The art of memoir by Mary Karr

This is a good book. I meet people who ask you how to pick books. This one has a huge reading list at the end that I am temped to upload. But she also helps me to understand Nabokov so I am better able to appreciate him and why I would want to read him and his limits.

There are some memoirs she writes about I feel compelled to read. I want to read Nabokov and Hong Kingston so far.

Some of them I've read.

Some I'm not as interested.

I think my first draft is all tell and no show, this is about my 5th try at writing my memoir. I'm going to try and finish it, and then I can rewrite it to death.

This is a rich book, and I particularly liked Chapter 14 about false voicing and finding her own voice. She usually has short chapters, like Chapter 16 "The Road to hell is paved with exaggeration." I believe that. When I was supervisor in child welfare, and had to edit workers writing, I always crossed out the "very". There is also good editing and knowing when to stop.

Comments

Manet and Degas

Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special. In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review

Silo

This is a dark show that I'm reluctant to watch. Slow burn with reveals along the way. Lots of padding and important small details you have to pay attention to, which sometimes I don't because I'm looking at my phone. The TV competes with the phone. Either I'm playing chess, or another game, or surfing for news about my favorite soccer team NYCFC. They're supposed to sign some new players and can register them tomorrow, but the team usually doesn't do things in a timely way, they're messy. The first few episodes of the 10 episode first season are about the sherif and his wife, played by Rashid Jones . Then there's like a buffer action episode where the generator almost goes kaput. Then it becomes Longmire, a woman sheriff who doesn't know the protocols and rules, and doesn't care, she just wants truth and answers. Everyone lives in the Silo, it's huge and mysterious and you can't have relics, things from the past, that might clue you i...

Introduction

Robert B. Palmer's introduction to his translation of Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult (p. ix-xi) Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas, Can ye listen in your silence? Can your mystic voices tell us Where ye hide? In floating islands, With a wind that evermore Keeps you out of sight of shore? Pan, Pan is dead. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING The Dead Pan W H E N Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these lines which sound so pessimistic and so limited to any lover of the beauty and truth of Greek mythology, she had in mind a famous passage out of Plutarch's De Oraculorum defectu {Mor. 419 A-E) in which it was reported on good authority that Pan had died. But let Plutarch tell the story (Philip is speaking): As for death among such beings [i.e., deities], I have heard the words of a man who was not a fool nor an impostor. The father of...

Motley Kamuka

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