Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

Wish...Wonder...Will...Woo...Voila

This is a quote from Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights  which I've just checked out of the library for the third time in a year.  It is actually from a different book--From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers.

I've just explored all of Warner's books on Goodreads and now I want to own them all!  My first encounter with her work was in the late 80s when I was in college with Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary.

Read more...

Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

Pink Cat by Diane Ong  @art.com

Something about this picture mesmerizes me.  Am finding it hard to tear my eyes away.  Was trying to figure out why when it occurred to me that 'why' was the wrong question.  If there even is a right one.

My gaze reminded me of the quizzical steady gaze of an infant so maybe it is similar in nature to that ever fresh wonder of a baby's encounters with the new and strange which for them is a constant of their days but for adults who are unpracticed at seeing something for the first time it is rare to have our gaze captured like that.

I just had to spoil it by 'figuring it out' didn't I?

But those thoughts either were stimulated by or reminded me of the recent posting by Laurie Halse Anderson of that Chuck Palahniuk quote over at Mad Woman in the Forest:

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.    ~~Chuck Palahniuk

Read more...

Imagini Me

I've been spotting this widget all over the blogosphere in the last several months. I thought it was a slide show of people's own pics at first but eventually noticed that the same pics were showing up in different people's slide shows. I kept promising myself that as soon as the library closure was behind me, I would see what it was all about.

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

Turns out it is a personality test of a sort. And it sure seems to have my number.

Your results are also compared to the results of other participants so you can see how your choices in each question compares to the choices of others. In terms of the percentage of others selecting the same pic for the prompt.

Out of thirteen questions only three of my picks ranked in double digits and eight of the remaining ten were in the fifth position and I suspect in a few cases, when my choice was at 4% or 2%, that there must have been one or two pics besides the other four shown that were selected more often than mine.

Well I always knew I was different, eccentric, unique, weird; that I never fit in. Teachers, classmates, parents, siblings, friends, preachers, cousins etc. spent the first thirty years of my life pointing this out to me and I spent those same years either helplessly shamed or struggling for at least the appearance of conformity.

The best thing that ever happened to me was to discover that conformity was not the holy grail nor was 'fitting in' the same thing as belonging.

I finally got it that I belong right here--smack dab in the middle of my very own story

Read more...