Summer 2012
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Little Manhattan
Leslie: Maybe not everything is supposed to last forever. Certain things are like… like… skywriting. Like, like, like a really beautiful thing that lasts for a couple moments and then… You know?
Gabe: [cries] Mommy!
Leslie: I know, honey. Love sucks.
Gabe: Yeah.
The Paris Review: Ray Bradbury
I read Fahrenheit 451 when I was 21-years-old. So, it wasn’t the famous novel that drew me to Ray Bradbury.
It was his short stories. I remember his work was included in a sixth grade anthology that my class often had assignments from. I’d always skip to his stories. They were deliberate, tightly packaged and short, with powerful endings like an O’Henry story or a Twilight Zone episode.
I was always left reeling and in thought. So I guess it wasn’t any surprise that an interview by the Paris Review left me much the same way. Here are my favorite excerpts from an interview with a brilliant man and a true writer:
Imagine if sixty years ago, at the start of my writing career, I had thought to write a story about a woman who swallowed a pill and destroyed the Catholic Church, causing the advent of women’s liberation. That story probably would have been laughed at, but it was within the realm of the possible and would have made great science fiction.
~
With Fahrenheit 451, Montag came up to me and said, I’m going crazy. I said, What’s the matter, Montag? I’ve been burning books, he said. I said, Well, don’t you want to anymore? He said, No, I love them. I said, Go do something about it. And he wrote the book for me in nine days.
~
I don’t believe in optimism. I believe in optimal behavior. That’s a different thing. If you behave every day of your life to the top of your genetics, what can you do? Test it. Find out. You don’t know—you haven’t done it yet. You must live life at the top of your voice! At the top of your lungs shout and listen to the echoes. I learned a lesson years ago. I had some wonderful Swedish meatballs at my mother’s table with my dad and my brother and when I finished I pushed back from the table and said, God! That was beautiful. And my brother said, No, it was good. See the difference? Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
~
INTERVIEWER What do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle? BRADBURY Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.
~
If you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t have a marriage. In that film Love Story, there’s a line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Love means saying you’re sorry every day for some little thing or other. You make a mistake. I forgot the lightbulbs. I didn’t bring this from the store and I’m sorry. You know? So being able to accept responsibility, but above all having a sense of humor, so that anything that happens can have its amusing side.
Kudos
…And as I ponder how to use Google+ for social reasons, not to mention journalistic ones, I’m impressed with KOMU’s use of the social media site to report. Yesterday the Columbia, Mo. TV station’s Sarah Hill interviewed several Norweigians about their experiences after the Oslo bombings via a Google+ Hangout.
I always get paid
Forelsket
My best friend Erin kept the blog to herself for a long time. It is her place to keep momentos of the things that are important to her: words of inspirations from coaches and teammates, athletic goals as she enters her fourth year of collegiate swimming (so proud of you!) and a place for odes to love, life lessons, New Jersey, friends.
Ah, but at last she has decided to make her blog public and I am not-so-secretly ecstatic that she’s decided to share her sunflower sanctuary with the world.
Check out Forelsket, (a Norwegian word for falling in love.)
Plus I’m obsessed with her Impossible List. Thinking about creating my own.
Poke to the Future
I may be undeniably a fervent contributor to the world of social media that consumes…well…almost everyone, but I will never get tired of things that poke fun of life via the Internet.
Here’s the latest: Vanity Fair’s Poke to the Future by Henry Alford
Indeed, in the off-line future, when someone who knows who you are but hasn’t been introduced to you runs into you at a party, he will wordlessly walk up to you and rub one side of his body up against yours in the manner of a dog pre-mealtime. Without offering any salutation in response (just like on Facebook), you can decide whether to accept or ignore this friendship request. To accept it, simply announce to your new friend what you have recently eaten.
A Letter from Another World
I’ve never read the Millennium series, not the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the one with hornet’s nest or whatever the other book was. But I can appreciate the cultural phenomenon that Stieg Larsson’s trilogy and the ensuing films have created.
I didn’t know about the romance Larsson had with his life partner, Eva Gabrielsson, but after reading a Vanity Fair article about Larsson’s untimely death — an excerpt from Gabrielsson’s book: “There Are Things I Want You To Know” about Stieg Larsson and Me — I was completely taken by the love letter that Larsson wrote Gabrielsson in 1977 before a trip to Africa.
Gabrielsson found the letter in a box after Larsson’s untimely passing in 2004. It was labeled “To be opened only after my death.”
Stockholm, February 9, 1977
Eva, my love,
It’s over. One way or another, everything comes to an end. It’s all over some day. That’s perhaps one of the most fascinating truths we know about the entire universe. The stars die, the galaxies die, the planets die. And people die too. I’ve never been a believer, but the day I became interested in astronomy, I think I put aside all that was left of my fear of death. I’d realized that in comparison to the universe, a human being, a single human being, me … is infinitely small. Well, I’m not writing this letter to deliver a profound religious or philosophical lecture. I’m writing to tell you “farewell.” I was just talking to you on the phone. I can still hear the sound of your voice. I imagine you, before my eyes … a beautiful image, a lovely memory I will keep until the end. At this very moment, reading this letter, you know that I am dead.
There are things that I want you to know. As I leave for Africa, I’m aware of what’s waiting for me. I even have the feeling that this trip could bring about my death, but it’s something that I have to experience, in spite of everything. I wasn’t born to sit in an armchair. I’m not like that. Correction: I wasn’t like that … I’m not going to Africa just as a journalist, I’m going above all on a political mission, and that’s why I think this trip might lead to my death.
This is the first time I’ve written to you knowing exactly what to say: I love you, I love you, love you, love you. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. I want you to know I mean that seriously. I want you to remember me but not grieve for me. If I truly mean something to you, and I know that I do, you will probably suffer when you learn I am dead. But if I really mean something to you, don’t suffer, I don’t want that. Don’t forget me, but go on living. Live your life. Pain will fade with time, even if that’s hard to imagine right now. Live in peace, my dearest love; live, love, hate, and keep fighting. …
I had a lot of faults, I know, but some good qualities as well, I hope. But you, Eva, you inspired such love in me that I was never able to express it to you.…
Straighten up, square your shoulders, hold your head high. Okay? Take care of yourself, Eva. Go have a cup of coffee. It’s over. Thank you for the beautiful times we had. You made me very happy. Adieu.
I kiss you goodbye, Eva.
From Stieg, with love.
His words remind me that the best of all loves are fleeting. At the end of it, we fade or progress. Hopefully, we go wherever we are headed — life or death — carrying a small gratitude for the people and things that once struck something in us.
The sea gives and the sea takes.
It’s late Monday night and I’m on the copy desk. An Intimate Relationship tests hangs over my head. (The dreaded test is to occur tomorrow morning — I opened to the correlating chapters for the first time today.) I should be studying. Or editing. Not scouring through the Pulitzer Prize winners website.
My efforts are productive, however. I discover that a MU grad is on the explanatory writing winning team from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. I watch newsroom reaction videos on the homepages of various winning publications — and can’t help but grin. Then I discover this:
Perhaps I have a soft spot for the familiar setting. (Atlantic City, Cape May, Lower Township, Sicklerville, Wildwood — for all you Jersey folk.) But the story was riveting. Amy Ellis Nutt of the Newark Star Ledger spent seven months researching what became a “deeply probing story of the mysterious sinking of a commercial fishing boat in the Atlantic Ocean that drowned six men.”
Read The Wreck of the Lady Mary. Read it because you’ve grown up in a world that understands the mercurial force that is the sea. Read it to understand loss or adventure or regret. Read it because it’s the kind of journalism that holds people accountable, the kind of journalism that keeps the world honest. Read it because something happened to the Lady Mary on March 24, 2009 and that something deserves to be understood.
That’s all.
And somehow, after reading about a devastating shipwreck and delving into a fantastic piece of journalism, stressing about a silly test doesn’t seem so important. At least that’s what I’m telling myself until tomorrow.
Andre Malok, Star Ledger
Sports Illustrated models fuel personal body art obsession
There is something about body paint that I find most beautiful… and intriguing. So I was pretty ecstatic for the part in the 2011 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition where — you guessed it — models bare it all for the sake of art.
The process was intense. For example, according to the magazine captions, Kenza Fourati’s body was first painted at 9:16 a.m. The last “brushstroke”? 6:15. AM!
Notice the bodypainter’s quote — the process is so detailed that this model’s bathing suit includes a crease.
And just when I thought my day couldn’t possibly get better than painted swimsuit models? Two words: Hilary Rhoda.
Striking eyebrows, piercing eyes and a body that looks more like an athlete’s than a skeleton in heels…
Perfection.
