To Read & To Write

As I sat reading this in my living room late last night, it occurred to me that I was experiencing a quiet and stillness that I haven't in many years. It was only brief, a minute or so, but I cherished the moment completely. I sat there on my couch with the candles flickering, the room filled with lamplight against the darkness of late evening, the balcony window open letting in a cool midsummer breeze, the outdoor fountain pleasantly making the sounds of falling water.  "The Wild Remedy: How Nature Mends Us - A Diary" by Emma Mitchell (2019) is a book full of moments like the one I experienced above, yet highlighting the power and potency of the biological realm of plant-life in aiding illness and disease: here, Mitchell writes about her fight against the insidious grip of depression. Usually I'm tentative to read books that cover subjects such as mental illness: I suffer from a mental illness that is not as widespread/well-known as depression, but I was not dis...

I'll never tire of this story. Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations are beautiful, using rich, dark hues of deep browns, deep maroons, deep greens and grays that contrast nicely with brighter blues and reds. The colors bleed together and fill the pages with warmth, creating full borders for the text of the story itself. Paul Heins' translation is straight-forward yet elegant and magical, making a perfect bedtime read for little ones or for fairy-tale lovers of any age. The cottage, castle, woodland and its animals will remind readers of a place that never gets old, that special place that hasn't disappeared from our imaginations for centuries.

I might come back to this one: I just couldn't get into the story as much as I would have liked. Something about the very drastic contrast between the arbitrariness of day to day life in the coffee shop, family stuff, and romantic relationships and its stark contrast to the world-history of the Wars between the Others (of various mythological manifestations: i.e. vampires and sorcerers, etc.). Put more simply, there wasn't enough a blurred line right off of the bat between the fantastic and the normal (a blurry-ness which gives that aura of wonder to the fairy-tales I typically read). Also, this narrative reminds me a bit of the television show "True Blood" and I was never a fan of that one either (although my husband is). Lastly, I'm an old soul, admittedly, and McKinley's writing here caters more to young souls (personal opinion); the narrator herself is fairly young (early to mid 20s?) and everything in her world is deemed devoid of mystery on accounts ...

I'm glad I finally read Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Requiem for a Dream" (1978) after years of having a copy of the book on my shelf and never getting to it. I've seen the movie, directed by Darren Aronofsky (2000), several times, but Selby's book has so much more resonance, though if one has seen the film even once those images don't disappear as you read the words of this story.  The words seem to flow from the author without much pre-conception: "Requiem for a Dream" is free from any sense of being contrived. The story and its style (which is a variant of stream-of-consciousness) is beautiful in its simplicity and for the authors clear talent for telling it like it is. A story like this doesn't need much more.  What a reader might be able to grasp from the book rather than from watching the film is the idea that the kids in this book really don't know how to care for anything but their own souls. It's as if they've never really le...

Twin Peaks, that quaint, quiet small town in Washington State that went a bit off the rails after the death - murder, to be more precise - of the town's sweetheart, Laura Palmer, is, as we know, a *fictional* place created from the minds of David Lynch and Mark Frost at the end of the '80s and early '90s. What Mark Frost ingeniously presents us with in  The Secret History of Twin Peaks (published 2016) is a slew of documents from diaries, reports and transcripts from the FBI and CIA, detective photographs, military (especially the U.S. Air Force and Navy) notes and letters, psychiatric files, newspaper clippings, and all sorts of other case files which locate Twin Peaks in a larger, global arena, with the intent to show how this small town is linked to the bigger picture in myriad ways. The whole of Secret History is written by an unknown Archivist, whose footnotes and endnotes, prefaces and epilogues throughout help us uncover the mystery surrounding Laura Palmer, her ...

Similar in its practical (or tactical, whichever you prefer) aim to perhaps John Berger's " Ways of Seeing"  (1972), Evan Calder Williams' " Combined and Uneven Apocalypse" (2011) lays bare a different understanding of the world: a world in which its subjects can no longer point beyond themselves to any given cause. The apocalypse is here, it has been, and it will be. So now what? First, Williams really wants us to get a handle on what the apocalyptic actually is - on his terms - so that we can understand what it means to become  post-apocalyptic : "... post apocalyptic here does not mean that we have witnessed the destruction of our society or nation. It means what we don't know who are enemies are anymore. The very category of enemy is rendered diffuse, reduced to the bad smell of fear stinking up the place." (p. 55) Williams is interested in the literature, language, and filmic readings of zombie films, films about catastrophe, the t...

Bury the past as deep as you like - whatever you do - if you don't make true peace with it - it'll come back to haunt you. You must make peace with it. For its substantially conceptual heft,   Underland: A Deep Time Journey is an easy-going, fascinating book of intense exploration that is concerned with what the unseen says about that which coexists with it as it goes unnoticed. Author Robert Macfarlane is concerned with uncovering parts of this Earth that many, if not most, cannot visualize - and this is not entirely due to its geography. In the Introduction, he writes: "An aversion to the underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be 'uplifted' us preferable to being 'depressed' or 'pulled down'. 'Catastrophe' literally means a 'downwards turn', 'cataclysm' a 'downwards violence'. A bias against depth also runs through mainstream convent...