Yet the conversation, such as it was, revealed almost nothing. The only topics were location (at mall/at McDonald’s/at skate park) and mood. Everything is lame. Everyone is lame. Parents, friends, school, any activity. The jokes of the other texter are lame. Lord, is it any wonder that zombies are enjoying a resurgence in pop culture? This generation is the new walking dead, except they lumber away from brains, disdainful of anything that requires thought, passion, participation. He imagines his daughters vacant-eyed, arms stretched in front of them, tottering down the street, moaning: “No brains, no brains.” But still texting, all the while.

~ p. 220, The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman

Now, I don’t believe that all teenagers fall into this category, but I’ve certainly come across my share of them!

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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She thought it strange and wonderful that she had been given these to love. She thought it a blessing that she had loved them to the limit of her grief at parting with them, and that grief had only deepened and clarified her love. Since her first grief had brought her fully to birth and wakefulness in this world, an unstinting compassion had moved in her, like a live stream flowing deep underground, by which she knew herself and others and the world. It was her truest self, the stream always astir insider her that was at once pity and love, knowledge and faith, forgiveness, grief, ad joy. It made her fearful, and it made her unafraid.

~ from the short story “Fidelity,” published in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories by Wendell Berry

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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No individual life is an end in itself. One can live fully only by participating fully in the succession of the generations, in death as well as in life. Some would say (and I am one of them) that we can life fully only by making ourselves as answerable to the claims of eternity as to those of time. ~p. 8

Professionalism aspires to big answers that will make headlines, money, and promotions. It longs, moreover, for answers that are uniform and universal – the same styles, explanations, routines, tools, methods, models, beliefs, amusements, etc., for everybody everywhere. And like the corporations, whose appetite for “growth” seems now ungovernable, the institutions of government, education, and religion are now all too likely to measure their success in terms of size and number. All the institutions seem to have learned to imitate the organizational structures and to adopt the values and aims of industrial corporations. It is astonishing to realize how quickly and shamelessly doctors and lawyers and even college professors have taken to drumming up trade, and how readily hospitals, once run according to the laws of healing, mercy, and charity, have submitted to the laws of professionalism, industrial methodology, careerism, and profit. ~p. 15

The only science we have or can have is human science; it has human limits and is involved always with human ignorance and human error. It is a fact that the solutions invented or discovered by science have tended to lead to new problems or to become problems themselves. Scientists discovered how to use nuclear energy to solve problems, but any use of it is enormously dangerous to us all, and scientists have not discovered what to do with the waste. (They have not discovered what to do with old tires.) The availability of antibiotics leads to the overuse of antibiotics. And so on. Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions. We are learning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don’t know the whereabouts of our children. Science does not seem to be lighting the way; we seem rather to be leapfrogging into the dark along series of scientific solutions, which science is always eager to supply, and which it sometimes cannot supply. Sometimes it fails us infamously and fearfully. ~p. 32-33

Unlike the culture of the European Middle Ages, which honored the vocations of the learned teacher, the country parson, and the plowman as well as that of the knight, or the culture of Japan in the Edo period which ranked the farmer and the craftsman above the merchant, our own culture places an absolute premium upon various kinds of stardom. This degrades and impoverishes ordinary life, ordinary work, and ordinary experience. It depreciates and underpays the work of the primary producers of goods, and of the performers of all kinds of essential but unglamorous jobs and duties. The inevitable practical results are that most work is now poorly done; great cultural and natural resources are neglected, wasted, or abused; the land and its creatures are destroyed; and the citizenry is poorly taught, poorly governed, and poorly served.

Moreover, in education, to place so exclusive an emphasis upon “high achievement” is to lie to one’s students….The goal of education-as-job-training, which is now the dominant pedagogical idea, is a high professional salary. Young people are being told, “You can be anything you want to be.” Every student is given to understand that he or she is being prepared for “leadership.” All of this is a lie. Original discovery is not everything. You don’t, for instance, have to be an original discoverer in order to be a good science teacher. A high professional salary is not everything. You can’t be everything you want to be; nobody can. Everybody can’t be a leader; not everybody even wants to be. And these lies are not innocent. They lead to disappointment. They lead good young people to think that if they have an ordinary job, if they work with their hands, if they are farmers or housewives or mechanics or carpenters, they are no good. ~p. 57-58

Journalism and the electronic media, for example, routinely exhibit representations or disclosures of intimate emotion as objects of curiosity, as intrinsically interesting, or as proofs of artistic or journalistic courage. The perennial act of cutting-edge enterprise in reporting is to shove a camera or a microphone into the face of a grieving woman. But what is the qualitative difference between the man who cold-heartedly shoots another and the photographer who cold-heartedly photographs the corpse or the grieving widow? Are they not simply two parts of the same epidemic failure of imagination, which is to say a failure of compassion and of community life?

Such exposures do not make us free, and they do not increase our knowledge. They only compound human cruelty by a self-induced numbness to the suffering of others and to our common suffering.

To be indifferent to hurts given by one’s writing to its human subjects, which exactly parallels the scientific-industrial indifference to the suffering of animal or human subjects of exploitation or experimentation – to say “I don’t care, I don’t give a damn” – is a betrayal not only of the subject of writing, which is invariably our common life, our neighborhood, but also of imagination itself. It is a refusal to be compassionate, a denial of the vital link between imagination and compassion. How can such a betrayal not impair one’s ability to know the truth and to make art? ~p. 86-87

There is no reason, as I hope and believe, that science and religion might not live together in amity and peace, so long as they both acknowledge their real differences and each remains within its own competence. Religion, that is, should not attempt to dispute what science has actually proved; and science should not claim to know what it does not know, it should not confuse theory and knowledge, and it should disavow any claim on what is empirically unknowable. ~p. 98

Good artists are people who can stick things together so that they stay stuck. They know how to gather things into formal arrangements that are intelligible, memorable, and lasting. Good forms confer health upon the things that they gather together. Farms, families, and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make. ~p. 150

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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Mary Oliver was a new poet to me when I received Evidence: Poems in the mail from the Goodreads First Reads program. Oliver reminds me of two of my favorite poets, Luci Shaw and Wendell Berry. Nature speaks to her and her love of nature infuses her poetry. The lessons Oliver learns in nature inform her view of life, love, death, and the world around her.

Unlike some modern poets, Oliver isn’t in love with her own pen, and she doesn’t use overly frilly or incomprehensible language – she simply expresses what she feels. I enjoyed most of the poems in this book very much, but as with any collection – whether it is poetry or short stories or essays – there were also some that just didn’t appeal to me. Reading poetry is a personal experience – what speaks to one reader may be completely different than what speaks to another. So even though I only rated it 3 stars, I still recommend this collection – especially for those who are looking to experience some modern poetry that is simply, yet beautifully written.

Here is one of my favorites:

Then Bluebird Sang

Bluebird
slipped a little tremble
out of the triangle
of his mouth

and it hung in the air
until it reached my ear
like a froth or a frill
that Schumann

might have written in a dream.
Dear morning
you come
with so many angels of mercy

so wondrously disguised
in feathers, in leaves,
in the tongues of stones,
in the restless waters,

in the creep and the click
and the rustle
that greet me wherever I go
with their joyful cry: I’m still here, alive!

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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I took the kids to the park yesterday afternoon after school. It was gorgeous, sunny, temperature in the 80s. We stopped at the library on the way, and picked up 84, Charing Cross Road, which was waiting for me on the hold shelf.

As the kids played, I devoured this little book. I have had this book on my to-read list for years, but just never got around to it. I read a review recently (I’m sorry if you’re the blogger who reviewed it – please remind me, as I’d love to give you credit) that convinced me to click over to the library web site and put it on hold. I am so glad I did!

84, Charing Cross Road is an epistolary book, comprised of the correspondence between writer Helene Hanffe and the staff of a bookshop in London. She primarily corresponds with Frank Doel, the associate who finds the out-of-print books that she desires to feed her bok addiction. Various staff members at Marks & Co., as well as Doel’s wife Nora, also begin to write Ms. Hanff.

I was amazed at how emotionally involved I could get simply from reading these people’s letters. I found myself laughing, smiling, and at times tearing up over the letters. Not only are the letters witty and engaging, but they are full of sentiments that Ms. Hanff’s fellow book-lovers will find familiar.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me. ~ p. 7

I wish you hadn’t been over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.) ~ p. 27

WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS? this is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot.

I could just spit.

where is jan. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?

where is sir w. pen’s son that was giving everybody so much trouble with his Quaker notions? ONE mention does he get in this whole pseudo-book, and me from philadelphia.

i enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT. ~ p. 31*

I houseclean my books every spring and throw out those I’m never going to read again like I throw out clothes I’m never going to wear again. It shocks everybody. My friends are peculiar about books. They read all the best sellers, they get through them as fast as possible, I think they skip a lot. And they NEVER read anything a second time so they don’t remember a word of it a year later. But they are profoundly shocked to see me drop a book in the wastebasket or give it away. The way they look at it, you buy a book, you read it, you put it on the shelf, you never open it again for the rest of your life but YOU DON’T THROW IT OUT! NOT IF IT HAS A HARD COVER ON IT! Why not? I personally can’t think of anything less sacrosanct than a bad book or even a mediocre book. ~ p. 54

I just threw out a book somebody gave me, it was some slob’s version of what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell – only the slob didn’t LIVE in the time of Oliver Cromwell so how the hell does he know what it was like? Anybody wants to know what it was like to live in the time of Oliver Cromwell can flop on the sofa with Milton on his pro side and Walton on his con, and they’ll not only tell him what it was like, they’ll take him there. ~ p. 86

*All grammar and spelling are as originally appears in Ms. Hanff’s letters.

© CarrieK for BOOKS AND MOVIES, 2009. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: commonplace book, epistolary memoir, memoirs, reviews

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