Three Things

1. All the Pretty People by Ariel Gore.

I confess, I know the writer. (You may too- she started Hip Mama.) Right before I moved to New Zealand I took her class at the Attic Institute in Portland. I don't know why I signed up, and I felt like a fraud being there, but I eventually became comfortable enough in the class and really enjoyed it. So her book is a bunch of little stories (good for people like me who like to take reading breaks at work, or someone with kids, or a regular person too). The stories are both chronological and creative, and I could identify with a lot of the subject matter, as someone who grew up not traditionally pretty while wondering and trying to figure out what it would take to be considered attractive, and then led a semi-alternate adult existence. Ariel Gore has not led a mainstream life, but I think most people would identify with her thoughts. The book is not really about being pretty or not, but more about thought processes surrounding life events as she grew up in the SF Bay Area. (That's her on the cover.)

2. Listening to: Portishead's Glorybox.

Portishead: spooky, dreamy, artsy music. Perfect for intermediary life times, when the future is a black hole and a fuzzy dream at the same time. "This is the beginning of forever and ever..."

3. Weather & Life.

It's kinda summer here. 19C today. I ran the fields, hot and sweaty. It felt good even though I didn't want to go. The lame-duck-sitting-and-waiting thing that happens when your job is over but not quite makes me feel generally sluggish. I just want to sit and do nothing. Maybe with some chocolate. It's like I'm holding my breath until the end arrives. But it's a bit illogical. I should just keep living and enjoying my life as if it were going to continue, because it will, just in a different way. I'm not really waiting for anything.

"Out Stealing Horses" by Per Petterson

A novel which was published in the States by a small nonprofit publishing house in St. Paul, MN, "Out Stealing Horses", is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Its author is out of Norway. The book is quiet and understanded, like his home country. But storyline is strong and deep, and has a way of running through your thoughts over and over, weeks after you've finished the book. Which explains how I was able to read it two times in one weekend and enjoy the details which I had missed the first time through. It's rare that I would read a novel twice.

I've since ordered two more of his books from the library, and look forward to the next little treasures of literature from Norway.

NY Times review of "Out Stealing Horses":
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/books/review/McGuane.html?ref=books#

Graywolf Press:
http://www.graywolfpress.org/

"To be free, you must see things as they are."

From Paul Theroux's, "The Elephanta Suite".

"Not a journey anymore, not an outing or an interlude, but seeing the world; not taking a trip, not travel with a start and a finish, but living her life. Life was movement"

In the last few days, I've been sipping the words of this book, a mind-holing read from Paul Theroux. He also writes non-fiction, travel accounts, but this was a fictional story set in India, a country which changed everything in my mind about life and travel, in the three short weeks I was there in 2005. This book feels India.

I've been sitting at home all morning, mostly on my orange sofa, with fresh French press coffee, beans from Stumptown in Portland, remnants of my mom and sister's visit. Reflecting on time and space, after finishing my read. Radiohead. Elliott Smith. Pearl Jam. Others on the Ipod. Sunlight streams. Pajamas remain.

"Life is movement." A perfect quote in this time of life. My family gone. My grandma died.

I am here. Still and quiet.

Wondering sometimes what it's all about. What is next. Planning trips. Istanbul? Athens? Tunisia? Bucharest? Three-day weekends coming up, plans should be made.

I've injured my foot. So the Prague marathon is a big question mark.

But life is movement, right? I am moving... even when standing still.

"You went away from home and moved among strangers. No one knew your history or who you were; you started afresh, a kind of rebirth. Being whoever you claimed to be, was a liberation."

Living here, in Germany, on my seventh month now, brings questions, only occasionally, what will happen next? Thinking about taking another year or two to travel when my contract is up. Or a change in career. How not to move back to the States.

That part about moving amongst strangers. No expectations. Maybe that's why I have the best relationship with my family when I am away. We are more friendly, less expectational.

Over here, I am free to be whoever I want here. It's true. I am more me than ever. Calm, free, peace.

From "Fugitive Places" by Anne Michaels

"We must carry each other. If we don't have this, what are we? The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light... It's a mistake to think it's the small things we control and not the large, it's the other way around! We can't stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident- or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see."


It's a book about a Jewish boy, Jakob, who survives WW2 hiding in a wall, though his family dies, is saved by a Greek man, Athos, and ferried off to an island off Greece, and his life that follows. I've only just begun, but already deeply intrigued.

Divisadero

"We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth." - Nietzsche

This quote was interwoven into the beautiful book, "Divisadero" by Michael Ondaatje, which I recently read in two days' time. I couldn't stop reading it. It's one of those books that's hard to explain, without an obvious plotline, and when it was finished I wondered how that was the ending. Kind of like life I think.