15 followers
143 daily readers
rank of 80
Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:
|
|
|
Work Report - This blog originally focused on work, but it's now focusing on the collection of quotes I've accumulated.
Mike Crowl blogs in two places on Orble, and more than two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
One last quote from Joy Cowley's book, Navigation. This time from pages 141/2.
It's not until we travel overseas that we become aware of New Zealand as a nation of readers. Here, even the smallest town has its library, its bookshop, its school where children are not merely taught to read, they are taught to love reading. Our education system makes full use of children's delight in story, their natural curiosity, sense of wonder, creativity and their expanding interest in language. It caters fro the different ways children learn, and is child-centred rather than teacher-directed. There is early emphasis on reading and its overflow into creative writing and art
[ Click here to read more ]
Joy Cowley in her memoirs, Navigation, discusses the bleakness of many New Zealand novels....(pages 108/9)
Over the next decade I wrote another four novels for Doubleday: Man of Straw, The Mandrake Root, Of Men and Angels, and The Growing Season, all set in New Zealand and all in our national literary genre, the bleak book. I believe it can be said that in New Zealand novels and films, the darkness is heavier than the light, and particularly in my own novels. The pages were so sodden with angst that they could be wrung out like handkerchiefs at a funeral. The later novels Classical Music and Holy Days were more balanced, but when I wrote them I had grown past the stage of therapy writing
[ Click here to read more ]
In her book, Navigation: a Memoir, New Zealand writer, Joy Cowley, talks about when she and her husband were young parents.
I'd read books on mothering and childcare, but instinct discarded most of the
rules. If a baby cried, he or she was picked up. A hungry baby was fed whatever the hours. Awake or asleep, the baby was seldom alone in the bedroom cot, but with me - lying in the clothes basket while I did the ironing, tied into a shawl when I walked down the farm to change the electric fence. At milking time, the baby was in a carrycot in the dairy, while the others played in a sandpit built for them on the other side of the yard rails
[ Click here to read more ]
Roger Ebert on the Occupy Movement:
My hesitation all along has come with uneasiness about the Occupy tactics. The idea of physically occupying public spaces--parks, plazas, malls and so on--is a questionable strategy. The notion of pitching tents, running kitchens and maintaining libraries on a quasi-permanent basis would have Saul Alinsky tearing his hair out. If you set out to do something that will obviously not work, you're setting yourself up for inevitable failure. Very few people are mentally or constitutionally able to live in a tent for long, especially with the approach of winter. Young and strong people can. Soldiers do. But the Occupy movement is intended to be populist, and a great many ordinary people have children, families and income requirements that make it inconvenient to camp out
[ Click here to read more ]
Jane Clifton writing in The New Zealand Listener on the state of things post-election:
So the left [Labour et al] has been far more successful at expanding its potential territory than the right [National]. Actually, let’s be even clearer about this: the right has been certifiably incompetent. So head-bashingly useless, in fact, that it ended up being accidentally saved by its worst enemies. Both John Banks [ACT] and Peter Dunne [United Future] should by now have written big smoochy thank-you cards to Winston, because he is the only reason they are in Parliament. Both were on course to lose their seats till the spectre of a rapidly fattening Winston forced National voters in Epsom and Ohariu to hold their noses and vote for the undeserving pair
[ Click here to read more ]
This is an extract from The Trope Teacher, the third of three novellas in
Chaim Potok's book, Old Men at Midnight. I like this idea that Chandal, a novelist, states, that a memory can be induced from a 'zero point.'
The other character, Benjamin Walter, is having trouble with his memoirs, for which he's been paid a substantial six-figure advance. But he can't get to grips with the earliest part of his life; it's somehow been blocked off. He is the first to speak:
[ Click here to read more ]
More Posts
446 Posts dating from December 2006
Email Subscription
Receive e-mail notifications of new posts on this blog:
|
|
|
Read More
Add Comments
Comments (2)
