Refresh

Mumford and Sons playing The Cave at Treadwell's Bookshop.
Magical.

Find the good.  It's all around you.  Find it, showcase it, and you'll start believing in it.

--Jesse Owens

After Combat

From Sunday Times, a piece by James Dao:

Specialist Hayes, undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, visited his platoon mates at Fort Drum.  To celebrate, they drank Guinness from his prosthetic leg.

Interview with David Sedaris

I did not conduct the interview.
I read it.
Sarah Lyall writes:

Mr. Sedaris has no cellphone; his land line does not have call waiting. (“Nobody ever calls me,” he said at the end of the afternoon. “The phone hasn’t rung once,” which was true.) He neither has nor wants an e-mail address.

He stays away from the Internet — “You’ll lose a whole year on the Internet, just in terms of looking things up,” he warned — and was unnerved when he once idly typed in the name of the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Terry Gross, and a bunch of critical commentary came up. “I don’t even want to know what anybody thinks about Terry Gross,” he said.

In Paris, he said, he has just two friends — one is a journalist, the other a tour guide from Alabama — but he doesn’t mind: “Hugh has a lot of friends, and I can sometimes use his friends.”

Found

A pink post-it fell out of a newly purchased book.
In blue ink, it read:

You are wonderful.

You are beautiful.

You are smart, funny, and unique.

And you have great hair.

for some reason

The Life of a Day  

 Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

---Tom Hennen

Problem

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

                    --Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

The Hut

where Roald Doll wrote.

A room of one's own is no joke.  Virginia Woolf and other writers sanctuaries are pictured at re-nest

This is where online rug shopping takes me: to idyllic huts in English countryside.
It seems my floor shall remain bare quite awhile longer.  

On Cookbooks

Cooks are a bossy lot. I suppose they have to be, playing with fire and throwing knives around and all that. I've noticed a direct correlation between the gorgeousness of a photo and the sternness of tone, as if the cook knows you are going to fail at the gefuellte tauben (that's stuffed pigeons to you and me) and is preparing a case of "I told you so." The only book exempt from this principle is Julia Child's The Way to Cook.  Who else tells you how to pronounce quiche (keesh) and how to skip the pesky crust preparation when making one?  I believe she loved eggs as much as I do. 

           ----Dominique Browning

Yes Marie Yes

I love the Tiny Desk Concerts that NPR hosts.  This one in particular made me laugh out loud because:

1. the woman is playing a jawbone.  as her instrument.  and
2. the bass, at 1:29, completely breaks, and the bass player just laughs and thumps along.

What else can you do when your instrument breaks during a live performance?
Play the nearest jawbone, I reckon.

Everyone

There are no chosen individuals.  Everyone is chosen, if instead of asking, "What am I doing here," people would simply resolve to do anything that sparks enthusiasm in their heart.          

           --Paulo Coelho