It’s been so long since I’ve done a list here, and yet listing is one of the things I do best!
Things I have read that have stayed with me:
…. my friend Shari’s blog post on teaching and Zeitoun.
…. my friend Addie’s blog post on Last Tango in Paris and the lifelong damage it did to Maria Schneider. I can’t stop thinking about Addie’s points. How awful to have your most humiliating moment bring lifelong notoriety that dominates even your obituary. How desperately sad.
…. the list of 2012 books to look forward to.
…. Ryan’s post on the difficulties of Christmas with a special needs child, and how important it is to be understanding.
….this story about Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, from the Old Love tumblr.
…. this quote has been rolling around in my head, especially the bolded part (my bold), even though I’m not sure I would agree with the quote in its entirety. Found on the OnBeing Blog, which I love:
“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
-Franz Kafka, from a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904.
