From https://www.facebook.com/OccupyWallSt

Stop This Madness

Back to the topic that got me starting writing this blog: guns.  Adam Gopnik writes this at the New Yorker site:

I don’t think I’ve ever been as heartbroken by anything as I was, last night, by the video of Richard Martinez, whose twenty-year-old son, Christopher, a college student at the University of California Santa Barbara, had been murdered the day before. Christopher and six others were killed in a mass shooting near campus. That I have a twenty-year-old son who is also a college student makes an empathetic response easy, almost obligatory—but I suspect that many others felt the same way, and that they felt this way because they were hearing a hard truth spoken clearly. Martinez, almost overcome with a grief that he knows and we know will never fade, not for as long as he lives, still struggled to speak sanely in that moment. And so there was something almost heartening amid the heartbreak. Richard Martinez, in the height of his grief, somehow did the hardest thing there is, and that is to find the courage to speak a painful truth: “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A.,” he said. “They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, ‘Stop this madness; we don’t have to live like this?’ Too many have died. We should say to ourselves: not one more.”

Browsing in the library, I found the book above.  It contains pictures of meals from fifty novels including Lolita, The Bell Jar, Bllueberries for Sal and the meal below from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 

Each meal picture is accompanied by a relevant passage from the book and some miscellaneous facts about the book and/or the foods in the picture.  The miscellany for this picture includes the fact that Blomkvist and Lisbeth consume thirty to forty sandwiches in the course of the novel.  I don’t remember the sandwiches, but I remember that one teaspoon of milk was usually added to the espresso.

The author, aptly named Fried, cooked and photographed the meals pictured in this book  It’s a great reading diary, and it inspires me to pay more attention to the food I read about and imagine how I might arrange it for a photograph.

This video of young Iranians dancing to Pharrel's William's "Happy" illustrates a huge cultural gap between authorities in Iran and their own people.  Sad.  Just in case you haven't heard, they were arrested for this sacrilege.  More details at The Dish and other places as well.

"There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun." Thomas Merton 

Carrie Newcomer posted this today.  I wish I could see this shining sun more often.

 

Walk It

Last Saturday, I walked ten miles of the Kal-Haven Trail (connecting Kalamazoo and South Haven, Michigan) with my daughter and our friend Wendy.  Sometimes I just need a long walk.