Month: December 2008

I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn last night.  This book is a masterpiece and I’m feeling a little annoyed that it wasn’t assigned when I was in school, and so many other inferior books were. Among other things it is pretty much the most perfect coming of age book EVER, so much better than the coming of age book I had to read (A Separate Peace), and it would have been so helpful to me at the time.  Oh well.  At least I had The Outsiders.

My to-read list just keeps growing and growing.  I just added the following thanks to a 3QuarksDaily link:

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao
Night work
Flat Earth News
Quantum : Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
The Gone-Away World

Here is another night shot from my roof.  I love New York City chimneys.

Back from the library, where the stacks were closed even though I checked the website before I left. It was okay, I had some online research to so, from databases only accessible to me from the library, but still! This always happens to me. I love it there though.  I want to work there, but so do a lot of other people I imagine, and I don’t have the appropriate degrees. 

I found some funny answers I gave in a 1996 interview.  Funny to me I should say. And so me.  I love that I gave these answers.

What are the sources of your best and most original ideas?

Disappointment. Longing.

Where do you find inspiration?

Success is very inspiring but I would keep going even if everything I did failed. Fear of death, maybe? The promise of sex?

I added a link to the jewelry of Kim Sujovolsky Marrero, (Aly Sujo’s niece). She dedicated one line to him, and there’s a bunch of photographs of Woodstock. Aly always told her that her rings looked like something that came out of the movie Dune (I see it). The work is beautiful.

On a whole other note, a friend on Facebook sent pointers to a site called
Fuck You Penquin, which was cracking me up for a while. Thank you, Beth.

And this one I got from 3QuarksDaily, 50 Things We Know Now (We Didn’t Know This Time Last Year): 2008 Edition.

I went to this club occasionally in the early 80’s.  It was always a little terrifying to me, in a fun way.  People were so over the top here.  Dancing on the bar near naked, etc.  Plus, the neighborhood late at night was very iffy then.  I saw my first dead body not far from here (okay, that was not fun).