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America's Great Outdoors

Source:50shades-of-impregnation

“I come from a working-class family,” says the Kirkcaldy, Scotland-born McDermid. “There was no money for books, but my parents understood the value of education, the value of words. My dad was a great Robert Burns man, and when I was six we moved house to live opposite the central library. That changed my life: I had access to the entirety of the children’s library and I basically read my way round it.” Once she’d run out of books in that section, the progressively inquisitive McDermid absconded with her mum’s library card, procuring adult reading material under the aegis of running reading errands for her ‘sick mother.’ “I then read my way right round the crime section,” she recalls, “and became imprinted with the idea that an adult novel had to have a dead body in it.” Because it was Presbyterian Scotland in the 1960s, says McDermid, you could take out four books at a time, but two of them had to be nonfiction. “There was that sense that you had to improve yourself. So I read lots of things that might not otherwise have crossed my horizon: poetry and drama, for example, came under non-fiction. And I started to do what people do who become infected with words: I started making stuff up and writing things, writing stories. Most of my teens I spent writing song lyrics and bad poetry.” While songsters Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were strong influences, so was poet Robert Browning. “I liked his dramatic monologues,” McDermid explains. “I always liked the Scottish ballad tradition, the idea of telling stories in songs, so what attracted me were Browning’s dramatic monologues that told stories in poems. I think I’m pretty well addicted to the narrative form: I like things that have a beginning, a middle and an end—though not necessarily in that order.”

http://crimereads.com/val-mcdermid-it-doesnt-get-easier-it-gets-harder/

image source: pagewoman Daisies, Cushendall, Antrim, Northern Ireland

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery. However many of life’s large, captivating principles and small, captivating details we may explore, unpuzzle, and learn by heart, there will still be vast unknown realms to lure us. If uncertainty is the essence of romance, there will always be enough uncertainty to make life sizzle and renew our sense of wonder. It bothers some people that no matter how passionately they may delve, the universe remains inscrutable. “For my part,” Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom ones curiosity like a high-spirited thorough-bred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses image source: jalouise

shinypizzakid

“So there - the eagerness to see you, I do not expect, I am your meeting place; I am not your shortcoming because no heartbeat is mistaken - For the words we observed, was felt deeper and deeper as we go along together. - And along with the clouds, you will fly, swim the sea, you will land into my arms; I will wait for your voice to call me, on these lips gradually melting, like a candle that is kissed with fire. - I do not understand a heart that swells in red; And the tears that dripped idly while I am burning; Love is deliberately denied, even if it is hungrily desired. - Destiny is strictly uncompromising on the very time I need you; but I must prove still that I love you.”

— Chuck Akot : source image: heart-petals

Source tachy on beam

Every walk is a sort of crusade,”Thoreau wrote in his manifesto for the spirit of sauntering. And who hasn’t walked — in the silence of a winter forest, amid the orchestra of birds and insects in a summer field, across the urban jungle of a bustling city — to conquer some territory of their interior world? Artist Maira Kalman sees walking as indispensable inspiration: “I walk everywhere in the city. Any city. You see everything you need to see for a lifetime. Every emotion. Every condition. Every fashion. Every glory.” For Rebecca Solnit, walking “wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.”

Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. -- Scottish writer Kenneth Grahame

#http://brainpickings.org/2018/01/10/kenneth-grahame-the-fellow-that-goes-alone

Annotation can be an action of reverence. Ever since, it’s been impossible for me to read a book, or analyze a poem, or follow the routes of an essay without underlining, circling, drawing arrows, making notes in the margins.

[...] recognize annotations as a conversation with words, a way to meander among letters and sentences, they start to enjoy the practice. There’s a kinesthetic release to letting your pen or pencil move, mark your territory, voice your questions. It builds reading confidence; it helps us understand how literature is made—because it puts us there among the phrases.

Annotate to appreciate; annotate to understand. Move that pencil within the sentences. Cover the margins. Let your ideas bloom from what has already been created. Allow annotation to help you remember how words can sing: you might not provide the chorus, but to listen and learn is also divine. - Nick Ripatrazone

#SOMETIMES THE BEST WAY TO READ IS TO MARK UP THE BOOK

[...] Jamison expanded on this aspect of her memoir: “Part of what was so fascinating and a little hard to metabolize at first, for me, about the storytelling culture in recovery is [that] . . . you don’t have to have lived anything exceptional in order for your story to be useful. It’s actually the opposite that has to be true. We all have to accept that our stories are unexceptional in some way. It’s the unexceptionality that makes them worth sharing.” - Larissa Pham, The Bottomless Generosity of the Writer’s Memoir

source image: heart-petals

Inside the reading room, it is cold and quiet as a church. Students and researchers bow their heads over manuscripts propped up on cushioned, red-velvet bookstands designed to protect delicate spines and pages, some instructed to wear white cotton gloves when handling certain materials. Pages turn gently with a palpable hush, the silence akin to reverence. What else could bring someone to trace the paper trails left by years of textural ephemera—the notes and to-do-lists and false starts, aborted poems and rough drafts of prose, memos and correspondence that are absent from a finished work—while the summer burned away outside, except for love, and it’s kissing-cousin, obsession? [...]

Of all the ways to remember Sam Shepard—his long cross-disciplinary career; the way he reimagined the American West as a landscape of longing, isolation and abandonment; his handsome face like a cowboy in a movie with those steel-blue eyes and two lines between his brows as if he’d been staring into the sun too long—it seems important to note that he was a man who knew the names of trees and varieties of lilies. In his hand, they read something like a poem: Citronella, Scarlet Emperor, Thunderbolt, Golden Sunburst, Silver Stain.

I thought often of that scene in the long lonesome months that followed. The way they articulated how love can be irreparably ruined not only by lack but also by excess, and understood how jealousy and possession can give way to violence (and are, perhaps, their own forms of aggression). I imagined I had written those words, and imagined they were written for me. I used to make long speeches to you after you left, I thought, remembering Jane talking to Travis through the glass. Every man has your voice, I said in my mind to the one who had left me. But perhaps what I was recalling was not so much the movie or my own recent heartache, but an old feeling, a memory of a memory, its seed buried deep within my own origin story. [...]

We say art mirrors life because where else does art come from except lived experience, imagination, and the desire to give those events a shape and coherence they may have lacked? A blank page is our only tabula rasa, and it offers us the hope of a second-chance—that here, we might get it right this time. We can write our way back towards the things we have lost and hold them again for just long enough to let them go.

https://lithub.com/well-always-have-paris-my-time-in-texas-with-sam-shepards-notebooks/

image source: mycountryliving

My romantic obsession with books started young, I think my mother gave me The Three Musketeers during a particularly bad round of bronchitis when I was nine, and once the dashing D’Artagnan swaggered into my life, I knew my only heroes would be fictional and I subsequently fell in love with the main character of almost every book I read. The classics were my delight, I loved corsets and hansom cabs, stories of honor and romance where all the heroines were virgins like myself and everyone either paired up in the end or died. While my peers hung posters of Leonardo DiCaprio or the Backstreet Boys, I daydreamed about Mr. Darcy and Daniel Deronda, and Raskolnikov, brushing my hair with a boar bristle brush and reading by candlelight late into the night. But the one who stood above all others was Sherlock Holmes. Tall, dark, thin, brilliant, antisocial, vain, self-destructive—he was everything my teen heart wanted in a man, and increasingly everything I wanted to be myself, and I lost whole evenings to imagining the most lurid romantic fantasies.

“But he isn’t real,” my friends would argue, and I found it hard to articulate that actually the books that I read seemed more real, more vibrant, more connected to my emotional life than the world around me. The novels I read were my whole life, and I wept, and thrilled to and lusted for those characters who filled my mind and kept me company, an otherwise, painfully shy, socially inept, dreamy young woman. I dated a few men here and there, but my heart remained untouched. No one was worthy. [...]

Oh this unbelievable man! His salt and pepper hair crested back from a widows peak and he smelled deliciously of some old fashioned cologne—vetiver or bay rum—like expensive sheets and masculine sophistication. All the boys I had known smelled of Tide and Irish Spring. He showed me pictures of himself in a deerstalker cap. He made yearly pilgrimages to Reichenbach Falls, infamous site of Holmes’ near death fall and even more wonderful, he did it in full Victorian costume. I told him about the chest of antique corsets and petticoats I kept under my bed. He told me he had made a full, accurate recreation of Homes’ study in his house, I told him about the “Rache” on my wall. He was only in New York for the weekend, to attend the Baker Street Irregulars annual banquet, but he had to see me again. And then he said the words that made me feel like everything in my life had been moving towards this one moment. “You are my very own Irene Adler, there was only one woman for Holmes and you are clearly the only woman for me.” All my past fantasies lined up with the real flesh and blood man standing in front of me, like focusing the two side of an old fashion stereopticon and all my waiting had been worth it and I agreed to meet him the next night. [...]

I was heartbroken, but I found I still didn’t want to let go of the hope that this could somehow be what I wanted. I had wanted it for so long. When I told my friends, no one could believe the story. “You found the perfect guy for you,” and I agreed. Against all possible odds, I had found that man who knew the secret to the “Rache” on my wall, but my stomach felt cold and hard at the thought. He went back to France and sent me long passionate emails. He was going to come back. He was going to move across the ocean and marry me—the girl of his dreams. They were often addressed to “Irene” and I found I didn’t like it quite so much. He sent pictures of his living room, the one he had transformed to mimic Holmes study, and it looked shabby and cluttered and had strange homemade mannequins posed in it that kind of looked like dead bodies. I started to have reservations. I slowly began to put aside the books I had loved so much and started trying to read new fiction, pleasantly surprised at how much there was in it to relish and identify with. Eventually I stopped responding to the emails. I scrubbed the coagulated writing from my wall where it left only a faint brown stain. I let friends set me up and I asked the men I went out with about their lives and thoughts. Sometimes I found unexpected points of connection. I was still shy, and still liked to daydream but I began, tentatively to test out the waters of the real world, one that always seemed so alien and threatening.

http://crimereads.com/searching-for-a-soul-mate-must-love-sherlock-holmes/

#source: nehmesis

Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my travels and my dreams. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

I have no talent. I write poems for myself, to think things through, that’s all.

—Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet

#First Little Free Library Hudson Wisconsin 2012

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