River Walking |
Kerri Ladish is a writer/Lit. nerd/wannabe dirty hippie living in Washington State. When she's not telling stories, she's probably telling (really awful) jokes. In no particular order Kerri loves: using her words, being underwater, getting lost in the woods, felt (and real) mustaches, puns, porters, pine trees, pugs, (alliteration, and) well-timed cinematic montages. She thinks in t-shirt slogans, quotes movies like it's her job (it isn't), and really believes Moby-Dick surpasses all the hype. She probably thinks you're pretty neat. (You can also find Kerri here, here, here, and oh yeah: here, too.) |
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I don’t particularly dig puppets (or, ahem, Muppets), or ventriloquism of any variety—a fact which I mostly attribute to watching horrible horror movies with my much-older stepsisters when I was much too young to understand the improbability of inanimate objects suddenly springing to life to attack me like they attacked that nice policewoman in The Tommyknockers (why Stephen King, whyyyy?)—but I’ll forever make an exception for Jason Segel and “Dracula’s Lament.”
Happy! Monday, friends.
Bonus video because today felt like it needed a little dose of Jack Black.
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Notes
from The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan
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NotesToday in library ooh-la-la-ing…
The “Old” Main Library. The Main Library has occupied a prominent position in downtown Cincinnati since 1874, when a new building was constructed at 629 Vine Street. Considered the most magnificent public library building in the United States at the time, “Old Main” featured one element similar to today’s library: a towering atrium with a skylight ceiling…The building closed in 1955, when the “New Main Library,” located at 800 Vine Street, opened.
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"The flowers must have been the latest generation of perennials, whose ancestors were first planted by a woman who lived in the ruins when the ruins were a raw, unpainted house inhabited by herself and a smoky, serious husband and perhaps a pair of silent, serious daughters, and the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw, bare lot with its raw house sticking up from the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something and here is just as outrageous as there because in either place (in any place) it seems like an interruption, an intrusion on something that, no matter how many times she read in her Bible, Let them have dominion, seemed marred, dispelled, vanquished once people arrived with their catastrophic voices and saws and plows and began to sing and hammer and carve and erect. So the flowers were maybe a balm or, if not a balm, some sort of gesture signifying the balm she would apply were it in her power to offer redress."
Paul Harding, from Tinkers
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"Let me close with a word about process. There’s a common notion that self-discipline is a freakish peculiarity of writers — that writers differ from other people by possessing enormous and equal portions of talent and willpower. They grit their powerful teeth and go into their little rooms. I think that’s a bad misunderstanding of what impels the writer. What impels the writer is a deep love for and respect for language, for literary forms, for books. It’s a privilege to muck about in sentences all morning. It’s a challenge to bring off a powerful effect, or to tell the truth about something. You don’t do it from willpower; you do it from an abiding passion for the field. I’m sure it’s the same in every other field.
Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong…There’s nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn’t against nature, and it isn’t against human nature. It’s what we’re here to do."Annie Dillard
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“What’s your favorite planet? Mine’s the sun.”*
Thinking a lot about the sun today and the way even the most desolate of physical and metaphorical places are always touched by it, if not often, then eventually.
The sun,—the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man—burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.
(Lines first penned by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist)
*Just in case you’re unfamiliar. You’re welcome.
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Notes 15 of the Greatest Literary Mustaches“Gaze into the abyss of Nietzsche’s walrus-handlebar mustache.”
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"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
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Notes"Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
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Notes Those Visits Home, the Way the YoungThose visits home, the way the young
come back and still follow you around
or find you on the bed reading
or writing, to lie down at an angle orsit cross-legged. No secret between you,
not even trouble quite though
it isn’t ordinary, the way the world unravels
through them: what he said, what shenever, who traveled where, that things-
how exactly-splinter and break
and cut. It trails off then. Both of you,
which one to speak but thinkingbetter of it. And the book is just a prop,
what you were writing perfectly weightless
in this silence. Child, oh fully no longer,
out there tangling, untangling.-Marianne Boruch, from The Book of Hours
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“Vulnerability is absolutely essential to wholehearted living… It is our most accurate measurement of courage.”— Researcher-storyteller Brené Brown,...
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“Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, ‘Lighthouses’ as the...”
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“In the beginning everything I said exploded. I would say: I am holding a glass of ice water & the glass of ice water would explode. I would mumble...”
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“If we have goals and dreams and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don’t want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when...”
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YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY.
Except for the part about not wearing cycling clothing to church. We’re still on board with...
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“We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or...”
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FEAR AND TREBLE(ing)
last night, C and I decided to take a walk. At some point, there was a hilly knoll, where someone had to take a pee behind a...
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Things are so hard to figure out
when you live from day to day
in this feverish and silly world.
The road is life.
What’s in store for me
in the...
