"Windows and Wallpaper" ChLA 1

I recently spent a delightful 5 days at Hollins University attending  ChLA; the hosts were wonderful, the sessions were educational, my fellow attendees were interesting and interested, the food was delicious, and there were fireflies at the awards banquet on the grounds of the historic quad.  All that and I got to be dorm "roomie" with Sonya Sawyer Fritz.  What fun!

Margaret Wise Brown, who graduated from Hollins in 1932, is the author of two of my favorite books (Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny)
and is being celebrated with a festival which has just opened.  The campus museum exhibit, where I spent a delightful half hour and wanted to stay the day, is Goodnight, Hush.  Classic Children's Book Illustrations. I lingered and returned again and again to the original illustrations by Clement Hurd.  Since DMP and I had a series of house bunnies spanning twenty years, I delighted in his studies of rabbits in various poses.

I also enjoyed the classic fairy tale illustrations of Ruth Sanderson and bought a copy of Papa Gatto, An Italian Fairy Tale, a Cinderella story which required no fairy godmother. 

Sanderson's illustrations are beautiful and draw one into the story.  If there had been a copy in stock I would have bought Goldilocks because the illustration reminds me of my young neighbor, Emily C.  After making my purchase, I returned to the exhibit to find the benches fully occupied by women with PhDs and tenure-track professorships.  Each had grabbed a book and settled down to read a story of her childhood. What a wonderful recess from the distractions of scholarship!

The first session on Thursday featured Children's Literature as Linguistic Play and a look at books where "conversation shapes social reality" and  I enjoyed learning about these very special children's books:  ,  David Wiesner's The Three Pigs at first seems to be the familiar story  but then the wolf huffs & puffs & blows the little pigs outside the story frame and away they go on a series of adventures (and changing illustrative style) into other story books.  It's a childhood version of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series which neither DMP nor I can resist for a minute.

Adam Z. Dotson's presentation linked Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces which defined the monomyth and has been required reading for any serious student of literature since it was first published in 1949.  A bit of fun as Dorothy manages all 17 points of the hero's journey although Baum's work predates Campbell's by almost half a century.  If you only know the movie, you've missed much of the story although I did not much enjoy the books when I read them as a child.  

Dotson's paper was lagniappe since I chose that panel because I wanted to hear Anna Panszczyk's paper "Get Thee to a Library:  The Library Setting as a Space of Revolt and Difference in Children's Literature" and Anna did not disappoint.  The library appears as a space of "hushed tones and rigid rules" where one obtains "immediate information" but its  "organized, ordered exterior" exists "in tension with the chaos at its heart" where there is a "frenzied passion" to "collect, hoard, and devour" books.  Anna's talk featured  Library Lion and The Librarian of Basra   and one of the most delightful books I've come across, The Libraryby Sarah Stewart about a girl who would "rather read..."  That girl is a lot like the child I was and the woman I grew to be.

The day concluded with a screening of The Library of the Early Mind, a documentary film directed by Edward J. Delaney, produced by Steven Withrow, which features interviews with 50 top writers, illustrators, publishers and critics of children's literature.

{Insert many adjectives for a rave review here!}

 The interview with Daniel Handler a.k.a. Lemony Snicket is a delight!

One of the interviewees (perhaps Peter H. Reynolds) said that children's literature, "the books we read as children... give us windows and wallpaper."  I think he meant "windows" through which to look out and learn of the world and "wallpaper" with which to decorate the rooms of our minds, the images on which our inner eye dwells. 

My quirky mind was pleased at what I think was an unintended double entendre:  Windows is also an operating system and Wallpaper is the image we select for our Desktop. One cannot consider books, reading, information, libraries without considering the changes that technology and digitization are bringing. 
Quoting my friend Luci's blog:  "...if you're a teacher... start imagining how you can transition your classroom to a multi-media, online format. don't worry, your organization's LMS should be a great help, and you can shoot for gradual blended learning if the online component freaks you out. but buck up, soldier - the technology is here to stay, people are already drawn to it, and it can add a lot of options to your class to help different kinds of learners, so make friends with the computer and let it help us turn out critical thinkers who're actively participating in their educations."

ChLA to be continued...

A novel, a blog, and Bob Dylan

I can't seem to get back into the blogging groove.  I can't even keep Library Thing updated with my "what I'm reading" and "recently read" lists.  I have been reading as much as I can manage; I'm cramming for ChLA like I think it's a final exam.  When the program came out, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was better read in the source material than I had anticipated.  I'll save those books and my comments for the July blog after I've come home.

SEASONS (my women-reading-theology group) has decided to offer a special summer program based on the book and soon to be released movie, The Help by Kathryn Stockett which I read on Kindle.  I will probably blog much more about this book later also.  I'll limit today's comment to Stockett's decision to break the novel's timeline in order to include the lyric of Bob Dylan's The times they are achangin'. On page 352, Skeeter hears the song on the car radio. "It is better than anything I've ever heard... I feel a rush of inexplicable relief.  I feel I've just heard something from the future."  The novel is set in 1962 and Dylan's song was first played 26 October 1963.  I don't understand why Stockett didn't just push her timeline.  A later date would have allowed her to make use of the selective service draft which throughout most of the South took "coloreds and white trash" first. The conscription and death of young black men "in the white man's war" in Viet Nam served as a call to action for the civil rights movement.  I, however, did not write this book; the teller of the tale gets to make such decisions.  I basically liked The Help and thought it spoke truth.

My reading of Stockett's book came shortly before Bob Dylan's  70th birthday so I revisited the music of my youth.  As I recall I first heard Bob Dylan on the floor of my dorm room probably in the fall of 1968.  I had to learn to appreciate Dylan as a musician--it was a totally new sound--but I recognized at once that he was a great poet.  Malcolm Guite--British poet, singer-songwriter, and priest--writes a blog which I enjoy for its insight on the intersections of literature and Christianity.  In a 2008 article published in The Tablet, Malcolm Guite demonstrates how Dylan layers time and echoes biblical text. 
Turning again to the song that Stockett thought so essential to her story that she broke the timeline to quote the last two lines of the first stanza, I have added a few notes in red in The times they are a-changin' by Bob Dylan:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters       whelming waters                      
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you                  "redeeming the time"
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'  rejection of status quo
Or you'll sink like a stone        Jesus: "better a millstone"
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come writers and critics       Stockett's novel is about writing
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon     there is a long silence, time of waiting
For the wheel's still in spin  Bible is not the only religion's imagery
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'                    who is named in Skeeter's book
For the loser now                  Jesus:  last shall be first
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come senators, congressmen    Stuart's father is a senator
Please heed the call                   Hilly's husband is running for office
Don't stand in the doorway       Hilly's husband loses election
Don't block up the hall              Stuart's father has more open views
For he that gets hurt                  but will not speak them publicly
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.


Come mothers and fathers       lots of mothers in novel
Throughout the land
And don't criticize                   Skeeter's mom & Elizabeth criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is                     Psalm 1, the way of the wicked
Rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one   road blocks to stop activists
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.


The line it is drawn         novel is all about boundaries
The curse it is cast          this image is about prophecy
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now       again Jesus: last shall be first
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.


[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/]

listen to Bob Dylan at the White House Celebration of Music of the Civil Rights Movement.

How does my garden grow?

My friends have started to comment, "It's been a long time since you've blogged."  I joke that,  although unintentionally, I apparently gave up blogging for Lent.  In truth, I've been hugely depressed.  Why?  

It's Spring... for as long as I can remember all that teeming new life and hope make me feel hopeless and lifeless.  All this transitory beauty seems like such extravagant waste.  "It is the blight man was born for..."  I probably need to read some Hopkins while listening to Gregorian chant.  Seriously, for me it helps.



Grandma Wieland in her kitchen, 1971,
holding keepsakes from my wedding.

Several of my young friends and family members are in marriages that are ending and I remember the joy that marked their weddings and weep.  Marriage and divorce are not private and personal matters since they grow out of and into the community of the "dearly beloved... gathered here to unite..."  I know that "happily ever after" is extraordinarily rare except in fairy tales but...  {sigh!}

A number of my young friends are mourning grandparents and I mourn for them.  I know what they may not yet know, that the death of those we love and those who love us is a life-long wound.  Yes, of course, there is Easter and Resurrection-promised, but now we wait beside our tombs that are not yet empty.

Depression is like drought; it's an unchosen time of waiting, of lying fallow, of praying  "O thou lord of life, send my roots rain."

[Hopkins, again.   link to Pied Beauty at the Poetry Foundation ] 

In the meantime, I've been working in my yard, tending a literal garden in the hope that some time spent "in green pastures... beside still waters..." will "restore my soul."  My yard looks great:




  Red geraniums in memory of Gran Cummings & David's father.

 



Caladiums & indigo spire sage come back after the frost of winter. 
The magnolis tree has also recoverd from the damage of  Ike and is in glorious bloom.

 






DMP loves blue & got me some pretty new pots.  Herbs flourish.





Patio garden.
  Pepper & eggplant ready to bloom;
 a harvest will come.

I begin to sense that the darkness is passing and that I may be about ready to "arise and shine."

One of the things I do in down times, uncreative times, is sort, file, and edit. Rather than sharing my reading in this post, I'll share something I wrote several years ago and recently reworked.

In this short story/memoir/personal essay--the lines between fact and fiction are blurred in the telling--I attempted to capture the fragility of age and the bittersweet mood of memory, the interweaving of past and present.   I tried to reproduce the cadence of the speech of my grandmother's generation, using phrases and grammatical constructions without resorting to dialect.  The moment of time in this story is 1966. 



Winter Magnolias

  by K Cummings Pipes

in memory of Grandma Mary Bridget Atzenhoffer Wieland



She reached down the jacket and bonnet from behind the kitchen door. Since girlhood she had protected her skin’s fairness from the sun’s burning. Nowadays, her granddaughters ran around half-naked, tanning their skin a deep brown. Even so, they were pretty girls. The young one, especially, was a lot like her—short and well-rounded with red-gold hair. In her day, she too had been pretty. She had known it and had taken care to protect her skin with jacket, bonnet, and gloves. Despite her precautions, years of stress aided by the West Texas wind wrinkled her face. Old age’s liver spots marred her fairness. Still, by long established habit, she put on the jacket and bonnet before going outside to work the garden. No gloves, not anymore, since half her eyesight was in her fingertips. She stepped out to the porch and bent to change her slippers for the old shoes she wore when working. As she laced and tied them, the wind carried a strong whiff of honeysuckle to her. Another pair of shoes, another place, another time. Her granddaughter--the older one, the smart one--would call it déjà vu. She had no name for the feeling. She simply enjoyed the moment and allowed her mind to enlarge it into memory.

She had come in from the field so tired. It must have been a hundred degrees in the shade. She had chopped cotton through the heat of the day, planning to take off early for the dance. Her very first. She had taken that hand-me-down dress from the banker’s wife she scrubbed floors for--the banker’s wife was so fat there was plenty of material—and had cut the silk to fit her own budding figure. She had ached for the pair of shoes she had seen at the store but her mother had forbidden her and bought a pair of heavy brogans. Who could dance in brogans? But dear brother Henry could never stand to see his little Mary unhappy. He bought her those shiny black shoes that did not lace but buttoned all the way to the top with brass buttons that shone like gold. Beautiful, fashionable—just like the girl in the Sears Roebuck catalog. That blue silk had matched her eyes. The black shoes had flown across the wooden slats while fiddles sang and honeysuckle sweetened the air. Just as the memory now sweetened her day.



Enough day-dreaming, the flags and pansies needed weeding. With some luck that thunderhead might bring a shower, at least it was building up in the northwest, the right direction for rain. The moisture would help the flowers but it would help the weeds more. She got down on her knees to see the plants a little better and began pulling the unwanted roots from the ground. She worked steadily for half an hour and began to feel warm even though the evening cool was setting in. The yard was a lot of work but worth it, especially so the year her yard had won the prize. It might not look like much these days, but it had sure been pretty then. She was still proud of her yard, proud of her flowers. Flowers, even wild ones, did not come easy in this country. Back home, flowers had seemed to grow everywhere.



The entire field in front of the house had been colored with them. She could still see him, straight and tall, walking across that field. He had picked a bunch of wild flowers , bluebonnets and Indian paint brush, for her. They had said he was too old for her, “old Robin Gray come a-courtin’.” She had looked at the love and laughter in his eyes and had seen all the years ahead, years of working and praying together. They had had a good life until he passed on. She blinked away tears and wondered that twenty years had passed. Still, she had his children. And memories. She left an orange prairie flower nodding among the pansies. A wild flower was not a weed.



She thought she heard a noise and a shadow passed in front of her hands, startling her. She turned quickly, straining eyes and ears to identify the intruder. No one; nothing. Probably only a cloud and the wind freshened by the coming storm. Silly old woman. But you never knew; there were so many bad things happening nowadays. A woman living alone could not be too careful. She took a deep breath. A woman living alone could not live in a dither of fear either.

 

"the boy" Kelvin,
"the smart one" K, Grandma, "the pretty one" Zacha



An unexpected visitor might just as well be the grandkids. They came by every once in a while. Why, they stopped by about this time last Friday, brought her a small carton of strawberry ice cream. They admired her flowers and chattered on and on about the dance, “prom” they called it. The younger girl, the one who looked like her, had been all excited; it would be her first dance. The boy had gone by the florist to pick up a corsage for his girl. His mama had told him that gardenias were always proper. Did she think so? He showed them to her—gardenias, white and sweet like magnolias. The smell was like magnolias, too, only a bit less lemony. She wanted to tell them about the magnolia but they were in a hurry. They had driven away in the car their daddy got them. Their daddy spoiled those kids. Their mama’s daddy had not had much chance to spoil her.



He had been gone for almost two months when Will came by. Dear, dear Will who had stood up for them at their wedding. How solemn he had looked apologizing for missing the funeral. He had brought her a magnolia. Climbed right up on the hood of the car and reached over the fence and picked it, he had said, with some old lady yelling that he had no call to take her flowers. That was little enough compared with other things he had taken, with some of the trouble he had been in. Will had driven hell-for-leather bringing that magnolia to her. It was brown and wilty by the time he got it here, but, oh, it had smelled so sweet. Sweet as laughter after two months of tears. Sweet as flowers for a young girl’s dance.



She began putting away the tools and looked hopefully to the northwest. That thunderhead was going to slide off to the west; no rain tonight. She got the hose and turned on the faucet. So much water for the flowers made the bills too high. Last summer, it had been hard to stretch the money to cover it. Her check stayed the same but the bills grew like weeds. She prayed that the rain would come soon. In just a bit, the lambsquarter and poke would come in season, and she could eat greens. That would save grocery money. Then the vegetables would start up but vegetables used a lot of water, too. Still, if she were careful with the water and careful with the money, she would make it. She always had. Times were always hard for a widow woman. The water spattered the ground and washed the dust from leaves, making them shine. Little drops ran down inside the blooms. In the fading light, it looked like dew. She smiled at the memory of dewy mornings she had known as a child.



She found herself humming. The tune had been stuck in her mind for some time, going round and round. Now she took it for that old waltz. She couldn’tt remember a time when she had not known it. As a little girl, she had thought the song belonged to her because it had her name in it. Later, young men had sung it to her when she rode in their buggies. Not that she had gone riding with just anyone who asked her; she was not that sort of girl. It was a pretty song. “Mary, Mary, pretty Mary, be my love so fair.” No one called her Mary anymore. Most of her friends had passed away. Casual acquaintance of her generation maintained an old-fashioned formality. Everyone called her Mrs. Wieland. Or Grandma. Young people who she hardly knew sometimes called her grandma. She was not quite sure she liked that.

The scent of the flowers was fading; the blossoms closed, curling in on themselves. The morning sun would open them again but today’s light was almost gone. She turned off the faucet and put away the hose. A lingering brightness in the west streaked the rain that was falling on other fields and gardens. She sat heavily on the porch and changed back into her slippers. Again, she remembered when dancing in new black shoes had been so very important. With a smile and a sigh, she lingered a bit but even a West Texas twilight does not last forever. Time to go in. She hung her jacket and bonnet on the nail behind the door and closed it to shut out the night.

What I'm reading...

I intended to blog more often this year but...  I'd planned to blog on my birthday a week and a half ago and woke up sick.  The next day my computer didn't wake up at all.  The following Monday my husband became very ill.  It will be a long time before I've put all the pieces back together but everyone and every thing at least seems to be up and functioning more or less normally.

What I've been reading:

Fiction:

Conroy, Pat: The Prince of Tides. 1986.  Kindle.  I seldom read any best-selling book until it's been kicking around a few years.  "Popular" does not equal "time-tested" and there is so little time to read.  I also tend to avoid 20th Century male authors; their world view is often too depressing for me.  I knew I would love this book and I also knew I would hate it.  I loved the first half and hated the last half;  I prefer "elegy" to "nightmare."   Pat Conroy wrote a great novel in the tradition of the great Southern novel with the requisite beauty, quirky characters, and disfunction.  kindle location [kl] 859 "...you're southern to the bone, Savannah.  It don't wash out."  loc 1268 "The southern way?" she said.  "My mother's immortal phrase.  We laugh when the pain gets too much.  We laugh when the pity of human life gets too... pitiful. We laugh when there's nothing else to do."  "When do you weep... according to the southern way?" "After we laugh, Doctor.  Always.  Always after we laugh."  kl 3646 "...in the South.  Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence."  kl 3748 "I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position."   It has some wonderful descriptions of childhood and some painful ones:   kl 169 "Later when we spoke of our childhood, it seemed part elegy, part nightmare."  kl 1504 "There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory."  kl 3046 "There is no fixing a damaged childhood.  The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float."  It offers descriptions and commentary upon the 20th Century struggles against racism and those of feminism and environmentalism.   kl 201 "This has not been an easy century to endure."  Chapter 18 should be required reading.  I don't know that I've ever fully appreciated the role of a coach, despite having a couple in my family.  The descriptions of the North Carolina locale are heart-breakingly beautiful and made me want to go live on an island and fish. One of my favorite quotes is about reading:  kl 997 "You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read.  People that like to read are always a little fucked up."  There is, of course, a movie and it's a good one but the book is better.  I've decided to read some more Conroy: My Reading Life.  Doubleday, 2010.  Kindle.

Victorian scholarship:

Adams, Maureen: Shaggy Muses.  The dogs who inspired Virginia Woolfe, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte. New York:  Ballantine Books, 2007. Kindle.  My friend, Cathey Roberts, recommended this book {she also mentioned a seminar on Creativity and Madness which riffs nicely with Conroy's book and brought a smile to DMP}and I immediately downloaded it and read it straight through without iterruption--one of the advantages of physical weakness and no computer is that one may read and read and read. kl 3361 Quoting Virginia Woolfe:  "Half the horrors of illness cease when one has a book or a dog or a cup of one's own at hand."   kl 4496 "Like many creative people, she [Emily Dickinson] depended on someone else to oversee the balance between having time alone against the need for connection with others to avoid being engulfed by the work."  Emily Dickinson and her friend Susan Gilbert, who married Emily's brother, "shared a hatred of housework, a love of literature, and an intense interest in religion."  Sounds a bit like me. 

My "intense interest in religion" groups six very different books:. 

I'm continuing the Annie Dillard Reader and have just finished the excerpts from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, perhaps my favorite work of mysticism.  kl 4236 "that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames." kl 4270 "An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.  He hasn't the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn.  In a couple of years, what he will have learned is how to fake it..."  kl 4567 "But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought.  The literature of illumination reveals this above all:  although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise...  I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam."  . 

I was asked to read an excerpt from For the Time Being during a Sunday worship--which I was too ill to read--and as a result I'm reading W. H. Auden's Collected Longer Poems which I haven't touched since my undergraduate course with Dr.  Monroe K Spears, Poetry of W.H. Auden: Disenchanted Island.  I have a much better appreciation of the modern poets now than I did in my youth. 

"Remembrance of the moment before last

Is like a yawning drug."

Several weeks ago, DMP and I went to see the new Narnia movie which has given us an excuse to re-run the movies and re-read the books.  I first read C.S. Lewis's literary scholarship (the dreaded and still dispised Milton semester with Alan Grob) and happened upon Voyage of the Dawntreader so I started the series in the middle.  It's always been my favorite and  one reason is that dear swashbuckling mouse Reepicheep reminds me so very much of DMP.  This story is also a commentary upon "reading the right books" and celebrates imagination rather than information.  A lesson that our universities might well learn before they slash the funding for humanities and libraries.

I continue my slow progress through Robert Alter's The Book of Psalms which is masterful and magnificent.  From the 39th Psalm:  "Let me know, O LORD, my end and what is the measure of my days.  I would know how fleeting I am... a nothing... mere breath.... For I am a sojourner with You, a new settler like all my fathers.  Look away from me, that I may catch my breath before I depart and am not." 

These psalm readings work really well with the book that is the companion of the Open Door class study of Genesis.  Walter Brueggemann's Land kl 231 "...any society is likely to treat its land in the same way it treats its women."  kl 307 "...land is never simply physical dirt but is always physical dirt freighted with social meanings derived from historical experience."  kl 485 "Biblical faith begins with the radical announcment of discontinuity that intends to initiate us into a new history of anticipation.... rooted in the speech of God..."

Blog note:  I will continue using the Amazon associate links and images in the text of the blog because Amazon usually allows readers to take a look inside or download a sample.  I've switched the sidebars to LibraryThing which lets me maintain an on-line catalog and collection lists.  They have the advantage of being readable on the Kindle.   http://www.librarything.com/home/KCummingsPipes 

I first saw the LibraryThing used in Catherine Pope's Victorian Geek blog: http://blog.catherinepope.co.uk/2011/01/an-eye-for-an-eye-by-anthony-trollope/ and clicked the link in one of sidebars.  The first 200 books is a free membership if you want to give it a try.

Leftovers...

I like leftovers, especially all those left from luscious holiday feasts.  This post deals with a few things that are left over from 2010. 

My house is still fully decorated and will remain so for a few more days and, yes, I'm still listening to Christmas music.  I'll play Handel's Messiah while taking down the tree, probably on Wednesday. 

I want to share my favorite decorating tip which might prove useful at other times.   Note the brass candle holders.  I pressed them into floral foam and used the foam to secure the bright red elongated ornaments.  The visual effect is candle-like but it was much safer than a lighted flame close to my drying-out-by-the-minute Noble fir.  I keep thinking of using this trickwith things other than ornaments.  Maybe pussy-willows, or tree limbs, or peacock feathers?

I monetized this blog several months ago.  Being an Amazon associate allows me to display images of book covers and provides an easy link for readers wanting more information.  In the interests of full disclosure, I would receive  a small % of any sales which my links generated.  To date, there has been no money.  If there are ever any proceeds, they will be donated to a library or children's reading program.

What I'm reading:

Among my Christmas celebrations was a reading of  The Children's Book of Christmas Stories edited by Asa Don Dickinson and Ada M. Skinner, originally published in 1913, a Project Gutenberg eBook downloaded to my Kindle for free from manybooks.net although it is also available at Amazon's Kindle store. 

I have added links to several of my favorite sources for Kindle books to My Favorite Web Places in the right side bar.

Alter, Robert: The Book of Psalms. A translation with commentary. New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.  This is my current bedside book and I'm lingering over a psalm or two each night.  I have read through the 53rd Psalm of this superb and well-annotated translation.  Alter's notes compel me to notice how much the Psalms are related to the Prophets--particularly Isaiah and Micah--and of their commonality with Wisdom literature--particularly Ecclesiastes and Proverbs.  A note on Psalm 48:17:

"Like Your name, so  Your praise--

to the ends of the earth.

With justice Your right hand is full."

Alter comments on the word justice:

"the Hebrew  tsedeq can also mean "victory" or "bountiful act."

What a rich and challenging concept is God's justice!

As I read the Psalms in this translation, I note the frequent repetition of the word "breath" and am reminded of a by-gone resolution which, as I kept it, helped restore my health.  Both spiritual and bodily health and, indeed, life itself require breath.  The only New Year's Resolution currently on my list is:  Breathe deeply.

In my Annie Dillard Reader, Kindle edition, I've read her Poems and The Book of Luke (1989)which made wonderful Advent reading.   Kindle location 3899 "It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find.  It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time."  3922 "This Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a best seller, is a chink--often the only chink--through which winds howl.  It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple world strays and vanishes.  We crack open its pages at our peril."  3925 "...it is the book that kidnaps the children, and hooks them."  The author writes about her experiences in Christian summer camp and Sunday School and offers insightful commentary on the Gospel text, concluding with these selected quotes:  4095 "What a pity, that so hard on the heels of Christ come the Christians.... flawed to the core, full of wild ideas and hurried self-importance....  They are smug and busy, just like us, and who could believe in them?  ...Who could believe that salvation is for these rogues?"  "Unless, of course--  Unless Christ's washing the disciples' feet, their dirty toes, means what it could, possibly mean:  that it is all right to be human."  4109 "If they were just like us, then Christ's words to them are addressed to us, in full and merciful knowledge--and we are lost.  There is no place to hide."  Annie Dillard's lovely meditative prose, her keen observations, and the way her mind interweaves everything make her one of my favorite authors.

At least a half dozen of my friends have urged me to read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, Dial Press, 2009.  I finally found time for a nice uninterrupted reading of this book which I enjoyed at least as much as my friends thought I would.  I knew nothing of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II.   Kindle location 145 "That's what I love about reading:  one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you into another book, and another bit there will lead you to a third book.  It's geometrically progressive--all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment." 

I suppose I've just added a second, continuing, resolution: Read as many good books as I can and  share them in my blog with as many friends and strangers as possible.
I've been downloading many, many samples as I explore titles and plan my reading for the New Year.

My favorite Christmas present:

DMP insisted that he be allowed to up grade my original Kindle to the latest generation Kindle with Wi-Fi and 3G. I'm really enjoying the upgrade which came loaded with my media library from the first Kindle. The first night I opened my Kindle and began reading where I'd left off. The improvements are really improvements and I love the larger memory and the ability to organize my eBooks into collections on the home page. It's much faster, too. The e-Ink Pearl offers better resolution and more choices for fonts and line spacing. Wow!

Some sort of eBook reader is the future of reading. No one loves the "book experience" more than I, but a Kindle in a leather cover is an acceptable substitute. It opens up a world of reading materials that I couldn't otherwise find or afford.

Remember that you can download all Kindle books on multiple devices and have your reading synced across devices.visit Amazon to download free reading apps.

Happy New Year!