mari-beta

Mariana's Internet Commonplace Notebook

[incidentalcomics]

Blank Page Variations

Everywhere I look, I see the blank page. 

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If I dismiss the ordinary - waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life

Dani Shapiro in Still Writting

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I never share what I think until I see what I write

Carol Loomis interview with Longform Podcast. Timestamp -56:41

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Knowing that everything comes to an end is the gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuos present, and imagine that future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own passing. Pain is endless pain.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff (page 230)

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Another one from the ride with dad. The Hudson River is on the background. #nature #hudsonriver #tractor #upstateny (at Thurman Train Station)

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Captured on the motorcycle trip with my dad today. So much fun. I feel most at home among mountains, lakes, and rivers. #narure #upstateny (at Big Brook)

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Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide.

This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff

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First Sentences: Small Memories by Jose Saramago

“The village is called Azinhaga and has, so to speak, been where it is since the dawn of nationhood (it had a charter as early as the thirteenth century), but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that passes right by it (and has done, I imagine, since the world was created) and which, as far as I know, has never changed direction, although it has overflowed its banks on innumerable occasions.”

The first sentence in Jose Saramago’s book Small Memories

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But the act of purchase is actually only a prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it —which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren

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Sunday morning cup of cappuccino with a side of reading.

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Book Recommendations from Books: Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser - Ch. 10

I am starting a series where I document book recommendations that I find through books I am reading. This list of books are all memoirs recommended by William Zinsser in chapeter 10 of his book Writing About Your life.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

The Liar's Club by Mary Karr

An American Childhood by Anne Dillard

Growing Up by Russell Baker

Walden by Thoreau

Poets in their Youth by Eileen Simpson

Orphans by Eileen Simpson

Reversals  by Eileen Simpson

Family by Ian Frazier

Colored People by Henry Louis Gate Jr.

The Road from the Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison

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Betancourt Ruiz family around the 1920′s in Venezuela. My grandfather, Hector Betancourt, is the boy on the right.

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Writers are the custodians of memory, and memories have a way of dying with their owner. One of the saddest sentences I know is "I wish I had asked my mother about that"

Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser

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A story is like life itself; in life, we do not expect to understand events as they occur, at least with total clarity, but looking back on them, we do understand.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren

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When I visited my dad at his office, Delida, one of his employees, used to give me stacks of white and green paper to draw on. I never questioned why it had holes on the side and why it was green and white. I just liked to practice my signature and calligraphy on the muted green lines and rip off the side strips to make bracelets.

Through the magic of Google and Wikipedia I just learned that this type of paper is called Continuos Stationary.

Continuous stationery (UK) or continuous form paper (USA) is paper which is designed for use with dot-matrix and line printers with appropriate paper-feed mechanisms. Other names for continuous stationery include fan-fold paper, sprocket feed paper, burst paper, tractor-feed paper, and pin feed paper. It can be single-ply (usually woodfree uncoated paper) or multi-ply (either with carbon paper between the paper layers, or multiple layers of carbonless copy paper).

source: Wikipedia

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Pico Iyer — The Art of Stillness

Pico Iyer is one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the "inner world" — in himself and in the 21st century world at large. In this intimate conversation, we explore the discoveries he's making and his practice of "the art of stillness.”

Anybody who travels knows that you’re not doing so in order to move around; you are traveling in order to be moved. And really, what you are seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you are sleep walking through your daily life

Timestamp - 08:17

When I heard how Pico defined travel I got goosebumps and started nodding my head. It is the most accurate description of the experience of traveling that I have heard.

[marianabeta]

It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren