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my notebooks
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Inspired by this post- 25 years, 85 notebooks (hat tip Kathy Sierra on twitter), I’m kicking off today with a couple of pictures of two of my own notebooks. They are nothing like as edibly gorgeous as Michael Bierut’s- I think and write nearly always just in words- but there is something so glorious about [...]
why is literature always so depressing?
Monday, February 2nd, 2009small boy in badly-fitting clothes, no shoes- truly dismal
I’m reading Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer prize winning Angela’s Ashes, the book that reputedly started the trend for miserable childhood memoirs, and boy, is it depressing. I can blast through Holocaust memoirs with barely a tear, so it isn’t the gloom-laden subject matter itself that’s problematic here- wretched [...]
Life lessons from Sartre and de Beauvoir
Sunday, January 11th, 2009I’ve been reading Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre by Hazel Rowley, which was a very interesting and entertaining read, especially considering the rather dry and serious characters of its two famous protagonists. Here are a few of the ideas it sparked for me:
Relationships:
There is no way J-P Sartre could have maintained his “freedom” [...]
Wordsworth- positive psychology genius
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008There’s something ironic about the way scientists are now proving that being in nature calms your brain-waves and deliberately recalling happy memories induces a state of inner peace: these are wellbeing strategies that used to be well known in other areas of life before positive psychology was invented (religion, literature, art). Last night I was [...]
Alain de Botton on Flaubert’s hatred of his homeland
Sunday, December 7th, 2008As a person with a somewhat mixed relationship with my own birthplace (the only time England felt like home was when my kids were small, probably because anywhere would have been home with them around; I grew up wishing not to be English, checking out every new country I visited for potential resettlement qualities), I [...]
Milan Kundera on politics
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008I’m reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and came across this interview from 1985:
The danger that threatens us is the totalitarian empire. Khomeini, Mao, Stalin – are they left or right? Totalitarianism is neither left nor right, and within its empire both will perish. I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech [...]
why intellectuals get depressed
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008A danger of academic life we don’t think about much? But you don’t have to be in a university to make these mistakes:
The real shock therapy Wallace needed, in other words, was to get the hell off campus. The university, with its obsessive reflection upon authentic and inauthentic modes of existence, put his hyper-analytical mind [...]
Gopnik #2: the meaning of art
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008This is about art historian Kirk Varnedoe, and it is a way of thinking about all art (and literary) criticism of which I very much approve:
He was, he said, going to speak without a text, just with a slide list. This was partly a bravura performer’s desire to do one last bravura performance. It was [...]
Gopnik #1: on the middle classes
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008There are 11 little post-it bookmarks in my copy of Through The Children’s Gate, which I mentioned here, which makes for 11 different short blog posts, or until I get sick of them, whichever is first. It’s a beautifully written book, essentially a collection of essays about life in New York, some of that life [...]
blogging as writing- unfinished voices
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008Most blogs I’ve read for years and years have maintained exactly the same voice throughout, because the person writing is the same person. Sometimes voices develop because people change and grow increasingly into themselves as they get a bit older. Some of us don’t stop morphing and growing up till we are quite old, others [...]
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