a musing.
[Insert Sigh of Relief Here]
A list of things we have accomplished in the past five weeks:
1. Son’s First Communion
2. Daughter’s concert
3. Mother’s Day
4. Two parties of LI for neices’ Communions, different weekends.
5. Saw The Avengers - and LOVED it in 2D.
6. Print edition deadline - Top Quant Schools, yo.
7. Daughter’s Confirmation & party. Also celebrated son’s 8th birthday,
8. And a kidney stone - 4mm!
Over. Done. Complete.
What’s next? daughter’s graduation, nephew’s doctorate graduation from Dartmouth and then a retirement party for my sister-in-law. And then done!
Confessions of a Master Spy Novelist
You have an odd-looking word processor. Why not write on a computer?
This is an IBM Lexmark Wheelwriter. It’s a very different activity to hit the “g” key and have the “g” appear on the paper after the key has been hit. I like it so much I have a bunch of them. I stockpile them for parts. I do have to clean them with Q-tips and alcohol, where all you do with a computer is run a rag over it.
Do you sit down to write only when the spirit moves you?
Six days a week I’m out here at 7:30. I’ve got to do my two pages a day. For me that’s about 700 words. Hemingway said do 1,000 or 500 words a day—whatever he said, he’s always right—and stop only when you know what comes next. It works for me. When my two pages are done, I’m done.
- The Wall Street Journal interviews Alan Furst on his new thriller Mission to Paris.
Amazing episode - this is the one that will be nominated come Emmy time.
(Source: madmendaily)
259 notes (via madmendaily)
christinaxhendricks puts it nicely: This season of Mad Men was on another level entirely. I can’t even…
Or as New York Magazine puts it:
She didn’t sleep with scuzzy car guy just because she was desperate for the stability. She slept with him because she’s in a liminal phase.
Liminalty is the scary in-between times in our lives, the weird time when we’re not who we used to be but we’re not quite who we’re going to be. Joan’s in a classic — classic! — liminal phase right now. She’s not the office vixen anymore, but she hasn’t really transitioned to doting mother. And to top it all off, she’s in the middle of a particularly traumatic divorce. Joan doesn’t know who she is anymore; her entire identity is jeopardized.
How do you fit back into your old life, if you can’t be you? By being other people. Joan isn’t acting out or acting crazy, she’s grasping for models of behavior. She used to be the absolute queen of decorum, never a hair out of place or a situation she couldn’t handle. She is not that person anymore, and she doesn’t know who to be next — but she’s surrounded by men, some cruel, some decent, but all solid, all real, all right there. Maybe she could be like them, just for a little, just until things got easier or clearer. Liminality leads to mimesis, the imitation of the community around us in an attempt to reintegrate ourselves in our new form. Joan’s just acting like the members of the community she’s part of, and that community happens to be the bigwigs at SDCP. Roger, Don, Bert, Lane, Pete. Why would Joan prostitute herself? To fit in again.
(Source: citiesundercrowns)
… above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose … But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
(Source: bannner)
202 notes (via theronweasleygeneration & bannner)
Wow, I’ve only seen the middle one, which I own. Some of these are gorgeous. What’s your favorite?
(Source: theronweasleygeneration)
6,392 notes (via fascinationdreams & theronweasleygeneration)
