I am in New York! This city is great but I'm exhausted after being here touristing for 6 days so I'm kind of glad we're going home tomorrow. But I definately want to come back to experience more. I bringing some books home, I bought them on Barnes & Noble on 2nd Ave/54th Str.
Animal Farm - George Orwell
To kill a mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Reading Group - Elizabeth Noble
How to write your own life story - Lois Daniel
More blogs on: new york
It's 5.30 in the morning and I can't sleep. I woke up half an hour ago and decided there was no use staying in bed. So I stepped up and made coffe and started to read som blogs insteads. In Emmas blog I stumbeled on this test which I had to try - and found out I'm...
You're Alice's Adventures in Wonderland!
by Lewis Carroll
After stumbling down the wrong turn in life, you've had your mind opened to a number of strange and curious things. As life grows curiouser and curiouser, you have to ask yourself what's real and what's the picture of illusion. Little is coming to your aid in discerning fantasy from fact, but the line between them is so blurry that it's starting not to matter. Be careful around rabbit holes and those who smile to much,
and just avoid hat shops altogether.
Which book are you?
I have to admit I haven't read Alice in Wonderland, although it is considered a classical. Maybe I should do that now? By the way, I'm hoping to get accepted at an summer college class in English, starting in three weeks from now! It focuses on grammar and translation and should be a good thing for me in order to improve my language skills.
I just finnished reading The bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I can just say one thing - this is a wonderful book about love and please read it! Oops, that was two things. Anyway, I'm so happy I finally did read it, it has been put away in my book shelve for years without me paying any attention to it. Until a couple of days ago.
Apart from being a wonderful story about love, the book got me thinking about some things:
Infidelity When do you cross the line? Is it okey inviting a man for dinner when you're husband is not home? Is infidelity only the-going-to-bed part?
Love Is it worth giving up the love of your life becuase you are afraid the village gossip would break down the family if you create a scandal by running away from home?
Honesty After her death, Francesca writes a letter to her both children Carolyn and Michael, explaining about the love affair she had with Robert Kincaid all those years ago and how much it meant to her. She also explains that without meeting him, having those wonderful 4 days together, maybe she wouldn't have been able to stay with them on the farm for such a long time. A affair that keeps the marriage together, what a contradiction. She askes them to understand this and to accept Robert as a part of their family. She ends her letter like this:
Robert Kincaid taught me what it was like being a woman in away that few women, maybe none, will ever experience. He was fine and warm, and he deserves, certainly, your respect and maybe your love. I hope you can give him both of those. In his own way, through me, he was good to you.
As a child I think I would have some difficulties understanding why my mother's lover should have a place in the family. But maybe that is possible? Then it definately deserves recognition. It's a way of looking at the family and its consisting parts that reminds me of the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger's theories.
Hellinger looks upon the family as a system and all persons within this system have to be recognised. If someone for some reason is shut out, this influences the whole system and most probably someone else will try and take that persons place. In this case, maybe Michael or Carolyn would feel their mothers lost love and somehow, without knowing, trying to compensate her. This leads to a disturbance in the system. Hellinger also includes former lovers. If a person was a big part of your life, he or she too deserve a place in the family.
After the first chock, maybe reading the letter Francesca left is a relief to her children. Now they finally get to know a part of her she shut them out of when she was alive. And Carolyn gets an explaination to the strange fight about the pinkt dress they had when she was a teenager.
More blogs on The bridges of Madison County:
Ingrid got an assignment to write a reader response about book.
Priyanka Kumar identifies herself with Robert Kincaid.
Catwomen mixes a review of the movie and the book.
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Shogun by James Clavell
Flashman by George McDonald Fraser
Belive it or not, I actually fetched all my old The Famous Five-books from my parents attic tonight. I loved the stories about George, Julian, Dick, Anne and Tim just as much as our teacher in school disliked them. She always tried to make us read other books but she didn't convince me, I must have read them all along with other Blyton-books such as The Rockingdown Mystery, Ring O'Bell Mystery and The Treasure Hunters.
Wow, those were the days! I wonder if they are as good now as when I was 10? I'll let you know... ;-)
11 p.m. He hasn't rung. Oh fuck. Am so confused.Whole dating world is like a hideous game of bluff and double bluff with men and women firing at each other from opposite lines of sandbags. Is as if there is a set of rules that you are supposed to sticking to, but no one knows what they are so everyone just makes up their own. Then you end up getting chucked because you didn't follow the rules correctly, but how could you be expected to, when you didn't know what they were in the first place?
My favorite French American started a bookworms' page and asks her readers to give her some book input by recomending 3-5 books.
It doesn't necessarily have to be your top 3-5 EVER, it could also be your top 3-5 recently, she explains.
I recomended The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. Original title in German, Der Vorleser. In Swedish, Högläsaren.
Everyone should read it. It's really, really good. I bought tre copies of the book last Christmas, two copies in Swedish for my mom and sister and one in German for my dad.
What books would you recommend?
Following a link from Erik Stattin I decided to register my last blogentry as a review of "Ögonblickets tyranni" at Bookcrossing.
You'll find it here.
My household god at the moment is Thomas Hylland Eriksen. I first stumbled upon him when taking a ethnology class a couple of years ago and two of his books was on the reading-list.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a social anthropologist at the university of Oslo and his latest book is called "Øyeblikkets tyranni. Rask og langsom tid i informasjonssamfunnet" or in its Swedish translation "Ögonblickets tyranni. Snabb och långsam tid i informationssamhället".
The topis is "fast and slow time" and Hylland Eriksen argues that "slow time" ought to be at the top of the wishlist for the inhabitants of the information society. He points out a phenomen which I have recognized in my own life, namely the breaking up of time in smaller and smaller pieces.
Fast time, in contradiction to slow time, contains a lot of interruption. The continues time between phonecalls, sms, meetings, faxes und und und is short and getting shorter every day.
Hylland Eriksen describes a normal day at the office. He reads Aftenposten while waiting for the green light on his way to work, reads a second newspaper while waiting for the elevator, turns his computer on and finds he has recived 21 new email since yesterday afternoon. He gets a cup of coffee and is about to start writing his book but only has to answer the phone and find som information on the Internet first. He is on the phone for a couple of minutes and then he doesn't find what he is looking for on the net and starts answering emails instead.
In a short second of self-knowledge, he realises this isn't gonna be a book unless he turns his computer off. He does that and starts taking notes by hand.
In the next sentence he admits that last part isn't really true, he did not write �yeblikkets tyranni by hand. But he makes his point anyway - this is what I do almost every morning.
I sit at my desk, coffee cup to the left, and I have a clear ambition. Despite this clear ambition, I get lost in the Internet djungle almost every day and often lose more then 45 minutes before I realise what I'm doing and try to get back on track.
So what is his point then?
That we all should throw our computers, cell phones and faxes away and return to writing with a quill?
Not really, he is no advocate of a world without Internet. He is not a nostalgic person who yearns for the long gone but safe peasant society where everybody lived in small villages and knew eachother.
His ambition is to make the unwanted effects of the information society visible and this is something I feel is important because I often feel as if I spread myself thin. I sometimes, or rather oft to be honest, want to turn everything off (cellphone, normal phone, computer) and get some time to think without getting input from all around all the time. I want "slow time"!
But speed is addictive and once you have become used to it, it's difficult to quit.
- Hello, my name is Steffanie and I'm a speed addict.
- Hello Steffanie!
"... but was has changed is that we have accepted that multiculturalism is here to stay. It's not going away, we will have to learn how to live forever with diffrence, with people who follow diffrent rules.
Living with diffrence is an art of life, one of the most difficult aspects of art of life because it's always disquieting, slightly frightening. You don't know how to behave, you are not sure what the situation is and if you really understand eachother well. You feel anxious, apprehensive... right? But now we know this situation will last..."
Zygmunt Bauman was being interviewed on tonight's Mosaik and said something like that (and much more). An old man in an armchair smoking his pipe. He looked just as wise as he must be and I can't wait to read "Modernity and the Holocaust" which I recently bought. I have wanted to read that book for a very long time and have a feeling it will become one of my favorites, just like Erich Fromm's "Escape from freedom".
Tomorrow I'm going with Elin to her film-history class because they are watching Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph des Willens" which I also have wanted to see for ages.
And then I better start writing my Estonian-article because on Monday at 12 o'clock it should be finnished...
