Literary Quote

"If there was any word of comfort that would be a solace to her in her dying hour, and only I possessed it, I wouldn't part with it for Life itself."

David Copperfield-Charles Dickens

Literary Pick (*)

Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
(Cookie Mueller)

Quote of the Day

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

— Albert Einstein

Life in the Fun Lane

Spotlight On Design

Literary Pick (****)

The Unruly Life of Woody Allen: A Biography
(Marion Meade)

Quote of the Day

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have."
— Barry Goldwater

A Black Pepper

Slipcover Your Life

Fabulous K

Literary Pick (***)

The Bell Jar  

-Sylvia Plath

Quote of the Day

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literary Pick (****)

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle 

-Haruki Murakami

Murakami is an amazing writer. Each chapter of this book was very indulging. Oddly enough Murakami possesses a feminine quality in his work, a sensitivity in the character of Toru Okada that I really appreciated coming from a male writer. A modern quality in the relationship between him and Kumiko (his wife), of which I can't quite put my finger on that one rarely finds from other male writers when describing romantic relationships.
I couldn't help compare this book with Marquez's 100 years of Solitude due of the magical realism aspects of both works. The difference between the two is that Marquez's stories all ended seamlessly with viable explanations (as much as you can explain things in the world of magical realism) of some sort to these odd stories and characters. However, Murakami failed to do that. I am open to this particular genre of writing, but things still need to make sense to an acceptable degree. There were just too many unanswered questions in the "Wind-up Bird chronicle". Some events towards the end of the story even seemed a bit convenient and left unexplained.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading this book and am happy I did. I'm looking forward to reading more works by Murakami.

Quote of the Day

"Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight."

— Phyllis Diller

Sound of the Moment

Philadelphia (Neil Young)
-Click here-

Sometimes I think that I know

What love's all about

And when I see the light

I know I'll be all right.

I've got my friends in the world,

I had my friends

When we were boys and girls

And the secrets came unfurled.

City of brotherly love

Place I call home

Don't turn your back on me

I don't want to be alone

Love lasts forever.

Someone is talking to me,

Calling my name

Tell me I'm not to blame

I won't be ashamed of love.

Philadelphia,

City of brotherly love.

Brotherly love.

Sometimes I think that I know

What love's all about

And when I see the light

I know I'll be all right.

Philadelphia.

Literary Pick (*)

The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)

Quote of the Day

"Kiss me and you'll see how important I am."

— Sylvia Plath

Literary Pick (***)

It's Always Something (Gilda Radner)

I feel guilty not giving this a 4 or 5 star review because I love Gilda so much. I thought she was hysterical. It wasn't one of the best written biographies, but I couldn't put the book down either. It was interesting to read about her struggle with cancer and her never-ending relapses. She was one amazingly strong person. I know that's what people usually say to describe other people, but you should read this bio so you know what I mean. She lived through one stroke of bad luck after another. I don't even know where she got her strength from. Kudos to her husband Gene for sticking by her side. What a shame how she finally ended up dying. Life can be so cruel sometimes.

I read the 20th "newly revised" anniversary edition with a forward by Alan Zweibel, and I wonder why they didn't give the reader an update on her death later on. Fortunately I had already found out on the internet some months back, but they should definitely add that in future revisions.

We still love you Gilda!!

Lovely Clusters

Literary Pick (****)

Grapefruit  

-Yoko Ono

Recipe

Potato Kugel

Put peeled potatoes through a food mill and add a little dry government issue flour and salt. Grease a mold or ovenproof dish with paraffin or stearin and bake for 2 1/2 hours. Serve with rotten strawberry compote. (Onions not available. Nor oil for mold or dough!)

-Diary of a Young Girl

Art of the Day

Oedipus Cursing His Son, Polynices (Henry Fuseli)

Henry Fuseli's dramatic painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786, depicts the tense climax of Oedipus at Colonus, a drama by Sophocles. In that ancient Greek tragedy, King Oedipus had gone into self-imposed exile at Colonus, a town near Athens, after discovering to his horror that, unwittingly, he had murdered his father and married his own mother. Oedipus, having blinded himself in remorse, is depicted here with blood-red eyes in a thick, scabby paint—the opposite of the normal use of smooth, clear textures for eyes.

The kneeling Polynices, one of Oedipus’ two sons, hopes to win his father's favor over his brother, who had usurped the throne. Outraged at both his unfaithful boys, Oedipus condemns them to die in battle by each other's hand. The blind king extends his powerful arms to curse them, while Polynices recoils as if struck a painful blow. Standing between her father and brother, Antigone seeks reconciliation. In contrast to Antigone’s strength of will, her weeping sister, Ismene, personifies sorrow.

Fuseli, a Swiss clergyman, became a classical scholar before studying art in Rome. After immigrating to London in 1780, Fuseli was elected the Royal Academy’s professor of painting.

-NGA

Literary Pick (*****)

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

I'm really surprised by the number of people who thought this book was boring.
I could understand how an adult man might find the musings of a young girl rather dull, but how can people in general not find this journal utterly fascinating? Here is a teenage girl who up until the end wrote with the same emotional consistency as when she began. Whoever thinks this books is boring, is because they simply fail to realize, or even imagine the conditions in which this diary was written. To think how this young girls personal life continued beyond the details of the war is rather remarkable.
What would anyone else have written about in their diary as young boy or girl in the same predicament as the Franks?
Anne is surprisingly strong and mature for her age, impressively intelligent, and although there was a World War going on, her own particular world never abated. Her personal life was just as important, if not necessary in order for her to survive the day to day living conditions at the Annex.
Yes, there were brief moments of panic, but she had to live life, even if her living space was limited. She carried on as if being in hiding was a mere temporary inconvenience. She wasn't going to let that rob of her of her right to claim her passage into womanhood..her God given right to experience puberty, moodiness, emotions, and even love.

Here I thought I was about to read the semi-interesting scribbles of a blooming young lady, with ambiguous references to the war. But there is nothing cryptic about her diary. She shoots straight from the hip in this incredibly and shockingly honest account of what life was like for her and her family living in hiding during the WW. It's not what I expected. I expected something rather tame, but it's far from it. This young girl was very interesting and quite special.

You can't read this journal and think it's just an ordinary diary of a young girl, because it's not. Anne's diary is a representation of how other Jewish families lived and coped during the Nazi war. That's really powerful. Many people don't realize how fortunate we are (thanks to Anne Frank, her Father Otto Frank and Miep Gies) to have some insight on how it must have been for the Jews to coexist this way. Because of Anne, we can have some sort of idea of how it was like to live under floorboards, in between walls, and behind bookshelves. This diary humanizes and brings back to life the Jewish people who mysteriously disappeared but who had not yet died.
I love this diary and I'm so grateful to have read it.


It must have been extremely difficult for her father Otto Frank, to read his daughters diary after her death.

Quote of the Day

To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast should I adore? What holy image attack? What hearts break? What lies uphold? In what blood tread?

—A Season in Hell, Rimbaud

Lovers of the Century

Maria Callas and Aristo

Literary Pick (***)

Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)

Sound of the Moment

Y Como es el (Jose Luis Perales)
-Click here-

Mirandote a los ojos, juraria

que tienes algo nuevo que contarme

empieza ya mujer, no tengas miedo

quiza para manana sea tarde

quiza para manana sea tarde

y como es el?, en que lugar es enamoro de ti?

de donde es?, a que dedica el tiempo libre?

preguntale, por que a robado un trozo de mi vida

es un ladron, que me a robado todo

X2

Arregla te mujer, se te hace tarde

y llevate el paragas por si llueve

el te estara esperando para amarte

y yo estare celoso de perderte

y abrigate, te sienta bien ese vestido gris

sonriete, que no sospeche que has llorado

y dejame, que vaya preparando mi equipaje

perdoname, si te hago otra pregunta

y como es el?, en que lugar es enamoro de ti?

de donde es?, a que dedica el tiempo libre?

preguntale, por que a robado un trozo de mi vida

es un ladron, que me a robado todo

From: http://lyricstranslate.com

Honor Spotlight

 

Gilda Radner
(June 28, 1946 - May 20, 1989) was an American comedienne and actress.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Radner attended the University of Michigan as a drama major and moved to Toronto, Canada. Her first professional stage experience was a Toronto production of Godspell following which she joined the Toronto Second City comedy troupe. She first rose to widespread fame as one of the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" on Saturday Night Live. (She was the first actor cast for the show.) On that show from 1975 to 1980 she created such characters as Roseanne Rosannadanna, Baba Wawa, and Emily Litella. She had a knack for combining extreme physical comedy with soft, caring characters that were easy to love. (There is a legend that Radner broke several ribs during one comedy sketch that required her to slam herself against a door repeatedly, but the next day she went on as scheduled.)

After leaving Saturday Night Live, Radner appeared on Broadway in a successful one-woman show that featured racier material, such as the humorous song "Talk Dirty to the Animals". This show was captured on film in 1981 as Gilda Live! and co-starred Paul Shaffer and Don Novello.

In the late 1980s, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Even with the support of her second husband, actor Gene Wilder, (she had previously been married to Saturday Night Live band leader G.E. Smith,) she suffered extreme pain (physical and emotional) as a chemotherapy patient. Eventually she was told she had gone into remission, and she wrote a memoir about her life and struggle with the illness, called It's Always Something. The book was written by Radner in tribute to cancer sufferers everywhere, and she used humor to overcome tragedy and pain. The book's title came from a common catch-phrase from her Saturday Night Live character Roseanne Rosannadanna, who would often quote an elderly relative by saying "My Uncle used to say...it's always something! If it's not one thing, it's something else!"

In 1989 doctors did a more detailed examination and discovered that Radner's cancerous cells had not all been removed and had spread to other areas of the body. She died in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, in 1989, where she had been admitted for a CAT scan. She was given a sedative and passed into a coma. After three days, she died without regaining consciousness but with Wilder at her side.

Wilder has since established the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates and run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before a Congressional committee that her condition was misdiagnosed and that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would have found numerous cases of ovarian cancer and might have attacked the disease earlier.

Wilder has continued his involvement in both detection and treatment of ovarian cancer. In tribute to Radner, Gilda's Club was founded. It is a place where cancer sufferers can go to be around other people in the same situation and embrace one another in life. It grew to multiple locations across the country.

-Bio Base

Quote of the Day

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

— Mark Twain

Instruction

HIDE-AND-SEEK-PIECE

Hide until everybody goes home.

Hide until everybody forgets about you.

Hide until everybody dies.

1964 spring

Yoko Ono

Cultural News

the 20th anniversary of a photograph. It's a very dramatic photo, even though, at first glance, it's mostly dark and seems to show nothing at all.

But if you look closely, you can see a tiny speck of light. That speck is the Earth, seen from very, very, very far away.

Two decades ago, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck became the first person to ever see that speck, sitting in front of a computer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California. "I was all alone, actually, that afternoon, in my office," she recalls.

Her office was dark. The window shades were drawn. She was searching through a database of images sent home by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away. "I knew the data was coming back," she says, "and I wanted to see how it had turned out."

Finally, she found it.

"It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three pixels big," she says. "So not very large."

But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.

What's more, an accidental reflection off the spacecraft made it look as though the tiny speck was being lit up by a glowing beam of light. "You know, I still get chills down my back," says Hansen-Koharcheck. "Because here was our planet, bathed in this ray of light, and it just looked incredibly special."

And yet, if you weren't searching for it, that special little speck would be almost invisible. The Apollo astronauts had taken photos that showed the Earth as a big blue marble, swirling with clouds and continents. But this picture showed the smallness of Earth in the vastness of space.

A New Perspective On The Planet

The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Robert Poole, a historian at the University of Cumbria in the United Kingdom who wrote a book on images of Earth from space called Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, says this particular photo shows what an extraterrestrial might see as it approached our solar system.

"This is not our view. We've managed to go out and get the view that somebody else might have, whereas the early Apollo pictures of the blue marble were our own view of Earth," Poole says. "Like most people, I saw it in the newspaper not long after it was taken and kind of intellectually I thought, 'This is amazing!'"

A Photo That Almost Didn't Happen

Pictures like this are still few and far between. They are not exactly easy to take. In fact, we almost didn't get this one. Carl Sagan lobbied for it early in the Voyager 1 mission. But others objected that taking it might fry the spacecraft's camera. That's because the Earth is so close to our extremely bright Sun. "There was a reluctance to take any kind of risk when we would point back towards the Sun, we didn't want to accidentally damage the cameras in any way," says Hansen-Koharcheck.

"Oh, there was a lot of debate as to what its value would be," recalls Edward Stone, who was — and still is — the chief scientist for the Voyager mission. "It was not a scientific image. It was really, I think, an image to sort of declare that here, for the first time we could take such an image, and second of all it provided a new perspective of Earth and its place in our solar neighborhood."

But the idea was shelved for years, as Voyager 1 flew through the solar system and did its science, sending images back from Saturn and Jupiter.

In 1989, the mission was winding down — some staff was going to leave. And Sagan made a last-minute request to please, please, take this unique photo before the opportunity disappeared forever. The decision went to the top levels of NASA "because it was going to extend the mission in terms of imaging capability for an additional six months or so and that of course did cost money," explains Stone.

"I did get a visit from Carl Sagan. We talked about a lot of things. And somewhere in that conversation he mentioned this idea," recalls the then-head of NASA, retired Vice Admiral Richard Truly. "I thought, heck, with Voyager so far away, if it could turn around and take a picture of the different planets including the Earth, that that would really be cool. And so I was a great advocate of it, although I can't take any credit for it."

In 1990, late on February 13 — or on Valentine's Day, in the time zone used by the Voyager 1 team — the spacecraft turned its cameras to Earth.

A Relatively Tiny Object In The Vastness Of Space

Later, the image was released to the world to great fanfare. But it never really captured the popular imagination like the famous Apollo images.

"I think it was hard, it's still hard, to get really your head around the fact that our solar system is so immense, compared to Earth," says Stone.

To get the full impact of this photo, Stone says, you really have to see it up on a wall, as part of large panorama that Voyager 1 took of the solar system's distant planets.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used to have just such a display with the full mosaic of photos posted up in an auditorium, says Hansen-Koharcheck. "And to show the whole thing it covered, oh, I don't know, 12 or 14 feet," she says — of mostly empty black space, with just a few pinpricks of light showing the planets. One of them was labeled Earth.

"One of the guys that took care of that display told me one time that he was forever having to replace that picture," says Hansen-Koharcheck, "because people would come up to look at it and they would always touch the Earth."

Voyager 1 is now about three times farther away than it was twenty years ago, says Stone. The spacecraft still routinely phones home, although its cameras no longer take photos. But if it could send back another picture, the little dot that's Earth would look even fainter and even smaller.

Cookography

Art of the Day

Tea Leaves
(William McGregor Paxton)

Quote of the Day

Sta Viator. Amabilem conjugem calcas.

"Halt, Traveler. You are trampling an adored wife"

(inscribed on the tombstone of Emma Bovary)
-Madame Bovary

Literary Pick (*)

Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson)

Sandra Juto

Literary Pick (*)

The Age of Fable  

-Thomas Bulfinch

Cultural News

Giacometti Sculpture Sells For Record $104 Million

A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti was sold Wednesday at a London auction for 65 million pounds ($104.3 million) — a world record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, Sotheby's auction house said.

It took just eight minutes of furious bidding for about 10 bidders to reach the hammer price for L'Homme Qui Marche I (Walking Man I), which opened at 12 million pounds, Sotheby's said.

The sculpture by the 20th century Swiss artist, considered an iconic Giacometti work as well as one of the most recognizable images of modern art, was sold to an anonymous bidder by telephone, the auction house said.

Sotheby's had estimated the work would sell for between 12 million and 18 million pounds.

The sale price trumped the $104.17 million paid at a 2004 New York auction for Pablo Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice). That painting broke the record that Vincent van Gogh had held since 1990, and its sale was the first time that the $100 million barrier was broken.

L'Homme Qui Marche I, a life-size sculpture of a thin and wiry human figure standing 72 inches tall, "represents the pinnacle of Giacometti's experimentation with the human form" and is "both a humble image of an ordinary man and a potent symbol of humanity," Sotheby's said.

The work was cast in 1961, in the artist's mature period. It is rare because it was the only cast of the walking man made during Giacometti's lifetime that has ever come to auction, Sotheby's said. It was bought by Dresdner Bank in the early 1980s.

The last time a Giacometti of comparable size was offered at auction was 20 years ago. That sculpture was sold for $6.82 million, a record for Giacometti works at the time.

-NPR

Belle Chantelle





Daily Dose of Imagery

Quote of the Day

"What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint."
— Marc Chagall

Art of the Day

Constellation: Awakening in the Early Morning
Joan Miró


















This is one of a series of twenty-three small gouache and oil wash paintings known as the Constellations. The series evolved, surprisingly enough, from Miró’s aspirations in the late 1930s to work on a mural scale. As he wrote to his dealer, Pierre Matisse early in 1940: “I feel that it is one of the most important things I have done, and even though the formats are small, they give the impression of large frescoes.” By July 1940 Miró and his family had fled Nazi-occupied France, where he began the series, and were living in Majorca. It was there that the Kimbell Constellation was finished. At this time, Miró later explained, “The night, music, and stars began to play a major role in suggesting my paintings.”

The Constellations series was smuggled to New York, where part of it was exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in January 1945. Symbolic of the survival of great art in the face of the ongoing war, these small works had important implications for American painters such as Jackson Pollock as they created abstract compositions permeated with free-floating lines and forms.

Poetry

Puerto Rican Obituary

They worked
They were always on time
They were never late
They never spoke back
when they were insulted
They worked
They never took days off
that were not on the calendar
They never went on strike
without permission
They worked
ten days a week
and were only paid for five
They worked
They worked
They worked
and they died
They died broke
They died owing
They died never knowing
what the front entrance
of the first national city bank looks like

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
passing their bill collectors
on to the next of kin
All died
waiting for the garden of eden
to open up again
under a new management
All died
dreaming about america
waking them up in the middle of the night
screaming: Mira Mira
your name is on the winning lottery ticket
for one hundred thousand dollars
All died
hating the grocery stores
that sold them make-believe steak
and bullet-proof rice and beans
All died waiting dreaming and hating

Dead Puerto Ricans
Who never knew they were Puerto Ricans
Who never took a coffee break
from the ten commandments
to KILL KILL KILL
the landlords of their cracked skulls
and communicate with their latino souls

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
From the nervous breakdown streets
where the mice live like millionaires
and the people do not live at all
are dead and were never alive

Juan
died waiting for his number to hit
Miguel
died waiting for the welfare check
to come and go and come again
Milagros
died waiting for her ten children
to grow up and work
so she could quit working
Olga
died waiting for a five dollar raise
Manuel
died waiting for his supervisor to drop dead
so he could get a promotion

Is a long ride
from Spanish Harlem
to long island cemetery
where they were buried
First the train
and then the bus
and the cold cuts for lunch
and the flowers
that will be stolen
when visiting hours are over
Is very expensive
Is very expensive
But they understand
Their parents understood
Is a long non-profit ride
from Spanish Harlem
to long island cemetery

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
Dreaming
Dreaming about queens
Clean-cut lily-white neighborhood
Puerto Ricanless scene
Thirty-thousand-dollar home
The first spics on the block
Proud to belong to a community
of gringos who want them lynched
Proud to be a long distance away
from the sacred phrase: Que Pasa

These dreams
These empty dreams
from the make-believe bedrooms
their parents left them
are the after-effects
of television programs
about the ideal
white american family
with black maids
and latino janitors
who are well train
to make everyone
and their bill collectors
laugh at them
and the people they represent

Juan
died dreaming about a new car
Miguel
died dreaming about new anti-poverty programs
Milagros
died dreaming about a trip to Puerto Rico
Olga
died dreaming about real jewelry
Manuel
died dreaming about the irish sweepstakes

They all died
like a hero sandwich dies
in the garment district
at twelve o’clock in the afternoon
social security number to ashes
union dues to dust

They knew
they were born to weep
and keep the morticians employed
as long as they pledge allegiance
to the flag that wants them destroyed
They saw their names listed
in the telephone directory of destruction
They were train to turn
the other cheek by newspapers
that mispelled mispronounced
and misunderstood their names
and celebrated when death came
and stole their final laundry ticket

They were born dead
and they died dead

Is time
to visit sister lopez again
the number one healer
and fortune card dealer
in Spanish Harlem
She can communicate
with your late relatives
for a reasonable fee
Good news is guaranteed

Rise Table Rise Table
death is not dumb and disable
Those who love you want to know
the correct number to play
Let them know this right away
Rise Table Rise Table
death is not dumb and disable
Now that your problems are over
and the world is off your shoulders
help those who you left behind
find financial peace of mind

Rise Table Rise Table
death is not dumb and disable
If the right number we hit
all our problems will split
and we will visit your grave
on every legal holiday

Those who love you want to know
the correct number to play
let them know this right away
We know your spirit is able
Death is not dumb and disable
RISE TABLE RISE TABLE

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
Hating fighting and stealing
broken windows from each other
Practicing a religion without a roof
The old testament
The new testament
according to the gospel
of the internal revenue
the judge and jury and executioner
protector and eternal bill collector

Secondhand shit for sale
learn how to say Como Esta Usted
and you will make a fortune
They are dead
They are dead
and will not return from the dead
until they stop neglecting
the art of their dialogue
for broken english lessons
to impress the mister goldsteins
who keep them employed
as lavaplatos porters messenger boys
factory workers maids stock clerks
shipping clerks assistant mailroom
assistant, assistant assistant
to the assistant’s assistant
assistant lavaplatos and automatic
artificial smiling doormen
for the lowest wages of the ages
and rages when you demand a raise
because is against the company policy
to promote SPICS SPICS SPICS

Juan
died hating Miguel because Miguel’s
used car was in better running condition
than his used car
Miguel
died hating Milagros because Milagros
had a color television set
and he could not afford one yet
Milagros
died hating Olga because Olga
made five dollars more on the same job
Olga
died hating Manuel because Manuel
had hit the numbers more times
than she had hit the numbers
Manuel
died hating all of them
Juan
Miguel
Milagros
and Olga
because they all spoke broken english
more fluently than he did

And now they are together
in the main lobby of the void
Addicted to silence
Off limits to the wind
Confine to worm supremacy
in long island cemetery
This is the groovy hereafter
the protestant collection box
was talking so loud and proud about

Here lies Juan
Here lies Miguel
Here lies Milagros
Here lies Olga
Here lies Manuel
who died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
Always broke
Always owing
Never knowing
that they are beautiful people

Never knowing
the geography of their complexion

PUERTO RICO IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
PUERTORRIQUENOS ARE A BEAUTIFUL RACE

If only they
had turned off the television
and tune into their own imaginations
If only they
had used the white supremacy bibles
for toilet paper purpose
and make their latino souls
the only religion of their race
If only they
had return to the definition of the sun
after the first mental snowstorm
on the summer of their senses
If only they
had kept their eyes open
at the funeral of their fellow employees
who came to this country to make a fortune
and were buried without underwears

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
will right now be doing their own thing
where beautiful people sing
and dance and work together
where the wind is a stranger
to miserable weather conditions
where you do not need a dictionary
to communicate with your people
Aqui Se Habla Espanol all the time
Aqui you salute your flag first
Aqui there are no dial soap commercials
Aqui everybody smells good
Aqui tv dinners do not have a future
Aqui the men and women admire desire
and never get tired of each other
Aqui Que Paso Power is what’s happening
Aqui to be called negrito
means to be called LOVE

by Pedro Pietri

Literary Pick (*)

The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)

I believe that what you've just finished reading affects your judgment on what you read next. It's hard for me to look at each book as a single item (unless it's spectacular in it's own right) without comparing it to other books I've just recently finished. With that said, I recently finished reading 100 Years of Solitude, and to go from Marquez's beautifully prismatic tale of magical realism, to Coelho's one dimensional fairytale, which should be colorful and wondrous in itself simply because of it's backdrop (Spain, Africa, deserts, oasis') is really disappointing. I'm also not the spiritual type, per say. At least not in the type that recruits. I create my own spirituality and I make up the rules of my soul as I go along. This book seems like it should be geared more towards children, not for adults who already have figured out that the secret to achieving your own "personal legend" is by going after it and not giving up.
I myself have a pretty dynamic spirit, and my soul responds more to revolutionary philosophies. So half-way through this book, I knew there was not much I could gain from it.

Honor Spotlight

Fred McFeely Rogers


(March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) was an American educator, Presbyterian minister, songwriter, and television host. Rogers was the host of the television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, in production from 1968 to 2001.

Fred McFeely Rogers was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a town located 40 miles (65 km) southeast of Pittsburgh. He was born to James and Nancy Rogers; he spent many years as an only child. Early in his life he spent much of his free time with his maternal grandfather, Fred McFeely,who would later move to Florida, and had an interest in music. He would often sing along as his mother would play the piano and, at the age of 5, he began to play the piano as well.[1] Rogers graduated from Latrobe High School (1946).[2] He studied at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, (1946–1948).[3] He transferred to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he received a BA in music composition in 1951.[4] At Rollins, Rogers met Sara Joanne Byrd, an Oakland, Florida native. They married on June 9, 1952.[5] They had two children, James (born in 1959) and John (born in 1961), and three grandsons, the third (Ian McFeely Rogers) born 12 days after Rogers' death.[6] In 1963, Rogers graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church.[7] Scholastically, he went on to garner 40 more honorary degrees throughout his life.[8] Rogers was also red-green color blind[9] and a vegetarian.[citation needed] He swam every morning, and neither smoked nor drank.[10] Rogers also owned a summer home on Nantucket in the village of Madaket on the western end of the island.[11][12]

Literary Pick (***)

Mythology (Edith Hamilton)

Quote of the Day

"The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous."
— E.M. Cioran

'Catcher In The Rye' Author J.D. Salinger Dies

J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose The Catcher in the Rye shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91. Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author's son said in a statement from Salinger's literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H. The Catcher in the Rye, with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made Catcher a featured selection, advised that for "anyone who has ever brought up a son" the novel will be "a source of wonder and delight — and concern." Enraged by all the "phonies" who make "me so depressed I go crazy," Holden soon became American literature's most famous anti-hero since Huckleberry Finn. The novel's sales are astonishing — more than 60 million copies worldwide — and its impact incalculable. Decades after publication, the book remains a defining expression of that most American of dreams: to never grow up. Salinger was writing for adults, but teenagers from all over identified with the novel's themes of alienation, innocence and fantasy, not to mention the luck of having the last word. Catcher presents the world as an ever-so-unfair struggle between the goodness of young people and the corruption of elders, a message that only intensified with the oncoming generation gap. Novels from Evan Hunter's The Blackboard Jungle to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, movies from Rebel Without a Cause to The Breakfast Club, and countless rock 'n' roll songs echoed Salinger's message of kids under siege. One of the great anti-heroes of the 1960s, Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate, was but a blander version of Salinger's narrator. The cult of Catcher turned tragic in 1980 when crazed Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, citing Salinger's novel as an inspiration and stating that "this extraordinary book holds many answers." By the 21st century, Holden himself seemed relatively mild, but Salinger's book remained a standard in school curriculums and was discussed on countless Web sites and a fan page on Facebook. Salinger's other books don't equal the influence or sales of Catcher, but they are still read, again and again, with great affection and intensity. Critics, at least briefly, rated Salinger as a more accomplished and daring short story writer than John Cheever. The collection Nine Stories features the classic "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the deadpan account of a suicidal Army veteran and the little girl he hopes, in vain, will save him. The novel Franny and Zooey, like Catcher, is a youthful, obsessively articulated quest for redemption, featuring a memorable argument between Zooey and his mother as he attempts to read in the bathtub. Catcher, narrated from a mental facility, begins with Holden recalling his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school for failing four classes and for general apathy. He returns home to Manhattan, where his wanderings take him everywhere from a Times Square hotel to a rainy carousel ride with his kid sister, Phoebe, in Central Park. He decides he wants to escape to a cabin out West, but scorns questions about his future as just so much phoniness. "I mean how do you know what you're going to do till you do it?" he reasons. "The answer is, you don't. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it's a stupid question." The Catcher in the Rye became both required and restricted reading, periodically banned by a school board or challenged by parents worried by its frank language and the irresistible chip on Holden's shoulder. "I'm aware that a number of my friends will be saddened, or shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters of The Catcher in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children," Salinger wrote in 1955, in a short note for 20th Century Authors. "It's almost unbearable to me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach," he added. Salinger also wrote the novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — An Introduction, both featuring the neurotic, fictional Glass family which appeared in much of his work. His last published story, "Hapworth 16, 1928," ran in The New Yorker in 1965. By then he was increasingly viewed like a precocious child whose manner had soured from cute to insufferable. "Salinger was the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school," Norman Mailer once commented. In 1997, it was announced that "Hapworth" would be reissued as a book — prompting a negative New York Times review. The book, in typical Salinger style, didn't appear. In 1999, New Hampshire neighbor Jerry Burt said the author had told him years earlier that he had written at least 15 unpublished books kept locked in a safe at his home. "I love to write and I assure you I write regularly," Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. "But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it." Jerome David Salinger was born Jan. 1, 1919, in New York City. His father was a wealthy importer of cheeses and meat and the family lived for years on Park Avenue. Like Holden, Salinger was an indifferent student with a history of trouble in various schools. He was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy at age 15, where he wrote at night by flashlight beneath the covers and eventually earned his only diploma. In 1940, he published his first fiction, "The Young Folks", in Story magazine. He served in the Army from 1942 to 1946, carrying a typewriter with him most of the time, writing "whenever I can find the time and an unoccupied foxhole," he told a friend. Returning to New York, the lean, dark-haired Salinger pursued an intense study of Zen Buddhism but also cut a gregarious figure in the bars of Greenwich Village, where he astonished acquaintances with his proficiency in rounding up dates. One drinking buddy, author A.E. Hotchner, would remember Salinger as the proud owner of an "ego of cast iron," contemptuous of writers and writing schools, convinced that he was the best thing to happen to American letters since Herman Melville. Holden first appeared as a character in the story "Last Day of the Last Furlough," published in 1944 in the Saturday Evening Post. Salinger's stories ran in several magazines, especially The New Yorker, where excerpts from Catcher were published. The finished novel quickly became a best seller and early reviews were blueprints for the praise and condemnation to come. The New York Times found the book "an unusually brilliant first novel" and observed that Holden's "delinquencies seem minor indeed when contrasted with the adult delinquencies with which he is confronted." But the Christian Science Monitor was not charmed. "He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief," critic T. Morris Longstreth wrote of Holden. "Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet. But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind — as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention." The world had come calling for Salinger, but Salinger was bolting the door. By 1952, he had migrated to Cornish. Three years later, he married Claire Douglas, with whom he had two children, Peggy and Matthew, before their 1967 divorce. Salinger was also briefly married in the 1940s to a woman named Sylvia; little else is known about her. Meanwhile, he was refusing interviews, instructing his agent to forward no fan mail and reportedly spending much of his time writing in a cement bunker. Sanity, apparently, could only come through seclusion. "I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes," Holden says in Catcher. "That way I wouldn't have to have any ... stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. I'd build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made." Although Salinger initially contemplated a theater production of Catcher, with the author himself playing Holden, he turned down numerous offers for film or stage rights, including requests from Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan. Bids from Steven Spielberg and Harvey Weinstein also were rejected. Salinger became famous for not wanting to be famous. In 1982, he sued a man who allegedly tried to sell a fictitious interview with the author to a national magazine. The impostor agreed to desist and Salinger dropped the suit. Five years later, another Salinger legal action resulted in an important decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court refused to allow publication of an unauthorized biography, by Ian Hamilton, that quoted from the author's unpublished letters. Salinger had copyrighted the letters when he learned about Hamilton's book, which came out in a revised edition in 1988. In 2009, Salinger sued to halt publication of John David California's 60 Years Later, an unauthorized sequel to Catcher that imagined Holden in his 70s, misanthropic as ever. Against Salinger's will, the curtain was parted in recent years. In 1998, author Joyce Maynard published her memoir At Home in the World, in which she detailed her eight-month affair with Salinger in the early 1970s, when she was less than half his age. She drew an unflattering picture of a controlling personality with eccentric eating habits, and described their problematic sex life. Salinger's alleged adoration of children apparently did not extend to his own. In 2000, daughter Margaret Salinger's Dreamcatcher portrayed the writer as an unpleasant recluse who drank his own urine and spoke in tongues. Ms. Salinger said she wrote the book because she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me."
NPR

Art of the Day

Juno Asking Aeolus to Release the Winds
(François Boucher)


















As told by the Roman author Virgil in the first book of The Aeneid, the goddess Juno, consumed by jealousy toward Venus, schemed to prevent the fleet of her rival’s son, Aeneas, from reaching shore and founding a Trojan colony in Italy. In Boucher’s faithful depiction of this myth, Juno visits Aeolus, keeper of the winds, and urges him to unleash their fury, thus provoking a violent storm that would destroy Aeneas’s fleet. As enticement, Juno offers Aeolus her most beautiful nymph, Deiopea, in marriage. She aims the torch directly at his heart as love-struck Aeolus releases the winds, while a cupid unsheathes an arrow to target the compliant nymph, her wrists bound with pearls. The presence of an alluring sea nymph reclining in the foreground signals the outcome: mighty Neptune, god of the sea, will prevail over the winds, and calm the insurgent waters.

Literary Pick (*)

The Diary of Frida Kahlo (by Carlos Fuentes)

Sound of the Day

Gymnopedie (Eric Satie)
-Click here-

Reading of the Day

Romolo Marchelli
Lenten Sermons (1682)

God, in order to further torment the
damned, made Himself distiller, and
inside those stills of hell He enclosed
the pangs of the most ravenous
hungers, the most burning thirsts, the
most freezing cold,the firiest passions;
the torments of those slaughtered by
iron, choked by the hangman's noose,
reduced to ashes by flames and torn
apart by wild beasts; the flesh eaten
alive by worms, devoured by
serpents, flayed with knives, gashed
and torn by the torturer's iron combs;
the arrows of Saint Sebastian, the
the gridiron of Saint Lawrence, the oven
in the form in the bronze bull of Saint
Eustace, the lions of Saint Ignatius;
and severed and shattered bones and
dislocated joints and detached limbs;
all the keenest pains, all the most
terrible pangs, all the longest death
agonies and all the slowest, most
laborious, most atrocious deaths.
And distilling all these ingredients,
He made such a brew, each drop of
which contains the refined
quintessence of all pains, in such a
way that each flame, each ember,
better yet each spark of that flame
contains within itself the distillation of
all the torments within a single torment.

Literary Pick (*)

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)

Quote of the Day

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

Literary Pick (*****)

100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

I found this book a few days ago in a junk pile among other beloved classics. I brought them all home.

I've never read a book that was a continuous and inexhaustible series of events that continued to unravel and turn like a never-ending wheel. And that is exactly what 100 years of solitude is like, events that kept recycling themselves from generation through generation with new births of Aurelianos' and Arcadios'.

I was immediately intimidated by this novel ever since I read about the suicide that "defies the laws of physics". I've never gravitated towards the kind of fantasy literature that would do a thing like that. I assumed the entire book would be of that nature, and It is, and it's great! This novel was fascinatingly rich beyond the imagination of art, super-naturalism and surrealism.
Gabriel Garcia writes so confidently and convincingly, you don't stop to question the delusional world he has created. Macondo is a place, somewhere, no one knows where, but it exists.
It's definitely the kind of a book someone has to read to understand how these occult happenings make sense, but in the village of Macondo they do and it's ok! The Buendia family is deliriously alive!! I had a hard time putting this book down. It's not what I expected at all.

I loved Ursula.

I found it interesting that Prudencio Aguilar (who was dead) couldn't locate his friend Jose Arcadio Buendia (who was alive) until Melquiades himself dies, because up until then no one had died in Macondo to note it on the Motley Map of Deaths (on the other side).
I also loved the tale about meme and her lover, Mauricio Babilonia, whose presence she always sensed because butterflies followed him everywhere.

I read that Garcia Marquez locked himself up for 14 months in order to write this novel, and it makes sense. The imagination required to write all these stories needed solitude. I cannot imagine keeping all those details of tales straight while socializing with the outside world on a

One Boy One Girl

Literary Pick (*)

Beowulf

Art of the Day

La Jeune Martyre -Delaroche, Hippolyte (Paul).
















Christian Martyr Drowned in the Tiber During the Reign of Diocletian

The idea for this painting came to Delaroche during a time of severe illness. The subject deals with the terrible persecution suffered by Christians during the reign of Emperor Diocletian (284-305). The effective contrast of the crimson sunset and the cold greenish-blue tones of the water, with its reflections of that mystical light which illuminates the face of the martyr thrown into the Tiber with her hands tied, gives the painting a very Romantic feel. A contemporary of Delaroche, the writer Théophile Gautier, poetically described this image as that of the "Christian Ophelia" and was particularly admiring of the face of "virginal purity and divine beauty".