Mideast peace/world fish stocks/the ozone layer with you. (Tip: Many middle-aged democracies find themselves turning to religion for strength, so don't be too 'embarrassed' to erode church-state separation provisos)."
--America: The Book, the Daily Show With Jon Stewart

dumb question

coworker: This may be a dumb question, but is everyone on NPR gay?
me: yeah, that's a dumb question.

just write

"Writing is a lot like driving a country blacktop highway on a hot summer day. There is a wavery magical spot that shimmers on the horizon. You aim toward it. You speed to get there, and when you do, the 'there' vanishes. You look up to see it again, shimmering in the distance. You write toward that. I suppose some people might call this unrequited love or dissatisfaction. I think it's something better."
...........................................................
"Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it. Instead of self-consciously thinking about the sentence I have written, I find myself amazed and interested by the sentences that seem to want themselves written. Instead of being an act of pontification, writing becomes an act of revelation. This is true for any writer who lets writing write through him. We the writers, as much as any reader, are in for the treat of discovering what comes next."
--The Right to Write, Julia Cameron

me, joy

"You will soon bring joy to someone."
--Chinese Fortune Cookie

battling ignorance

"At times like this, when Miss Thornton was very tired, she felt that she fought a losing battle with ignorance and was overcome with a sense of futility and helplessness. What sense was there in nagging a boy into memorizing the dates of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire when the boy, grown, would milk cows for a living, as had his father and grandfather before him. What logic was there in pounding decimal fractions into the head of a girl who would eventually need to count only to number the months of each pregnancy? ... But in her mind then, as now, was the hope which kept her at her job, just as it has kept teachers working for hundreds of years. If I can teach something to one child, if I can awaken in only one child a sense of beauty, a joy in truth, an admission of ignorance and a thirst for knowledge, then I am fulfilled."
--Peyton Place, Grace Metalious