Month: August 2008

Had a great dinner last night at the Blue Room with Kara and Bouff. It was ostensibly to celebrate my birthday (see cupcakes above which the girls adorably brought) but that didn’t feel fair as Kara just had a birthday and Bouff just took the bar! Passages all around.
It’s soul-edifying to be with Kara and Bouff; I feel definitively less alone just for having seen them. I am both blessed and proud to call such intelligent, engaged, thoughtful, funny, irreverent women my dear friends. It is still kind of a wonder to me that we are all mothers at this point, not to mention that Kara is a doctor and Bouff a lawyer! How far we’ve come from the drunken land of orange & black, dancing in the kitchen suite, and YY Doodles … and yet how close to that we remain. Thank God!

A friend recently told me he was reading Tom Robbins and it sent me looking for some quotes of his that I love.

All a person can do in this life is gather about him his integrity, his imagination, and his individuality – and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time. Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.

– both from Still Life With Woodpecker

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who’re part of the solution and those who’re part of the problem.

“I’m not sure if I can walk,” she said. “Then I’ll carry you.” “Is that what love is?”

… a bare museum dedicated to what each of us wants and cannot have and to the sadness and joy of that wanting.

My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

“You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”

– all from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

Every passive mollusk demonstrates the hidden rigor of introversion, the power that is contained in peace.

– both from Jitterbug Perfume

I may not be clear on what I want to be when I grow up, but Whit is. He advised today that he wants to be a tow truck driver. Specifically, “Tow Truck Driver Whitty.”

One thing my parents’ house in Marion has is books. Tons and tons of books. I often look at them, sometimes pulling something out to leaf through it. Just now I opened up the Book of Lists (that link is to a new edition – of course this one is original, dusty, and much less spiffy looking). Opening to a random page I found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 21 pieces of advice on living:

1. Worry about courage
2. Worry about cleanliness
3. Worry about efficiency
4. Worry about horsemanship
5. Don’t worry about popular opinion
6. Don’t worry about dolls
7. Don’t worry about the past
8. Don’t worry about the future
9. Don’t worry about growing up
10. Don’t worry about anyone getting ahead of you
11. Don’t worry about triumph
12. Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
13. Don’t worry about mosquitos
14. Don’t worry about flies
15. Don’t worry about insects in general
16. Don’t worry about parents
17. Don’t worry about boys
18. Don’t worry about disappointments
19. Don’t worry about pleasures
20. Don’t worry about satisfactions
21. Think about: What am I really aiming at?

This list strikes me as a curious mix of micro and macro. I don’t know that I agree with all of them, but it’s a side of the man we rarely saw.

I kept leafing through and found Clifton Fadiman’s 10 best books of fiction:

1. Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
2. Ulysses – James Joyce
3. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
4. Gargantua and Pantagruel – Francois Rabelais
5. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
6. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
7. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
8. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
9. The Brothers Karamazov – Fedor Dostoyevsky
10. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Notable to me is how few of these books I have read (only 7, 9, and 10) – and even how few of these writers have even sampled (have never read Fielding, Rabelais, Proust, Cervantes). There are several best novelists/best writers/best books lists but Fadiman’s seems to me the most authoritative and credible.

And then I discovered 60 celebrated persons and their brain radiation levels. Oscar Brunler invented a process to measure measured brain radiation, which he deemed an accurate accounting of personal evolutionary progress. 95% rated below 300, and “genius” was 500 or above. A sampling of the list:

1. Leonardo da Vinci – 720
2. Michelangelo – 688
13. Napoleon – 598
14. William Blake – 580
20. Greta Garbo – 538
25. Grigori Rasputin – 526
30. Pablo Picasso – 515
31. George Washington – 512
40. Thomas Edison – 470
43. Queen Victoria – 458
45. Henry Ford – 448
49. John F Kennedy – 421

While I am not smart enough (I am surely below 300 on this test) to assess the science here, it’s surely a fascinating list! Here I was thinking I was evolved because I was born with only two wisdom teeth.