Little Notebooks

Scribblings about books, writing, film, television, etc. More at littlenotebooks.org.

[littlenotebooks]

“...People do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves.”

- Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk 

Photo credit: Digital Photo Blog 

[littlenotebooks]

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

Lorrie Moore

A new short story collection from Lorrie Moore,Bark, is coming out on Feb. 25! Cause for celebration!

[littlenotebooks]

"Part of the beauty of love was that you didn't need to explain it to anyone else."

- Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings (2013)

[littlenotebooks]

“Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.” 

- Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (2013)

Photo: Saul Leiter

[littlenotebooks]

Claire Denis' Bastards (2013), a noir-inspired drama about a family whose secrets and entanglements invoke the horror of Greek tragedy, contains images so unsettling that they linger long after the credits roll.

[littlenotebooks]

"The past seemed to leak into the present, as if there were a fault somewhere. Or was it the future spilling into the past...Time was out of joint, that was for certain."

 - Life After Life (2013), by Kate Atkinson

Photo: Saul Leiter

[littlenotebooks]

“Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.” 

- The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman (2013)

      Reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane was like reading a Madeleine L'Engle book for the first time: the known gives way to something unutterably mysterious and magical. Gaiman's latest novel takes off when a young boy discovers that a stranger's suicide has led to a monstrous force threatening to upend his world. At just under 200 pages, The Ocean is a compact book, but it has the sweep and resonance of a classical epic.

[littlenotebooks]

Photo: Saul Leiter

[littlenotebooks]

"Seeing is a neglected enterprise."

- Saul Leiter

Photo: Saul Leiter

[littlenotebooks]

Saul Leiter's Kodachrome portraits of New York streets in the '50s and '60s are striking for his use of muted bursts of color and focus. His photographs are beautifully composed but give the impression of spontaneity, as if they were moments documented purely by chance.

Photo: Saul Leiter

[littlenotebooks]

"Pursue the authentic -- decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart."

- "Advice to Myself", from Original Fire: New and Selected Poems, by Louise Erdrich

Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

[littlenotebooks]

Dream awake.

Photo: Jee Young Lee (mymodernmet.com)

[littlenotebooks]

Happy Tenth of December! In honor of George Saunders' book of the same name, here's a wonderful sentence -- just one of many, many wonderful sentences -- from "Tenth of December":

"They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone's affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing..."

- Tenth of December, George Saunders

Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

[littlenotebooks]

"We need narrative like we need space-time; it's a built-in thing."

- "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," David Foster Wallace

Photo: Draft of The Pale King (Harry Ransom Center)

[littlenotebooks]

"The good news is that for most of us, grief is not overwhelming or unending. As frightening as the pain of loss can be, most of us are resilient."

- From "The Secret Life of Grief," by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic)

What an incredibly moving and lovely story about a son reflecting on his mother's death and reconsidering some accepted conceptions about the grieving process.

Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans

[littlenotebooks]

"Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up.  Speed it along.  Start right now."

- George Saunders

Photo: Scattered Light, installation by Jim Campbell (Credit: Bon Expose)

[littlenotebooks]

"Between the hammers our heart

endures, just as the tongue does

between the the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise."

- From Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo: Fireflies on the Water, Yayoi Kusama