View through Book Review

Figured this out: the reason (or, one of the reasons) why I like to read The New York Times Review Of Books each Monday:

it gives me the news and current events THROUGH the filter created by looking specifically at What People Are Writing Books About. It's a filtered view of the world.

[excerpt] > > > > > "The Queen Mother" is a labor of love, both for the author and for anyone who tries reading it from cover to cover. The authorized biography of a woman who was born as the 20th century was beginning and died about a year after it ended, it is a linear, you-are-there chronicle of the events of her life. Mostly this means lunches, balls, charity events, shooting parties. She cut cakes, she cut ribbons, she cut the rug. She was a royal. She read the job description, first issued in 1689.

...Her brother-in-law Edward, who lied about his net worth at the time of his abdication and was seemingly being groomed by the Nazis to replace his brother should things break nicely for the Third Reich, threatened to slit his throat if Mrs. Simpson deserted him.

Unlike the patriotic, public-spirited, good-hearted queen mother, Edward was basically a worthless human being. < < < < <

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"She cut cakes, she cut ribbons, she cut the rug."
"...should things break nicely for the Third Reich..."
"basically a worthless human being"

I can't resist prose like that, so why try?
However, I won't ever get time to read that whole book; reading just the entertaining review gives me enough info to enjoy and continue formulating my concept of things.

That's another thing book reviews are good for: you never get time to read all books, but you can mine a lot of riches from just the reviews.

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Reviews I liked this week besides the one about the Queen Mother:
"Under The Dome" by Stephen King
"Samuel Johnson: A Life" reviewed by Harold Bloom
"Robert Altman: The Oral Biography"
"Postcards from the Edge: Tocqueville's Letters Home"
"At The Morgan: The Jane Austen her Family Knew"
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(haven't read yet -- saving for "dessert" but expect to enjoy:'
"Books about the Obama Campaign" - !

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Back to "The Queen Mother": the banal along with the glorious and inspiring -- like every life, perhaps.

You have --
> > > > > Back at the house there was tea to be taken in the drawing room, which featured an ancient gramophone with long-playing records of such old favorites as the Crazy Gang, and an equally aged television set for watching videos (rarely if ever the news). < < < < <

but also --

> > > > The immense affection the public felt for her antedates the central event in her life, when she and her husband refused to flee London during the Battle of Britain, a heroic, enormously symbolic act that helped pull her equally heroic countrymen through one of the darkest moments in their history.

No one alive at the time ever forgot her courage, nor should anyone alive today. < < < < <

Evil's presence in the world requires Heroism.

Now -- what, for lunch??

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two thoughts / questions

I had two thoughts today.
(More than that, I guess, but two I'll "blog.")

1. In life, there are big, major items, and small details, both of which require decisions.

While a person would, off the top of one's head, assume that the big choices and decisions would take large amounts of a person's focus and consideration while smaller details of life would consume smaller amounts of attention -- it hit me today that it's possibly the other way around:

it could be argued, that the decisions and choices of a huge nature in our lives consume small amounts of time and attention while, weirdly, the smaller issues get more attention, effort, and focus.

(This could be because the big stuff evolves naturally from circumstance and opportunity, while we have more control over the small items so we luxuriate in options when it comes to which color sweater or which brand of bicycle to buy. --

Is it a case of -- God makes the big decisions but leaves the lipstick shade to us?)

2. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

A quote most of us have heard.

Experience working in politics made me wonder if in many cases it's a corrupt person seeking power who runs for office in the first place.

So -- perhaps it's the other way around:
instead of "power corrupts" the truth may be:

Corrupt persons seek power.

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Interior Design

I'm interested in interior decoration

(think now we are supposed to say "space design")

but really don't know anything about it.

Must try to educate myself.

Magazines.

A blog called Design Sponge.

Edith Wharton's book: The Decoration of Houses

Alexandra Stoddard's book: The Decoration of Houses

Next effort.

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Churchill book

A beautiful,
really,
aesthetically beautiful
book,
for children,
about Winston Churchill.

At workplace, someone was selling children's books; you select from a catalog.

USBORNE
is the brand.

Only purchased the book because the co-worker with the catalog is nice to me -- one of those -- OK, I can buy something.

So -- I ordered; paid; the book was delivered to me today.
I had it in mind to give it to one or another of my friends who has children, but first I looked it over myself.

What a beautiful book!
I'm not doing a "commercial" for this Usborne company, but I simply have to say how impressed I am.

Excellent story of Churchill's life, and the look of the book just knocks me out.

Since it is for children there are pictures on just about every page. And the colors are rich and luscious.

Every page is a feast for the eye, and it's bound to instill in a youngster a thrilling sense of the majesty of history.

Now I must figure out whom to give it to.

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Betsy Lerner -- Norman Mailer

Finished reading The Forest For The Trees, by Betsy Lerner (NY agent and editor), and am now taking notes from it.

She writes, in Chapter 4 -- "The Self-Promoter":

> > > > How does a writer negotiate a capricious world that would just as soon destroy him as praise him?

[Norman] Mailer, who is clearly going to go out kicking and screaming, reveals the high cost and anguish involved in continuing to produce: "If I am going to go on saying what my anger tells me it is true to say, I must get better at overriding the indifference which comes from the snobs, arbiters, managers and conforming maniacs who manipulate most of the world of letters....

There may have been too many fights for me...too much brain-blasting rage at the minuscule frustrations of a most loathsome literary world, necrophilic to the core -- they murder their writers, and then decorate their graves."
...

Whether you throw a long shadow or hide within its dark fold, never leaving home but through the tapping out of your own Morse code, as Emily Dickinson did through the long winters of her life, or run for mayor, punch out people twice your size, and stab your wife, as Norman Mailer did while producing some of his generation's most influential prose, you will ultimately live or die by your line. < < < <

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Earlier in my life, reading only a brief sampling of Norman Mailer's writing was off-putting to me: harsh, disgusting, violent -- I was like, "Aaaauuggghhh!!!"

Needed a Jane Austen paragraph as antidote.

But I liked the above Mailer quote:
"brain-blasting rage"
"conforming maniacs"
"a most loathsome literary world."

O-kay.

And when he writes, "I must get better at overriding the indifference..." -- I could relate to that; often resolve in my mind to "get better at" something....

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excerpts: Project Journal

> > > > Friday, September 25, 2009
Today, for my Project Journal, I will do the following:
1) Type up Current Notes, with 8 or 9 items.
2) Write in this notebook about the Current Notes meshed with the Outline Thoughts. And then stop, for today.

Sunday, September 27, 2009
For my Monday 9/28 Project Journal work, I will --
1. Take the current notes and make a List/(Outline) for what to write about next, and
2) Write about it, in this notebook.

9/28/09 Mon.
I love the double rings of these notebooks. Excellent.
Through my notes: The current notes on what to write about next, focus on noticing the importance of narrative -- the significance of What You Say About Something.

The official line. Propaganda. Whatever ya got.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

What to write next:
List of 9.
It's in Grace's "Notes": free associate, and flow -- "Dylanize" it.

Wed. 9/30/09
Plots. Woody Allen's movies.

They're about Process. Love and disappointment. And how you keep living and how you look at things (attitudes). What you choose to learn, from things. And showing -- (exploring) -- the process of going ahead and investigating other options.

("What do you want? It was my first play.")

Thursday, October 1, 2009
Jane Austen plots. Characters reveal who they are, by whom they marry. Backdrop: human and social commentary and observation. < < < <

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Cary Grant (Mmmmhh...)

On Saturday, was watching the movie "Charade" (1963, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn) on YouTube.

When a CIA dude played by (I think) Walter Mathau explains some things to Audrey Hepburn, she asks questions with the word "spy" in them; he corrects her with the word "agent."

Spy.

Agent.

Cool exchange:
Audrey Hepburn (to Cary Grant): "You know what's wrong with you?"
Cary Grant: "No. What?"
Audrey Hepburn: "Nothing."

So many of the best movies have Cary Grant in them:
"Arsenic And Old Lace"
"Bringing Up Baby"
"His Girl Friday"
"Notorious"
"Indiscreet"
"To Catch A Thief"
"Charade"

Something one keeps noticing in "Charade" -- both Hepburn and Grant have accents -- and they are very individual accents. Audrey H. was from (I think) Belgium (a unique accent) and Cary Grant's accent was all his own; read somewhere that he developed it on purpose, to replace his native Cockney accent, indicative of being in one of the lower ("low-ah") classes, in England.

That's called inventing oneself.
Kind of like the rappers of today, who give themselves names that are spelled creatively.

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