Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Winter's Job: Typing Great-Grandma's Handwritten Memoir!


Intriguing clips from GG's life:

There are three kinds of marriage: The prize, the surprise, and the consolation prize.

Rockabye baby, please go to sleep. Momma’s a monster & daddy’s a creep. (...Weird...)

There was something almost chemical in my actions and decisions. Now was my kiddoes year to begin to store up fond memories. I had no intention of having examples set and telling them No. It is not wrong for them to follow the lead of curiosity. No! No! makes them less free about reaching out and learning than those raised where No is kept to the necessary minimum.

There is enough grounds for divorce in one cup of her coffee. (Hahaha)

I was a moveable object around which a kitchen was designed.

She galloped past the old maid doom, leaned over backwards in the other direction of double cursedness, and married the first confused young man who looked into her eyes and said, “You remind me of my sister! Be my bride!” The shortage of marriage-minded males for her type made her feel obligated to grab fast and hang on tight, letting the years drop where they may.

One advantage of being married is that I couldn’t make a fool out of myself without knowing it.

“This was not a great union. I’d lost all that made sense in life but the children and acquired a fine bleeding heart for a hoodlum,” all of a sudden a vocabulary of common sense told me in adjectives and emotions all unfavorable.

The height of creation is having a family and helping them develop according to their various talents, after all it isn’t when children grow up to explore an interesting object that mother should worry. It’s when they are afraid to reach out to touch objects that excite their curiosity that we should start worrying.

The fire was out with C and I, but there was enough warmth in the kids to keep us together.

I determined to make my society a touch of privilege, not a burden.

Mayme’s bed of whom I had supplanted was no bed of roses, but an abundance of experience, which no one would either seek or desire. There is nothing more baffling in human relationship than silence. The dark loom of doubt, and ? unexpressed. Only the shell remained.

Kentucky land is the footprints of our past and the hope of our future, even though the truck growled up and hauled us back to the city.

No matter how you slice him, he spelled nature’s blunder, always in debt throughout life and in pawn to the future.

The Emmicks were never friendly to me. They were constantly digging my grave, but I never came to the funeral. And most of them have had to eat their shovels, and I am still chewing up my talent. Fighting to the last ditch for a satisfactory later life.

Her record indicates she does not know much about choosing a mate for keeps. She invents a cure for which there is no disease. Bob Connor, #1, living by his wit, ignorant, shy and brazen almost to the point of blankness, struck one as though he had been bruised by life. Drawing petals around him only strengthened one’s impression. Dismayed false assurance. Seldom said the wrong thing. Seldom did the right thing. Moved around like a sleepwalker. She was very happy with her model husband, until she looked up model in the dictionary and found it meant imitation of the real thing. Then she tried the I’ll show ‘em outlet for her nobly repressed resentment. Divorce opened the way for Bob Connor. Their matrimonial route tilted for taller timber and bowled over completely.

She knew nothing about him and there was nothing to know.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Magical Realism in the Form of Book Review

"What we think, in the adult person, is very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to feel. Moreover what we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel."

D Willard
Renovation of the <3:
The book that centers me when I am in a vice tearing my limbs in four directions at once. In the middle of a hurricane. In the Bermuda Triangle. Before there was penicillen. When pirates, vicious not-hot-like-Johnny pirates still roamed the oceans. And underwater dinosaurs still existed entirely to drain the life blood of mammals. This book remains useful in securing my rescue when times are like these, God bless it.

Nin, Nineteen Thirty-Four

"I saw the headlines, families broken apart by economic dramas, I saw the exodus of Americans, the changes and havocs brought on by world conditions. Individual lives shaken, poisoned, altered... The struggle & instability of it all. I was overwhelmed. And then, with greater, more furious, more desperate stubbornness I continued to build my individual life, as if it were a Noah's Ark for the drowning. I refused to share the universal pessimism and inertia."

Friday, December 10, 2010

Lily Allen

I don't know what's right and what's real anymore
And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
And when do you think it will all become clear?
'Cuz I'm being taken over by the Fear

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Words Should be Heated in the Winter

Diary of Anais Nin Volume 1 words of the week:

"I accept life as it is, the ugliness, the inadequacies, the ironies, for the sake of joy, for the sake of life. It is a comedy. It is slightly ridiculous and full of homelieness... Today I laughed. I let others care. I shift the burden."

"Has pain made too deep a scar so that I do not feel the gentle touch of happiness? The flesh too scarred, too coarse-grained, to feel the softness of the summer? Only another wound can make it tremble. I am not made for happiness. It is like sleep."

"A devouring passion for reality, because me imaginary world is so immense it can never be annihilated. Only it must not be allowed to devour me."

"But from that moment on, I felt my connection with God, an isolated, wordless, individual, full connection which gives me an immense joy and a sense of the greatness of life, eternity. I was born. I was born woman. To love God and to love man, supremely and separately. Not to confuse them. I was born to great quietude, a superhuman joy, above and beyond all human sorrows, transcending pain and tragedy. This joy which I found in the love of man, in creation, was completed by communion with God."

The Disappearing Sabbath

Tonight, walking -shivering, gloveless in 17* windchill- up Half Street from Navy Yard (which was decorated with Christmas lights??), I decided I'd like to shrug off the 7-day week when I grow up. Because my ideal week would need 9 days. And there would be no such nonsense as "THE WEEKEND!". All days would be created equal. This week would go like so:

Days 1-4: The beginning would be all thinking in rooms and reading every sort of book and writing personal essays and lyric poems and editing original manuscripts and learning French and discussing theories+works and film-watching sans popcorn. Mental exercise. Cerebral procreation. Intellectual intercourse.

Days 5-7: The antidote to all this sinking in thinking would be hands-dirty creativity. One might cook a sixteen-course meal for two dozen of one's closest friends. Decoupage a chest or drawers. Henna one's feet. Trim the Magnolia tree. Photograph fruit. There should be at least 2 completed creative acts by sundown on Day 7 to keep things moving.

Day 8: Brain and soul cared for - time to nourish the body. Adventure and exercise - all the fun kinds of calorie burning. A dance class after morning yoga, followed by a hike through the woods which leads to a waterfall perfect for swimming laps under. After that a hot oil massage might be nice with some green tea and wheatgrass. Bulgur and carrot salad even. Deep breathing would be the constant refrain of the day.

Day 9: This day is mysteriously not experienced, though it does occur in its entirety on a "weekly" basis. It's compressed into a time warp that is unnoticeable to the human sense of time. I have yet to discover the purpose of this odd 24 hour period of time, but I am under the impression that I never will.

Then we start all over again!