Reading Journal

I have got to start spending more time reading!

I need to finish reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 2 months and I have about 200 pages left. I also need to finish Coming of Age in Mississppi or a True in order to start my annual holiday re-read of O! Pioneers.

Old: Tess
New: Wimpy Kid (finished in less than 2 days)
Random: Mississippi
True: Something short
Old: O! Pioneers

If I can't find something short and true on my shelves, I'll hit up Half Price. Which I can do since I recently purged my shelves of books with language or themes I wouldn't be comfortable discussing with the prophet Thomas S. Monson. I only had problems with one: Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried." I read it twice in college and I think once after. It has some pretty amazing quotes in it, and it really goes in depth about soldier's experiences in and after Vietnam. So of course there's vulgarity and lewdness. So I skimmed it and wrote down some of my most favorite quotes.

I'll share some of those here.

p. 20 "They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it....They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die....They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed and died because they were embarrassed not to."

p. 23 "You couldn't burn the blame."

p. 32 "...as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening."

p. 34 "You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present."

p. 36 "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end."

p. 38 "Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes, remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

p. 157 "Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, lie clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I'd made, all the terrible things I'd seen and done."
p. 158 "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. you make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened...and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."

p. 179, the definition of metafiction, "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

p. 180 "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again."

p. 192 "When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends."

p. 225 "But this too is true: stories can save us....in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."

Reading Journal

Go me! I got a chapter into "Dream Power" and then misplaced the book. Haven't seen it for a week. Haven't torn my life apart looking for it, either. I wanted to read "Indian Lawyer" before I loaned it to a friend I had mentioned it to. From what I remembered about the book, I thought he might have liked it. But it had been a while (5 years or so) since I had read it and wanted a refresher. So my plan was just to read that as my random.

I started reading it at the blood drive this morning. I got maybe 5 pages in and noticed that every page had had a swear word on it. Considering it begins with inmate conversations and most of them were of the tamer variety, I chose not let it stick. But then I saw the mother of all swear words and put the book back in my purse. I've gotten a lot more particular about what I read. Which will probably mean an impending purging of my library.

I'm just glad I read it before I loaned it to my friend, though. I'd hate to be responsible for exposing him to that language.

But that means I'm back to last week: Only my Old. Which I can't read right now because I'm not supposed to do any heavy lifting for 5 hours, and the hardbound complete works of Thomas Hardy would probably qualify. So I'm back to my shelves to pick out a Random. Maybe I should re-read "Coming of Age in Mississippi."

Writing Journal, Poetry

I've been having a lot of dreams lately. For about 3 weeks now. I mean, like, a lot. At least 10 a week. It's been exhausting, mentally speaking. And the vast majority of them are not pleasant. They aren't frightening or night terrors or anything-there are no hooded figures chasing me around at night-but I've been feeling panicked while dreaming. Like needing to leave a particular place or being concerned about someone else in the dream.

I'm used to my dreams having an impact on my life, but never at this frequency.
I'm also feeling a little stressed tonight, since I found out I have to put together a 16 page magazine/newspaper this week while going about my daily life.
So I decided to write a poem about it. I don't know why I chose the title "Hyperventilate," so if you've got a better one, feel free to shoot it at me.


Hyperventilate
I've been lost inside myself.
I don't know how I got here,
Or what purpose this trip is serving,
But I need to get out.
And fast!

My ears feel like they're
Caught in a vice grip.
My dreams are getting
To be too much.

There's not enough time in the day
For me to deal with their unpleasantness.
Why can't the panic attack me in waking hours?
Why must it assault me in my sleep,
When I am most powerless against it?

Why does my subconscious think it fair to
Heap this on me once a year?

Reading Journal

I finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance today while on the treadmill after work. It had some quoteables, but my interest in it fizzled out for the last 1/4 of the book. The last couple of chapters piqued me up again, but for the most part it was all in the beginning.

I'll try to pick out the quotes this week. I'll blog out my excuse on my "home blog." (Too lazy to insert a link.)

Time to shelve Zen and the Art of MM (after I quote it, of course) and move on to the New.
I wish it could be the 2010 BCR (which I've barely looked at, shamefully), but that leaves me without a purse book. So Diary of a Wimpy Kid it is. Maybe I'll have it finished by the time it hits redbox. Won't that be nice?

Reading Journal

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I don't have the time at the moment to go over all of the intriguing and marvelous quotations I've discovered in this book since the last time I posted. But I would like to share with you a story involving it.

I like it when a book can be applicable to everyday life and when it easily connects to current circumstances. (I've also been liking a lot of alliteration as of late.) Since this is my purse book, I had it with me when I went to help a friend fix his car. Some seemingly minor thing got messed up and it snowballed. The nut got stripped, so we had to make a run to the hardware store. Then we had to make a run to another hardware store because the first one didn't have any. It got rather frustrating.

After the part was satisfactorily fixed, my friend took the car for a test drive. I read while he was gone. Here is a portion of what I read (beginning on page 272); you can decide whether or not it applied to the situation at hand:

I like the word "gumption: because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along....I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
...
A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption.
...
The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it. Biut it's nothing exotic. That's why I like the word.
...
If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool. If you haven't got that you might as well gather up all the other toold and put them away, because they won't do you any good.
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven't got it there's no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there's absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. it's bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.
...
...Throughout the process of fixing the machine things always come up, low-quality things, from a dusted knuckle to an accidentally ruined "irreplaceable" assemply. these drain off gumption, destroy enthusiasm and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things "gumption traps."
There are hundreds of different kinds of gumption traps....I know it seems as though I've stumbled into every kind of gumption trap imaginable. What keeps me from thinking I've hit them all is that with every job I discover more. Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.

Now go back and read that through again. Only every time you see "motorcycle maintenance," replace it with "life."