Yummy, Kitsch-y Pop Culture

What's better than Glinda the Good Witch?
The thank you note to Glinda from Dorothy Gale.

Better than 007?
Top Secret Notes regarding the fates of 001 through 006.

Better than the B-52s?
The letter from their real estate agent regarding the efforts to sell the Love Shack.  "I'll be honest, this property is what's known as a 'tough sell' in our business." (p. 166)  PRICELESS.

Yes, the title is Dear Luke, We need to talk.  Dad Darth

Oooh, yummy, silly, pop culture at its ooey, gooey best.  

Not just talking the talk, but walking the Useful Walk

I just passed my 2nd Anniversary of writing The Page Turner.  You know how I remember now?  I volunteered at the local library used book sale again!

Here's my VERY FIRST BLOG POST, about that book sale.

And I did shop the sale again... a little... not too much.  Maybe it was because I made the (pretty minimal) effort to walk to the library and back for my volunteer shift last night, rather than drive.  

I watched a Ted Talk this week featuring Jeff Speck.  Among the many interesting points in his talk, Speck, author of The Walkable City (haven't read it yet, but want to!), says, "We've talked a long time about diet and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight impacts health.  But we've only started talking about inactivity.  Inactivity, born of our [car-dependent] landscape.  Inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there's no longer any such thing as 'the useful walk.'  [This is what] is driving our weight up." (TedTalks, Oct 2013)

The Dude and the Zen Master

The Dude Abides.

One September day, I read The Dude and the Zen Master in one sitting, about two hours, in the sun, in my back yard.  Seems like The Dude deserved the sunshine-y, high-quality treatment!

True confessions: I don't know much about Zen Buddhism, or even Buddhism in general. And this book isn't going to make you an expert either.  It might whet your appetite to know more, though, as it has for me.  What I do know seems to make excellent sense on how to be a decent human being.  How to live with yourself and others in a healthy way.

Little did I know that Jeff Bridges is a real perfectionist and pretty hard on himself.  I just always imagine him being just as "chill" as The Dude in The Big Lebowski.  Not so.  He worries a lot.  He worries about his performances as an actor, or as a public speaker.  Zen seems to help him escape some of this anxiety, that Zen is just "being" - just "showing up".  Kind of "don't sweat the small stuff."  I know that I can benefit being reminded of this!

"No honey, there's death in it."

Last weekend, before the big Blizzard hit, I stopped at the library to pick up a few movies and books.  I chanced to overhear the following between a girl (age 9 or so) & her father who were browsing DVDs in the children's room:

Girl: "Can we get Bridge to Terebithia?"

Dad: "No, it has death in it."

Cloud Atlas, or What is Reality?

I'm not gonna lie. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a difficult book for me to understand, and even more difficult to write about.  I don't struggle in this way very often.  Now, it could be the book, or my head all muddled still from various winter maladies necessitating lots of prescription medication.  Three cheers for albuterol!

Extremely philosophical and complex, but worth it.

Cloud Atlas is a series of six nested stories - each one linked to the previous... and the subsequent.  Taking place in the mid-19th century, with various stops along the way, ending (or pausing midway, depending on how you think about it) in a post-apocalytic era several hundred years hence.  Each story stops partway through itself beforing launching into the next.  And then they all collapse back again.  It's like paper dolls - all folded up - and then expanding.... and then collapsing back on themselves. Or two mirrors looking at each other, into infinity.  Or Matryoshka dolls. Or Mise-en-abyme.

Each tale is about power and control: colonial whites over native peoples.  Big corporations over the individuals who expose the truth.  Society's warehousing of the elderly.  Genuine humans over clones. 

Cloud Atlas is a climb from the past to the present and into the future. Zenith. The view from the top. Then a climb back down to the present, and back to the past.  Everything is connected.

One of the most difficult themes it tries to unpack is "real" history versus "virtual" history:

The workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic.  The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave.  Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction - in short, belief - grows ever "truer."  The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficut to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.  The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of the will.  Power seeks + is the right to "landscape" the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) (p. 392-393)

Consider: what is more "real" to you?  Thinking about the actual sinking of the Titanic... (an event that happened before all of us existed) or watching James Cameron's Titanic?  Which causes more emotion in you?  Which hits closer to home?  Which one makes you cry?  What is "real"-ness?

Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ explores this "real" versus "virtual" reality.  As he is hanging on the cross, Satan offers Jesus the choice to not die by the Crucifixion, but instead to live out an ordinary life.  He chooses the ordinary life, with marriage, a family, growing old.  Much later in this alternate life, he chances upon Paul preaching about a Risen Christ, the Savior.  This not-crucified-Jesus protests to Paul that he is none of those things... that it never happened... he never died, and never rose.  And Paul replies,

You see, you don't know how much people need God. You don't know how happy He can make them. He can make them happy to do anything. Make them happy to die, and they'll die, all for the sake of Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus of Nazareth. The Son of God. The Messiah. Not you. Not for your sake. You know, I'm glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful [emphasis mine]. 

In this alternate reality, Jesus of Nazareth the myth is the only story, but it has a tremendous power nonetheless, because others are caught up in Paul's faith. He believes it so MUCH, it must be TRUE!  Even today, I have heard theologians discuss that St. Paul's development and expansion of the message of Christianity, his impact on the development of actual Christianity, the way it took hold, especially among Gentiles, is nearly equal to the ministry of Christ himself.

I know, I sound like a heretic.  Stay with me.

Notice: spoiler alert!

Sonmi-451, the "fabricant" (clone) in Nea So Copros (futuristic Korea), ultimately is not the messiah she appears to be.  She is a cog in the wheel, colluding with the power structure, Unanimity, to "generate the show trial of the decade." (p. 348)  When asked why Sonmi would cooperate in such a conspiracy, she responds,

We see a game beyond the endgame.  I refer to my Declarations [her manifesto], Archivist.  Media has flooded Nea So Copros with my Catechisms.  Every schoolchild in corpocracy knows my twelve "blasphemies" now.  My guards tell me there is even talk of a statewide "Vigilance Day" against fabricants [clones] who show signs of the Declarations.  My ideas have been reproduced a billionfold. (p. 349) 

Hundreds of years after the "life" of Sonmi, she is worshipped as a goddess and savior.

Be careful of the truth you choose to believe as gospel.

I think I was born for this

Sunday night I was contacted by City Councilor Al Livingston, asking if I would be willing to serve on the Public Library Advisory Board.  I was so surprised, it took my breath away!  What an honor.  Of all the ways that I could spend my volunteer time, this might be my very best, favorite way.

I was invited to make a few remarks at Council session last night, as part of my appointment and "election."




My remarks just scratch the surface of what libraries mean to me:

My brain had to work so hard, it made my hair hurt.....

Abandon ye hope, all who enter here.

I don’t know what came over me.  Maybe it was the picture of Moby Dick on the front that intrigued me.  But in the last few weeks I’ve worked my way (emphasis on WORK) through All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.  

Hold all hate mail til the end.



If you have to use post-it flags to read a book,
and you're not reading it for class,
you might be crazy....

 I'd like to say, "here's the whole thing in a nutshell," but there's no nutshell here.  It's a big, brain-wrenching book saying that “an unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and yet our culture offers us no clear way to choose" (book jacket). That “the central challenge of the contemporary world… is not just that we don’t know how to live meaningful lives, it’s that we don’t even seem to be able to focus for very long on the question” (p. 30). That in our 21^st century lives we’re stuck in a depressing existential nihilism (don’t worry, I had to look it up too) where nothing has meaning, no choice is better than any other choice (just look up at the menu at Starbucks and you'll see what I mean).

Whirlwind tour through All Things Shining: