Endless Knots

September '07 book club: The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint

Further to my promise of posting all titles for the storied (ha!) Fiction Book Club of which we are members, September's book is The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall. No opinion to post as I haven't read it and will have to miss book club due to conflicting speaking engagement.

This just in from Meg Kearney, Director of Solstice Summer Writers Program and MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College: "The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is one of my favorite novels of the last 10 years. The book also features one of the most provocative first sentences in American literature:"

If I could tell you only one thing about my life, it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.

The five-minute headstand

Drawing from Yoga.net.au

A friend who's new to yoga asked this: "What happens in a five-minute headstand?" Coincidentally, I'd asked myself the same question the previous day during the four minutes I managed to hold headstand.

Minute 1: As slowly as you can, measure and place perfect triangle with forearms, interlace fingers, place top of head on floor, walk toes toward body until feet naturally lift, bend knees, raise torso, straighten legs, roll pelvis under, extend spine, distribute weight evenly along forearms, watch every little wobble.

Minute 2: Remember you're supposed to be using abs, notice clenched jaw, drooping shoulder, scrunched forehead, circulation stopping in gripping hands. Let all those go then realize you're wobbling again.

Minute 3: Pull up through spine (though you're upside down). Oh, remember to breathe. Calmly, slowly, inhale, exhale and for one very sublime moment you are completely relaxed, just resting, no effort. At which point...

Minute 4: Wobble wobble, weight rolls from elbows to sides of hands (and back), legs very anxious to come down, control, control, use the abs, very slowly bend knees, even more slowly straighten legs, very lightly touch toes to ground...and you are down.

Question to bloggers about updating content in posts

What do you do when you learn more about something you've written? Write a new post with a trackback or update the original one?

IT spending as percentage of revenue?

Does it make sense to key IT spending directly to revenue? An email from a colleague spotlights perhaps unanticipated consequences of this policy: No more telecommuting. Despite the fact that a large majority of the company's employees (2:1) work most directly with people in distant locations. Now this global IT company is requiring everyone to come into work. Got it? You drive into an office to work with people oceans away. Costs more to support IT from people's homes than from central locations? I don't get this.

"Tiny to-do lists" at Web Worker

Good thinking again at Web Worker by Leo Babuata, this time on the dreaded to-do list: make them tiny. Here. Anyone remember the "Few Big Rules" from the '90s? These two ideas should get together. 

Dinner with Sophia Bracy Harris

We had the pleasure last night of having dinner here at our house with our dear friend, Sophia Bracy Harris, co-founder and executive director of FOCAL (Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama). For the past couple of decades, Sophia, a MacArthur Genius award recipient, has provided women with the skills to rise out of poverty. By-products: children with access to quality day-care while their parents can work. Over the years, Sophia's organization has developed programs that build community, dissolve racism, and develop leadership in both adults and teens.

As a young high school student in the segregated US South, Sophia was  one of the first children to integrate Alabama schools. Her family's home was firebombed.

We met Sophia in 1991 when she joined the Calvert Social Investment Fund Advisory Council, where we'd been members for a decade. I was immediately impressed with Sophia as a systems thinker and a calm presence in contentious conversations, which we had a few of over the years at the Advisory Council (which, to its members' disappointment, was disbanded in 2006).

When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, the first person I thought of was Sophia. Many of her FOCAL clients live in areas still devastated by the hurricane. With Reed Montague, a talented staff person at Calvert, I helped mount a fund drive for FOCAL's Katrina Fund. A fair amount (never enough) money poured in quickly, providing insurance deductibles and the like for those with lives irreparably altered by Katrina.

FOCAL celebrates its 35th anniversary this year. Family, friends, and colleagues: please click here.

And, enjoy this. Tania Burger, who serves as Organization Developer for FOCAL, brought dinner to our house (the best of guests), so delicious that Pasta Lover asked Tania to share the recipe:

Carolyn Goodman remembrance on NPR today

There will be a clip remembering Carolyn today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Listen if you see this in time. Otherwise, click to hear.Very nice, personal reminiscence from Margot Adler, who knew Carolyn for many years, and captures her spirit and the experience of walking into her apartment.

One more piece worth reading, an interview with Carolyn in Jewish Currents from 2005, shortly after the trial that convicted one of those responsible for the murder of her son and two others.

Newsday: "Bellevue hospital makes move from medicine to manuscripts"

Brush off all your short stories, poems, essays, novels, and memoirs about illness, writer friends. Turns out Monique Doyle Spencer's having secured a hospital as her publisher may be a trend.

New York's Bellevue Hospital, at 271 the oldest such institution in America--and one associated with madness--now doubles as a publisher, including of fiction no less. The hospital has launched its own imprint, Bellevue Literary Press, according to Jennifer Peltz's piece in today's Newsday. So on I googled and found  "Unexpected Brand Name for Books: Bellevue" by Julie Bosman in the March 1, 2007, New York Times. Four books came out last Spring; four more are due this fall:

The Bellevue Literary Press sprung from the Bellevue Literary Review, a journal that was founded in 2000. Dr. [Jerome] Lowenstein, the journal’s nonfiction editor, recruited private donors to finance the imprint, raising at least $500,000 to be doled out over a four-year period. The imprint operates on a relatively shoestring budget, paying its authors advances that are usually less than $5,000, [Erika] Goldman, [the imprint’s editorial director] said.

“The types of books we’re publishing are books that we’re proud of, but they’re not commercially oriented books,” she said. “We don’t have any illusions about making a fortune. We’re in it for love and art.”

Take a look at Bellevue Literary Review ("We invite submissions of previously unpublished works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health and healing," says its website.") and wish me luck. With a few keystrokes, I just submitted "Feeling Numb," an essay about multiple sclerosis.

PS to Richard Selzer fans: He's judge of this year's nonfiction contest, deadline already passed.

My weekly post on Roland Merullo's Boston Globe column

I guess I should just set a timer reminding me to post. Every Monday for the past however many, the supremely talented Roland Merullo has had a worth-reading column in The Boston Globe. Today's "No burgers, but still nifty," has those laugh-out-loud moments that Roland is famous for (but, when you read some of his books, be prepared for the ones that leave you in a weeping heap, e.g. In Revere, In Those Days' readers: remember the toast?). Roland has an eye for the absurd, in this case, foreign tourists who don't appreciate the food in Italy, to which I say, are these people actually humans?

And...I have to praise another friend's column in The Globe from yesterday, "Drive Calmly," by Monique Spencer Doyle. Here she manages to capture what most of us are thinking - when those humongous SUVs, with the drivers on cell phones, cut in front but just before a bicyclist narrowly misses flying over your windshield. OK, she didn't mention either of these but I find myself screaming more than I like at the  people in the very large vehicles with phones tucked under their chins - and possibly smoking - while cutting me off. AAARRRRGGHHH. Monique is hands-down one of the funniest writers on earth. Any writer who can leave readers in stitches about breast cancer -- and still nail one truth after another -- is one-of-a-kind. As I've said before, if you know anyone with any cancer - or any life-threatening illness - or know anyone who has, does, or might (which would be everyone), buy multiple copies of "The Courage Muscle: A Chicken's Guide to  Living with Breast Cancer." Proceeds go to the cancer gift shop in the hospital where she was treated (and which published her book).

Parental controls

So all of us have topics that kind of set us off, right? Stuff that comes up about which, if you're so fortunate as to have them, your kids say, "Oh, Mom. Don't bother with that. It just upsets you." And then the next 14 times you mention this thing that bugs you, they patiently say, "Mom, promise me you won't bother with that again, ok?" And then you promise and of course something else incredibly irritating related to the thing that sets you off happens, which, naturally, makes you complain for the 15th time, at which point even your son-in-law starts screaming, saying, "You promised us you wouldn't get involved with that again..." And on it goes. I'm certain there's not a single other parent reading whose kids have ever reprimanded her/im in this way.

Sooooo....in the 16th conversation, my very capable techie-foodie-amazingly sensible daughter says, "That settles it. Time for the parental controls. I'm going to fix your computer so that any time this [unmentionable, unspeakably aggravating] topic comes up, it will be screened out." Which is why I can't even type the word that peeves me so, because if I do type it, like here,   , this is what happens.

Since I first posted this on Sunday, I've had several conversations with people asking WHAT IS IT? How about posting your conjectures below? Careful readers of the previous paragraph, no cheating!