Let's focus on making this a nation of readers and the rest will follow.
~Carol Jago, Past President of National Council of Teachers of English (@CarolJago)
A defining characteristic of an Athenæum is to be a "venue for intellectual exchange" (Boston Athenæum website, retrieved 9/18/12). Playgrounds are venues for play, typically for children, outdoors. Both places of learning and growth are usually that -- physical places in the world. I'm a lifelong learner, and this is one of my blogs.
Friday, October 25, 2013
QotD
From the introductory praise pages for Focus by Mike Schmoker:
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Lesotho, 1988; To see things as they are
Inspired by The Atlantic: Andrew McCarthy's interview with travel writer Paul Theroux. See "I Hate Vacations" for the edited transcript online.
I had the great pleasure of traveling in Africa in 1988 -- in Johannesburg and across Lesotho. In Theroux's latest book, The Last Train to Zona Verde, he says "The window of Africa, like the window on a train rushing through the night, is a distorting mirror that partly reflects the viewer's own face."
Among the things that meant the most to me on that journey twenty-five years ago was the openness of so many of the people I met. For the few hours I spent in apartheid-era South Africa, a surprising number of people asked if I were American -- something about the way I interacted in a marketplace. In Lesotho, people in Maseru, in the village I visited and in the highlands were exquisitely kind. Women taught me the proper wearing of the Basotho blanket for an unmarried young woman, and taught me to balance water on my head to carry for cooking and bathing. Instead of greeting by asking one another how we were, we used the traditional Sesotho , which relates to where we were. How are you?/fine translated roughly as Where are you going (or coming from)?/A little ways down the road. Hello [Lumela] literally means Believe, and the other common greeting, Khotso, means Peace. The language differences, even more than those of Malaysia or other places I'd visited or lived, made me question my daily assumptions, and the generosity of the people made me question my good fortune.
-----
This post started out as a simple Quote of the Day from the close of McCarthy's interview with Theroux in The Atlantic [emphasis mine]:
"PT: ... To see things as they are makes you free--to see things as they are, not nostalgically, not as you wish they were. Just to see them."
I had the great pleasure of traveling in Africa in 1988 -- in Johannesburg and across Lesotho. In Theroux's latest book, The Last Train to Zona Verde, he says "The window of Africa, like the window on a train rushing through the night, is a distorting mirror that partly reflects the viewer's own face."
Among the things that meant the most to me on that journey twenty-five years ago was the openness of so many of the people I met. For the few hours I spent in apartheid-era South Africa, a surprising number of people asked if I were American -- something about the way I interacted in a marketplace. In Lesotho, people in Maseru, in the village I visited and in the highlands were exquisitely kind. Women taught me the proper wearing of the Basotho blanket for an unmarried young woman, and taught me to balance water on my head to carry for cooking and bathing. Instead of greeting by asking one another how we were, we used the traditional Sesotho , which relates to where we were. How are you?/fine translated roughly as Where are you going (or coming from)?/A little ways down the road. Hello [Lumela] literally means Believe, and the other common greeting, Khotso, means Peace. The language differences, even more than those of Malaysia or other places I'd visited or lived, made me question my daily assumptions, and the generosity of the people made me question my good fortune.
-----
PT: Everyone needs encouragement. I think you need someone to say, at some stage, particularly someone not in your family, "I read you" or "I saw you onstage"--whatever it is. "Good going. You've got it."
AM: Who did that for you?
PT: V.S. Naipaul. He said, "You'll be fine."----
This post started out as a simple Quote of the Day from the close of McCarthy's interview with Theroux in The Atlantic [emphasis mine]:
"PT: ... To see things as they are makes you free--to see things as they are, not nostalgically, not as you wish they were. Just to see them."
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Tuesday's quote of the day from les Mardistes:
From the Stéphane Mallarmé page on Wikiquote:
- Degas was discussing poetry with Mallarmé; "It isn't ideas I'm short of... I've got too many" [Ce ne sont pas les idées qui me manquent... J'en ai trop], said Degas. "But Degas," replied Mallarmé, "you can't make a poem with ideas. ... You make it with words." [Mais, Degas, ce n'est point avec des idées que l'on fait des vers. . . . C'est avec des mots.]
- From Degas, Manet, Morisot by Paul Valéry (trans. David Paul), Princeton University Press, 1960.
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