Remembering that time …
when we had unrealized possibility,
the drifting period of our youth.
— Kate Zambreno, Screen Tests: Stories and Other Writing (Harper Perennial, July 23, 2019)
Photo: Alain Laboile
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
August 3, 2020 by 8 Comments
The first moment I wrote in my notebook again, I wrote of that fleeting feeling in the morning, of possibility.
That’s what I want Drifts to be, my desire and longing for it.
— Kate Zambreno, Drifts: A Novel (Penguin, May 19, 2020)
Portrait of Kate Zambreno by Nikola Tamindzic
Facts could be trusted. Facts consoled.
August 1, 2020 by 14 Comments
On this point, Trebek is remarkably direct: Even if he can’t quite understand the public fascination with his life, he knows he means something significant to the culture, something soothing and in short supply. He knows he fills a need. For the 36 years hosting “Jeopardy!” — an industry record— he has been a nostalgic father figure of sorts, showing up reliably at dinnertime and remaining tantalizingly aloof. In the autumn of the media patriarchs, he stands practically alone, untinged by scandal. His authority derives from his defense of facts, not their distortion…
Trebek might have inspired dread in his teachers and early employers, but he discovered that his real talent was in projecting calm, in allowing others to shine. As a host, it has been his proudest quality — his ability to buoy an anxious contestant through tone alone.
Facts themselves can confer steadiness. A small aside: I took to “Jeopardy!” early, and in high school had a weird, cursory career competing in televised trivia contests. My teammates and I — immigrants all, as it happened — glutted ourselves on dates and data with a hunger I couldn’t have possibly explained at the time but that now seems embarrassingly obvious. Facts could be trusted. Facts consoled. Their patient, dogged acquisition constituted a kind of shy possession of the world.
Of course, any possession in this life is, at best, temporary. “My life has been a quest for knowledge and understanding, and I’m nowhere near having achieved that. And it doesn’t bother me in the least,” Trebek cheerfully concludes. He ends the book at home, like of all us, in quarantine. He is exhausted by cancer treatments, exhausted by uncertainty but still sublimely calm and grateful. As he’s always advised his contestants to do, he’s already looking ahead to the next question.
~ Parul Sehgal, from In Alex Trebek’s Reluctant, Moving Memoir, Life Is All About the Next Question, in New York Times, July 21, 2020
Notes: His new book “The Answer Is: Reflections On My Life” can be found here.
Guess.What.Day.It.Is?
July 8, 2020 by 34 Comments
A camel library is giving children out of school in some of Ethiopia’s most remote villages a unique opportunity to continue reading and learning, despite COVID-19 school closures.
Save the Children first began the camel library in 2010. The program includes 21 camels, which are traditionally used by communities in the Somali region of Ethiopia to transport goods across the hot lowland areas. Camels can carry up to 200 storybooks at a time in wooden boxes strapped to their backs. The project currently reaches over 22,000 children in 33 villages.
Across Ethiopia, over 26 million children are out of school due to COVID-19. By continuing its camel library outreach program, Save the Children is making sure children can continue to read and learn while at home.
Mahadiya, 13, is in grade seven in a remote part of the Somali region of eastern Ethiopia. Since COVID-19 forced her school to close in late March, she has been unable to go to class.
To help her keep up with her studies, Mahadiya is making use of Save the Children’s mobile camel library, which visits her village every week. When she grows up, Mahadiya says she hopes to become an engineer.
“Before the coronavirus, we used to go to school regularly,” said Mahadiya. “The school used to provide us with a meal each school day, but now that has stopped. I feel sad and disappointed that I cannot go to school.
“I am worried it may not open soon. Because of this, I am worried that we could forget some of the things we learned in school and we could fail our exams.
“After schools were closed, many children were out of school and they were exposed to child labor and exploitation. Many children have become herders and some walk into the bush to look for firewood. When schools were closed, I was very sad. However, the camel library continued to come to our village and supplied us with storybooks. I feel very happy and I am now able to borrow and take home the storybook that I would like to read.”
Mahadiya’s family has also suffered financially during COVID-19 due to school closures and movement restrictions. Their family income used to come from a small shop, but because of increases in the price of goods and a decrease in the number of customers, her family is struggling to make ends meet. Her family also used to own livestock, but the ongoing drought in the region meant that most of the animals needed to be sold.
“It has been nearly three months since the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was recorded in Ethiopia,” said Ekin Ogutogullari, Save the Children’s Country Director in Ethiopia. “The virus poses particular challenges for vulnerable populations living in high-density or resource-poor communities, migrants, and displaced children.
“In Ethiopia, we recently conducted a survey where children told our team about their perceptions and concerns about COVID-19. Children raised concerns around increases in child labor, early marriage, and abuse due to the outbreak and closure of schools.
“On top of this, Ethiopian children and their families are facing floods, desert locusts, cholera, measles, food insecurity, and rising poverty levels. The scale of this crisis is huge, but we are determined to meet the needs of the most vulnerable and ensure no child is worse off at the end of this pandemic.”
~ From COVID-19: A Camel Library Takes Remote Learning to New Levels
Notes:
- Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again. Caleb is grounded in Work For Home and can’t come out to play this week.
T.G.I.F.: Freedom
April 10, 2020 by 16 Comments
“I was reading Kierkegaard while waiting to pick up my children from school. I wished I could wave some mother out of her idling vehicle and show her the passage. Reading, however, is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.”
~ Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Photo: Elena with Reading
get up ya bowsies / and clean out your cells
February 28, 2020 by 23 Comments
What time of day do you write?
There’s an Irish song written by Brendan Behan that goes: In the early mornin’ / the screws were bawling / get up ya bowsies / and clean out your cells. Well, that’s how I feel in the early morning: Get up, ya bowsie. I want to get up before the small mundanities and the stupidities and the prison guards of the Internet. Clean out my cell. Or my cells. Get the words down on paper. A perfect day for me begins in the dark before anyone else has woken, say 4:30 or 5 am. Two hours or so of this. In the quiet. And then, when the house begins to stir, the rest of my life will too. But for a small parcel of early morning hours, I feel entirely free. And then I go out and walk the dog.
~ Colum McCann, from “Colum McCann on Ulysses, Mary Lavin, and Drinking with John Berger” (Literary Hub, February 25, 2020)
Notes: Thank you Sawsan for sharing.
Lightly child, lightly
November 14, 2019 by 11 Comments
It’s so delicate, the light.
And there’s so little of it. The dark
is huge.
Just delicate needles, the light,
in an endless night.
And it has such a long way to go
through such desolate space.
So let’s be gentle with it.
Cherish it.
So it will come again in the morning.
We hope.
~ Rolph Jacobsen, “A Few Delicate Needles” from The Roads Have Come to an End Now
Notes:
- Poems: 3QuarksDaily. Photo: (via Mennyfox55)
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
Lightly child, lightly
November 7, 2019 by 28 Comments
I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books, such sandstorms and ice blasts of words, such staggering peace, such enormous laughter, such and so many blinding bright lights, splashing all over the pages in a million bits and pieces all of which were words, words, words, and each of which were alive forever in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.
~ Dylan Thomas, “Notes on the Art of Poetry” in The Poems of Dylan Thomas, Volume 1
Notes:
- Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels. Art: Michael Azgour with Jennifer Reading (2019)
- Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
About right.
September 24, 2019 by 12 Comments
Is this verbal violence, then, simply incompetence? Is it the verbal equivalent of someone who has not learned the piano sitting down and trying to play Rachmaninov’s Third? The rudeness of these public figures gives pleasure and relief, it is clear, to their audiences. Perhaps what they experience is not the possibility of actual violence but a sort of intellectual unbuttoning, a freedom from the constraint of language. Perhaps they have lived lives in which they have been continually outplayed in the field of articulation, but of this new skill – rudeness – they find that they are the masters.
~ Rachel Cusk, from “On Rudeness” in Coventry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux. September 16, 2019)
Notes:
- Book Review of Rachel Cusk’s new book Coventry via The New York Times: “Rachel Cusk Said She Was Done With Autobiography. These Essays Suggest Otherwise.”
- Portrait of Rachel Cusk (May 2018) via The New Yorker
Sunday Morning
September 1, 2019 by 18 Comments
“You’re going to ask if you can marry my daughter,” Nan’s father said.
“Yes,” James answered.
“Why?”
James thought: Because she is jolly and pretty and bright, like a firefly, blinking in and out of hedges and trees. Because I imagine her in the kitchen, washing dishes, looking out the window and humming to herself, her brow knit in concentration. I imagine myself coming up behind her, putting my arms around her, resting my chin on her shoulder. I imagine her face turning up to me, bright and pale and astonishing, and I imagine her lips just before I kiss her, full and parted, almost singing the words of a song. Because I think beyond kissing her, because I think about her naked and warm under clean sheets and damp from the bath. I imagine her bare ankle rubbing against my own. I imagine her hair disheveled; I imagine myself smoothing it out of her eyes. I imagine making toast with her and eating it at a round table. When I do, I am just as crazed with passion for her as I would be in bed. There is no difference between imagining her naked and imagining her with a kerchief over her hair.
“Because I love her,” he said.
~ Cara Wall, The Dearly Beloved: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, August 13, 2019)
Notes:
- I’m 75% completed, Highly Recommended.
- NY Times Book Review: A Lifetime at a Church, Filled With Faith & Drama (Aug 13, 2019)
