"if the accident will."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922-2007.

So it goes.

"love the questions themselves"

I was reading Don Hall's blog this morning, and his entry on devoting one's self to building an artistic skill reminded me immediately of a passage of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."

This is one of those books in my library that I often pick up and reread, and every time I do so, something new reaches out and grabs me. There are so many pieces of wisdom buried in this book, but you have to be in the place to see them.

I wanted to respond to Don's blog entry with some of the wisdom of Rilke, and so I grabbed my copy before heading out to work, and read through it on the train. It's not the ideal setting for reading such a work, but I wasn't intending to read it whole-heartedly.

However, as I always do when I read this work, I pulled out my pen and underlined passages that speak to me now. Until I came across a passage that I'd underlined before, one that in fact I've typed up and posted in my office, though its in an inconspicious place and I haven't read it in a long time.

As I read this familiar passage, tears welled in my eyes, and I realized I was understanding the words in a new way. I was at a place where I could truly, as Rilke says "live into the answer."

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible in our lives is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

a book meme

Picked up from Sparks' blog, since I love books. I added a few of my own to the end, since, as Sparks complained, there are some good ones missing.

Look at the list of books below.
* (Bold) the ones you've read
* Italicize the ones you want to read
* Leave unchanged the ones that you aren't interested in.
* If you are reading this, tag, you're it!

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austin)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling) (known as Sorcerer's Stone in the US)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)* I'm fairly certain I own this book.
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
101. The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien)
102. Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo)
103. Slaughter-House Five (Vonnegut)
104. Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
105. Hamlet (Shakespeare)
106. Little House on the Prairie (Laura Ingalls Wilder)

"I am who the media says I am"

I'm excited by the fact that being in grad school has really awakened my brain. I feel much more politically conscious than I was, and I'm much more interested in learning, in reading non-fiction, etc.

not too long ago, I just finished reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond, which is well written, and very, very interesting.

Currently, I'm cruising through Barack Obama's "The Audacity of Hope." And it does, in fact, give me hope. Read it, and you'll see why Obama is such a phenomenon. He seems like a man who thinks, who considers, who recognizes that issues aren't black and white, but many, many shades of gray. He details how idealistic politicians can be eaten up by the system of politics, how hard it is to hold on to your morals and ideals in the face of the political machine. How the media actually controls how politicians are perceived, based on where they do or do not place their focus.

I'm reading it, and part of me wants to believe so badly in what he saying, to trust that he is straight-forward and real and that he recognizes the landmines enough to avoid the worst of them. And there's a small part that suggests that the whole thing is nothing by bullshit and posturing, that I'm being manipulated, even as I hope that part of me is wrong.

In part, I feel sorry for Obama. We've all put him up on such a high pedestal, there's really nothing for him to do but fall. We want, so badly, a politician that we can trust and believe in. But I get the feeling that it's not so much the politicians themselves, but how they are portrayed to us, that might be the problem.

He says at one point, that through town hall meetings, he could meet with about 15-20,000 people in a six year term. A three minute story on the lowest-rated Chicago news station would reach 200,000 people.

"I - like every politician at the national level - am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public, at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I've become."

"It's hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the Internet, coarsens political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust."

"Every statement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit, interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through for potential error, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by the opposition party..."

"Every reporter in Washington is working under pressures imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or network executives, who in turn are poring over last week's ratings... To make the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieecs, the same stock figures. Meanwhile, for the busy and therefore casual news consumer, a well-worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it's quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody."

"This element of convenience also helps explain why, even among the most scrupulous of reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of a debate without and perspective on which side might actually be right... Is one [side's] analyist more credible than the other? Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might walk us through the numbers?"

books. good for the soul

Diane tagged me when she did this meme, and since i like books, i'll do it. what the hell, right?

1) One book that changed your life: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. This book is one of the first I read in college, and marked my jump from popular fiction into literature.
2) One book that you'd read more than once: I read everything more than once. Honest.
3) One book you'd want on a deserted island: Seize the Night, by Dean Koontz. It's a mystery that is also quite funny. If I was trapped on a deserted island, these are the characters I'd want with me.
4) One book that made you laugh: Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell. Turning presidential assassination shrines into comedy is pure genius, and because i'm a total dork myself, this book really speaks to me. See my entry on my visit to Dealey Plaza.
5) One book that made you cry: Offerings at the Wall
6) One book you wish you'd written: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. I don't wish I went through what he went through, but I wish I had his gift for language, for creating such richness and emotion.
7) One book you wish had never been written: The DaVinci Code, so that my mother would stop telling me how much I need to read it.
8) One book you're currently reading: Assassination Vacation - like I said, I reread everything.
9) One book you've been meaning to read: State of Denial, by Bob Woodward. It's sitting on my shelf, but I know it's going to piss me off.