A Blog + Quotes
Growing Up Boomer
It wasn't as easy as you think! Thoughts and reminiscences from one member of the generation that went from words like "Love" and "Freedom" in the 60s to today's "WTF did we do wrong?"
Click on this link to go to Growing Up Boomer.
Note: the Education and Freedom and Educational Follies blogs have been discontinued; however, its posts may someday appear in book form, and some of the posts (the rantings of the seventy-something Boomer most likely to be found yelling at the TV) may be found as posts in Growing up Boomer.
Quotes
The Alexandria Quartet--Lawrence Durrell
"... we artists form one of those pathetic human chains which human beings form to pass buckets of water up to a fire, or to bring in a lifeboat. An uninterrupted chain of humans born to explore the inward riches of the solitary life on behalf of the unheeding unforgiving community; manacled together by the same gift ... And realizing this I was suddenly afflicted by a great melancholy and despair at recognizing the completely limited nature of my own powers, hedged about as they were by the limitations of an intelligence too powerful for itself, and lacking in sheer word-magic, in propulsion, in passion, to achieve this other world of artistic fulfillment."
L.G. Darley in Lawrence Durrell's novel, Clea published in The Alexandria Quartet.
The Shadow of the Wind--Carlos Ruiz Zafon
"When a library disappears, or a book shop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place (the Cemetery of Forgotten Books), its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend."
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck--William Souder
(For Steinbeck) "the main thing was to think about the characters until he could see them. Eventually he learned everything about them. Where they were from, how they dressed, what their voices sounded like, the shape and texture of their hands--the total picture. Once they were clearly visible to him, he started building their back stories, adding details and events to their lives from before he knew them. He wouldn't use all of this information, but it was important to have it in order to better gauge the characters, to the point where they stood free of his conscious involvement and began to think and act independently. Gradually, he said, they would begin to talk to him on their own, so that he not only heard them speaking but started to have an idea about why they said the things they did. As the characters came to life, they inhabited his thoughts day and night, especially just before he went to sleep. Then he could "let things happen to them" and study their reactions. Eventually, he reached a point where he started fitting them into the story he had begun. Once the characters were his full partners, that's when he started to write."
Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck--William Souder
"... a scholar named James Gray offered a more judicious review of Steinbeck's career ... Steinbeck, he wrote, was a powerful storyteller and a 'quintessential' dramatist. What the critics saw from book to book--but failed to detect as a linkage among all of them--was Steinbeck's anger. He was America's most pissed off writer. 'All his work,' Gray wrote, 'steams with indignation at injustice, with contempt for false piety, with scorn for the cunning and self-righteousness of an economic system that encourages exploitation, greed, and brutality.'"
Quote
(Waiting for the next discovery)