running to stand still

 

Running on a treadmill

standing stock-still

I tell myself I am safe

from judgement, as though my slow progress

would offend, my stretched Lycra

would distress

I tell myself I am safe 

from runner's knee, and muscle pulls

concrete is too hard to fall

one trip to make me crawl

I tell myself it is easy 

drinks at hand, music wired

as though carrying what I need and desire

is too heavy

I tell myself it is easy

course predestined, speed anticipated

No sudden turns, dogs, streets gated

Even the seasons don't change

I don't change

I get nowhere.

Family Furnishings

Family Furnishings: Selected Stories, 1995-2014 by Alice Munro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alice Munro has perfected the realistic short story and though this collection contains 24 they are each perfection. I give her the Willa Cather award. Her stories often carry the tension between the expectation of a woman's role and her longing for something more fulfilling. In "The Children Stay" raw protagonist contemplates bringing her play's script on a beach outing with her children, but "then laid it down. She was afraid that she would get too absorbed in it and take her eyes off the children for a moment too long." This desire to be a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter, and the desire to realize one's own dreams and desires often chafes up against one another. Family Furnishings is also the perfect title because so many of these stories deal with family and a sense of place. The later stories become more and more autobiographical, but they all deal with the inheritance of expectations and responsibilities as well as personality and proclivities that are passed along family lines. I could, and probably should, expand what I mean by everything I just wrote, but I won't and encourage you to read a Munro story whenever possible.

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Mosquitoland

 

a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18718848-mosquitoland" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px">Mosquitoland by David Arnold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this YA novel about Mim who is trying to reunite with her mother after a divorce. Mim's father worries about Mim's quirkiness, that it is a harbinger of mental illness prevalent in his family. So with Mim as an unreliable narrator we embark with her on a crazy road trip full of adventures and a crew of pals she picks up along the way. All in all, it is just purely enjoyable. Do I like that one of the pals has Down-syndrome which they treat well, (yay), but also (and is even stated) as sort of a pet, no. Still, it emphasizes that we are all a bit crazy, we all have problems, we are all doing the best we can (even the evil step-mother). It is a refreshingly original, sensitive, funny, thoroughly satisfying book.
FYI: Does have some language. Although not jarringly so.

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Don Quixote

 

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I wrote an Honors English paper on Don Quixote as an undergraduate. I never actually read it. What's more, I got an A, which means my professor had probably never read it either. So now, about 30 years later I can finally say I've read it. When you consider that this was written in 1605-1615, it really holds up remarkably well. There is something undeniably inspiring in a person who follows their dreams especially in the face of naysayers. What I loved is how in part 2, Quixote actually becomes a knight for all intents and purposes, as people start treating him that way. In fact, everything he sets out to do, he does. Plenty of humor, entertaining anecdotes, and wise words. If it goes just a bit too long, most good novels do.

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“It is your fear, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that keeps you from seeing or hearing properly, because one of the effects of fear is to cloud the senses and make things appear other than they are;

His only obligation is to help them because they are in need, turning his eyes to their suffering and not their wickedness.

Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

the madness of the master, without the simplicity of the servant, would not be worth anything.”

Not all those called knights are knights through and through; some are gold, others alchemical, and all appear to be knights, but not all can pass a test by touch-stone. 3

there is no poet who is not arrogant and does not think himself the greatest poet in the world.”

deceivers are as mad as the deceived,

when I’m busy digging I never think about my better half, I mean my Teresa Panza, and I love her more than my eyelashes.”

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This much talked-about book is hard to rate. It is mostly a memoir, with factoids about therapy, and the stories of the people whom this therapist sees. While I didn't particularly relate to Gottlieb and at times found her humble-brags a bit annoying, I respected her need to seek out therapy for a crisis in her life. Her observations about therapy are also helpful and well demonstrated by her patients' stories which are in turns entertaining, heart-breaking, and inspiring. However, I couldn't get past that regardless of changed names, disguised story-lines, permissions granted, these are real peoples's stories and if I ever went to a therapist and then read about my life in a book, I would feel violated and vulnerable. Especially since it's more than the story--it's her reaction and interaction with the patients. In fact, I think I am less inclined to go to a therapist now than before I read this, wondering if my therapist is tolerating me, confused by me, or even annoyed by me. What I took away from this is that we could all use some introspection, that we are often the ones stopping ourselves from progressing, and that the future matters more than the past.

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People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don't know what our problem is.  We keep stepping in the same puddle.  why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?

irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (hero is the Greek word for "rejoice").

Christ and the New Covenant

Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon by Jeffrey R. Holland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What I found most helpful in this exposition of teachings from the Book of Mormon, besides having teachings laid out clearly and concisely (and pretty well written), was the example of taking an event in the scriptures and actually breaking it down into its teaching parts to gain the most from it. You can generalize and say, oh Abinadi taught about the atonement, but what exactly did he teach? Also, just love Holland's take on life.

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Geek Sublime

Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software by Vikram Chandra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Right now I am obsessed with the power of language. In it we can pass down eons of thought, insight, instruction. And saying things, putting it out in the universe, somehow allows for something to happen. That is why you write down goals, speak affirmations, shy away from talking about death. This book was described as explaining how coding and fiction are similar, and not knowing much about coding, I thought this might be interesting. I feel like there are some really good nuggets in here: how computers break all language down into 1's and 0's (and why), and how Sanskrit has been preserved for centuries as an uncorrupted language; how fiction and poetry use words to get to the emotion beneath the words and the limitations of any language. Still, I felt like I had to wade in deep, deep mud for any of these nuggets. Each chapter did not flow to the next, but dealt specifically about a subject: coding, Sanskrit, the gender politics of coding and writing, etc. And in each of these, there was so much technical detail, or foreign terms, or just minutiae that I often wondered what the point was. He attempts to make it cohesive in the final chapter, but even then I'm not sure I understood the point. Its a vomit of information--like the rough draft of a research paper. I feel like a few more passes over this, pruning away the extraneous and adding some rather pointed bits on how this is all related (probably obvious to Chandra who is so close to this, but lost on the rest of us regular non-coders and non-published writers) would make this a much more accessible and helpful read.

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the cult of modernity, in order to demonstrate the newness of modernity, needs to always insist on the chasms that separate modernity from the past.

the Vedas are chanted today exactly as they were almost four millennia ago, complete with archaic tones and usages present nowhere in the Sanskrit that followed.

So rasa—the word literally means “taste” or “juice”—is not emotion (bhava); it is the aestheticized satisfaction or “sentiment” of tasting artificially induced emotions.

The naive spectator who ascribes some sort of reality to what is happening on the stage and identifies personally with the emotions of the characters is incapable of rasa, which is an impersonal, disinterested pleasure.

The rasa is in the tasting of grief, in the relishing of grief, in the reflective cognizing of grief.

The pleasure of rasa comes from the meta-experience of experiencing oneself experience the stable emotions.

7. The Code of Beauty: Abhinavagupta

During the experience of rasa, according to Abhinavagupta, “what is enjoyed is consciousness itself.”

here, one’s own latent and personal memories of grief are liberated into “a universal, impersonal flavour.”

even language that does not cohere or produce mundane meaning may produce rasa.

the variety of suggestiveness is placed outside the human mind; it is the cause, not the result of poetic imagination.

Such a view is in harmony with the origin of the Sanskrit word for poet, kavi. A kavi is a seer, a revealer.

Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me.