quotes | dual personalities

December 15, 2015

“The world was hers for the reading.”*

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Betty Smith (December 15, 1896 – January 17, 1972), who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a classic about a sensitive young girl who escapes the grim realities of her tenement life through reading.

I always thought the author was Irish-American, but she was born Elisabeth Wehner, the daughter of German immigrants. I guess I am thinking of the movie based on her famous book–the characters are all so Irish. It is a good movie and Peggy Ann Garner as Francie Nolan is quite affecting. James Dunn won an Academy Award for best supporting actor as Francie’s pathetic drunk of a father (whom she loves very much nevertheless.) He deserved the award, although I always had the feeling he was playing himself.

The characters are very real and the movie does not gloss over the hard realities of the book. This is probably due to the fact that the film is directed by the great Elia Kazan–in his directorial debut.

Anyway, a good book, a good movie–hat’s off and happy birthday to Betty Smith!

“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains – a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone – just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”

I should also mention that yesterday was the birthday of one of my most favorite writers, Shirley Jackson (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965). I will happily toast both ladies. How about you?

*A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

4 Comments

December 9, 2015

Reason is indignant

by chuckofish

“God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

1 Comment

December 2, 2015

Point taken

by chuckofish

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.

–C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Quote found on TitusOneNine, the weblog of the Rev. Canon Kendall Harmon who, among other things, is editor of The Anglican Digest. The photo of God rays in Scotland is from this blog.

2 Comments

November 26, 2015

Giving thanks

by chuckofish

“I have just four words to leave with you. Four words that have spoken volumes of truth into my life.’

He wanted the words to stay in the room, to remain long after he had gone. Though no one wished to hear Paul’s radical injunction, it had to be told.

‘In everything, give thanks.’

This was the lifeboat in any crisis. Over and over again, he had learned this, and over and over again, he had to be reminded.”

–Jan Karon, In This Mountain

Here’s something to read if you’ve forgotten the difference between Pilgrims and Puritans.

And here’s a prayer for the day in case, like me, your plans don’t include church today.

Almighty and gracious Father, we give you thanks for the fruits of the earth in their season and for the labors of those who harvest them. Make us, we pray, faithful stewards of your great bounty, for the provision of our necessities and the relief of all who are in need, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

–Thanksgiving Day collect, BCP

[The first painting is by Anna S. Fisher, c. 1922; the second by David Reidel, b. 1956]

6 Comments

November 24, 2015

How to win friends and influence people

by chuckofish

Dale Harbison Carnegie (originally Carnagey) (November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955) was an American writer and lecturer and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. He was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), a bestseller that remains popular today.

You knew that, but did you now that he was born and raised in Missouri? Well, he was born in Maryville, Missouri, the son of a farmer. His family moved to Belton, Missouri (also the hometown of Harry Truman) when he was a small child. He graduated from the State Teacher’s College in Warrensburg, worked as a salesman, and moved to New York City. After failing as an actor (!), he taught a public speaking class at the YMCA. In his first session, he ran out of material. Improvising, he suggested that students speak about “something that made them angry” and discovered that the technique made speakers unafraid to address a public audience. From this 1912 début, the Dale Carnegie Course evolved.

Most of what he said is just common sense.

“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”

“Success is getting what you want..Happiness is wanting what you get.”

“When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health, and our happiness.”

“Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.”

“If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.”

But that doesn’t make what he said any less true.

Eminem who was born in nearby St. Joseph, MO, reading words of wisdom from his homeboy.

One more fun fact about Dale Carnegie: He worked as assistant to Lowell Thomas in his famous travelogue “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia”. He managed and delivered the travelogue in Canada.

Well, son of a gun. A toast to Dale Carnegie on his birthday and to T.E. Lawrence any old day!

6 Comments

November 4, 2015

What it is

by chuckofish

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about “design” and “balance” and getting “interesting planes” into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest “a” tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”

―Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

It has been awhile since I shared Brenda Ueland with you. I think she is so great. I agree that Art is about Love and sharing what you love with others.

On another subject, but related–I drove a Subaru for years. It was totally against stereotype, but I loved that car . So I thought it was pretty great when the Subaru people worked “Love” into this ad campaign.

Now they are even using a Gregory Alan Isakov song in an ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkX4aOQ_u2I

I hardly watch any television these days with commercials, but I saw this and was pleased. There are still some smart people out there working for the Man.

6 Comments

October 21, 2015

What it is

by chuckofish

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about “design” and “balance” and getting “interesting planes” into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest “a” tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”

―Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

It has been awhile since I shared Brenda Ueland with you. I think she is so great. I agree that Art is about Love and sharing what you love with others.

Now they are even using a Gregory Alan Isakov song in an ad:

I hardly watch any television these days with commercials, but I saw this and was pleased. There are still some smart people out there working for the Man.

October 21, 2015

Way back Wednesday

by chuckofish

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil. I could see the oaks turning brown on the edge of the hockey field, and see the scoured silver sky above shining a secret, true light into everything, into the black cars and red brick apartment buildings of Shadyside glimpsed beyond the trees. Pretty soon all twenty of us–our class–would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I’d been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other’s socks. I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school’s driveway. Now we’d go, too.

–Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

This time of year always makes me take a wistful look backward at my schooldays. I have always been an observer, watching other people do things. Sometimes I was taking pictures, sometimes writing about it. Sometimes I was just listening. Whatever.

I was never as cool as Annie Dillard, that’s for sure, never as connected. But we both felt the same desire to get the heck out of Dodge and move on.

Speaking of moving on, I re-read Dillard’s short memoir looking for a quote and I didn’t think it was as great as the first time I read it. Time and age again. Sigh.

5 Comments

October 19, 2015

“The outermost suburbs of the Truth”*

by chuckofish

I didn’t do a whole lot this weekend. I went to a few estate sales and I puttered around the house. I walked around my neighborhood. It is the perfect weather for that.

I watched Furious 7 (2015) with Vin Diesel et al.

It was ridiculous but highly entertaining. Indeed, the movie deserves an Oscar for special effects, because I certainly could not tell you where the real Paul Walker began and ended. Those Weta Digital people are pretty amazing.

I didn’t go to church but stayed home and re-read Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner, the third in his trilogy of memoir. It was the first book I ever read by Buechner and I was sold for life. But I guess he is not for everyone. When I first discovered him over twenty years ago, I recommended him to everyone I knew. One friend read The Sacred Journey (the first book of memoir) and thought he was a whiner. That is the last way I would describe him, but to each his own.

“The passage from Genesis points to a mystery greater still. It says that we came from farther away than space and longer ago than time. It says that evolution and genetics and environment explain a lot about us but they don’t explain all about us or even the most important thing about us. It says that though we live in the world, we can never really be at home in the world. It says in short not only that we were created by God but also that we were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us the way we have something of the stars.”

Buechner is the Man as far as I’m concerned.

And now it’s Monday again. Tra la la.

*Telling Secrets by Frederick Buechner

3 Comments

October 7, 2015

An’ The Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes, An’ tells ’em, ef I be good, sometimes

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of James Whitcomb Riley (October 7, 1849 – July 22, 1916) who was an American writer, poet, and best-selling author, frequently referred to as the “Hoosier Poet.”

Statue in Greenfield, Indiana

I suppose no one reads his poems anymore. (Although–surprise!– his books are still in print.)

I remember my mother reading them aloud to us with great gusto. There was Little Orphant Annie

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’
sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-
an-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun,
A-listenin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

and The Raggedy Man

O The Raggedy Man! He works fer Pa;
An’ he’s the goodest man ever you saw!
He comes to our house every day,
An’ waters the horses, an’ feeds ’em hay…

Indeed, they were fun to read and fun to listen to. That is no doubt why Riley was among the most popular writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

So join me in a toast to the forgotten Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley. (Perhaps with one of these.)

I leave you with this picture of another famous Hoosier reading some JWR poetry for fun and personal enrichment.

Enjoy your Wednesday–and don’t let the Gobble-uns git you!

2 Comments

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