The movie and the book are both amazing. Its one of the few instances I’d recommend both in whatever order. While the movie embellishes the stories told in his book, adding and subtracting characters for whatever reason and deals much more in the hopeless portion of his struggle than the book for cinematic purposes, it makes up for it by being visually stunning. Everything was enriched by the so-beautiful-it-breaks-your-heart cinematography, the perfect handling of the flash backs, the way the movie seemed to be paced perfectly ebbing and flowing like the ocean.

The book on the other hand is just simply amazing. Bauby uses his words to inspire hope, despair, the power of imagination. So much so that twenty pages in I was blinking back tears. You can see the lavish meals and the wonderful trips. You dream each dream and live each memory with him. You can feel the pain at not being able to ruffle his son’s hair. All of this told with wit, humor and aplomb. All never ceasing to be amazing, not simply because of the means with which the story was told but because of it’s sheer power and magnitude. I didn’t want to stop reading it and once I finished I wanted to pick it up and read it again and again. I found myself pouring over passages lest I missed the subtle meaning of each line.

I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?

Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passages of time: rose picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark…I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.

It will keep the vultures at bay.

*     *     *

From the Chapter: Twenty to One

(my favorite passage I chose because in the movie the imagery of the iceberg breaking away with the narration behind brought tears to my eyes)

The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mirthra-Grandchamp is the women were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but fail to bet on the winner.

**heading to the at&t store in the morning to replace what I believe is simply a defective sim card.

A few years ago I loaned it to someone who wrote in the margins, underlined passages, tore the spine and kept it for a year before returning it. Oft times things of that nature, personal notes in books I find interesting only because they hold a bit of a person and a bit of their mystery (though less so when the book happens to be mine). It leaves questions and doors and windows in someone else’s psyche. Here is what she underlined :

‘You’ll get over it…’ It’s the cliches that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it. The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over…This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

I’m crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow were any blasé thing takes its place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible–like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one. The people down there in the shadow are happy about that. At last, at last, everything’s ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last…

Toni Morrison, Jazz

I very much like this word. The way the “o” brushes against the hard consonant, K. The brush of your tongue against the top of your mouth when rounding out the word with “ta.”

I like it because as one gets older, as life begins to complicate (as life does) a lot more elements that delve into the realm of mokita seems to materialize.

…If we agree never to mention what happens, its almost as if it never did…

I like it because I was lying in bed and thinking of mokita kept me awake enough to write briefly to you about it.

good night,
good luck,

teeny

And then comes the funny part…they just stood there and asked me whether I wrote love letters. Everything, boys, I told them, setting the file on the floor and filling my glass with Los Suicidas mezcal again, letters from mothers to their children, letters from children to their fathers, letters from women to their husbands in prison, and letters from lovers, of course, which are the best, either because they’re so innocent or so steamy, everything mixed together as it is at the druggist’s counter and sometimes the writer adds something of his own devising.

(also reading Happiness as my little excursion beachy summer time read.)

This was my favorite book of all.

My mother bought this big boy home around 1998 from her job. It was one of my constant companions through late night reading sessions, attempting to grasp concepts that I didn’t understand. There are still quotes written on the inside cover, barely there in pencil and pressed flowers from an event I can’t recall hidden in its pages.

She still jokes that I used to read the dictionary. I was pursuing language at the time. Trying to grasp it. Eager to know as many words as possible. I’d flip through it sometimes, land on a word that I’d never seen, flip through to look up another word that was in the definition, get caught on a word at the corner of the page. I’d write it down so I’d remember it later.

In recent years I found the internet more convenient (google define:dictionary) but I miss that immediate discovery. Reading with a dictionary on hand. I hate to read near a computer as it becomes and endless hole of distraction: dictionary.com becomes gmail, becomes flickr, becomes twitter, becomes facebook becomes two hours later and I’ve not progressed a page. What’s lost are all the words that are skipped over, meant to be came back to, but of course forgotten. I’m reading more but I don’t feel like my grasp of the language is growing.

Anne Sexton….

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said…
but did not.

I’m not completed, I’ve only stopped because it felt like I was completely immersed in water and I wanted to lift my head up to do the things I need to prepare for the night: charge my phone, write a bit, post a bit, send a few short messages. I’m not sure why I’m always so compelled to write about what I’m reading while I’m in the middle of it rather than after, though I suspect it has something to do with my desire to communicate excitement as close to the experience as possible. Needless to say I’m endless pleased.

Whenever I read a book written by a foreign writer, I always wish I could read it in the language in which it was originally published.

After checking out a few new performers, I got turned onto Jessie Harris* who wrote the soundtrack for the movie (performed by Feist, Norah Jones, Cat Power and more), watched a preview for the movie and decided that I needed to buy the book this afternoon.

Its not the most well written book I’ve read, the sentences lack a bit of complexity and feel, at times unnatural (or maybe a bit too Hemingway-esque) . And yet…I’m enjoying the book mainly because its a semi-autobiographical and I’ve been reading it conversationally. I picture Ethan’s nuanced voice, the way that he carries himself, something in the words tells me that a bit weight and the strength of this book lies in the perceived knowledge of his personality. The story also carries along and progresses quite nicely, its not drivel. Its obvious that he’s read quite a few books and he’s not just hacking about, using his star power as a leverage.

(*performing at the Rockwood on Saturday, hear a song here)

Update: I finished the book. I was wrong, its a little terrible once the relationship ends.

The Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

When Frances Steloff was president of the American Booksellers Association she told me that my bookstore had drifted into being the sort of place that might have been designed by the world’s greatest architects. I have let my imagination run wild with the result that a stranger walking the streets of Paris can believe he is entering just another of the bookstores along the left bank of the Seine but if he finds his way through a labyrinth of alcoves and cubbyholes and climbs a stairway leading to my private residence then he can linger there and enjoy reading the books in my library and looking at the pictures on the walls of my bedroom.

…

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions – just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”. I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world.

- George Whitman

If we do not respect ourselves … we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Hellen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous…

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something so small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — their lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

“And lead us not into temptation” as the scripture goes. I’ve got to have a little more self respect, when it comes to my writing, my friendships, my relationships. I’ve got to learn to say no and distance myself. I cannot be apart of it all and still give time to my writing.

Just my thoughts on today.