Sunday Review

I read a lot. Not as consistently as I would like and always squeezed into the corners of life: while on the bike at my gym, the wee hours before the babies wake up (IF I can shuffle out to the lawn to find the paper and get the coffee going before I hear them wake up), listening to a book on the way to work (a seven minute commute), ten minutes before bed if I can tear myself away from all. the. reels. I most often underline, take notes on my phone and sometimes, I just save the whole paper or magazine. And I certainly keep ALL the books. I'm not very organized and certainly not type A, so this adds up and I need to de-clutter (will still keep the books). It's time. So I have decided to resurrect the old wix website. Surely there has to be a reason I have paid the yearly subscription fees. This is the reason. You're reading it!

So I will save things here for me and maybe for you if it's interesting and helpful. I thought one way I could capture the things I am reading would be a Sunday review where I kind of get all of the chicken scratch of notes and ideas I have collected over the week and get it in one place.

I am a firm believer in cultivating the internal life. I used to sit on the east river after work, read a paragraph, and look out and think about it. For a long time. I sat once for two hours. I'm serious that is what I did many friday nights in NYC. I had a painting I would visit at the MET (more on that later, I used to keep a tumblr of all of my favorite paintings and quotes but I can't remember my password, sigh!). I think it is important to find a way to capture your ideas and discuss them as you go about life. I'm all about sharing ideas, so here it goes.

The Sunday Review this week is some WSJ a few books and some New Yorker. Nothing extremely comprehensive and just a few ideas that I had while reading that I want to think more on.

1- War Darkens a Second Winter in Lithuania a Feb 16th essay by Karolis Vyšniauskas in the WSJ.

This was written by a Lithuanian journalist reflecting on the war in Ukraine from a Lithuanian perspective. The most poignant part of the essay was when he talks about how Lithuanians opened up their homes to more than 74,000 Ukrainians. His friends parents donated an apartment and when the volunteer coordinator asked if there was anything they would like to know about the family, the mother said, "No. Just let them in."

2- The Private Frans Kafka by Max Norman on Feb 17, WSJ

This was fascinating. How is our memory understood by those left to shape it? Max Broad is said to have taken great liberty with the way he edited and curated his late friend's works (Kafka had asked him to burn it all- great he didn’t follow that directive!)

Essentially, it is believed that Broad may have misrepresented much of his writings in his editorial choices of Kafka's work particularly in regards to chronology.

3- Think Again by Adam Grant

I have much more to dig and explore when it comes to this book but I love how the reader is asked to be prepared to be wrong - to try on that you don't have all of the answers and that you have to rethink your assumptions. In a chapter on "charged conversations" he writes: "Charged conversations cry out for nuance. When we're preaching, prosecuting, or politicking, the complexity of reality can seem like an inconvenient truth. In scientist mode, it can be an invigorating truth - it means there are new opportunities for understanding and for progress." (p 183).

4- The Palace, a poem by Kaveh Akbar

I have always been fascinated by the idea of home. I read this week that the best way to study memory is to study forgetting. When I worked in refugee camps and studied issues of nationality, home and displacement at Oxford, this idea of memory, forgetting and identity was often wrapped up in ideas of home and belonging. This poem is from April 2019 and here is a powerful snippet for you of Akbar's ideas of America as home - about love for a country even when you are "always elsewhere" - and where he discovers poetry is the ultimate homeland: "there are no good kings/only beautiful places."

5- The Lost New Jersey Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, from the New Yorker, Feb 5

I am always struck by photography of everyday life. As if the subjects, frozen in their most mundane moments, will become the stuff of history, the moments that a historian will one day excavate to understand us. This collection was unseen for 50 years. It uncovers everyday moments in New Jersey. The author writes about NJ - how it feels like it could be anywhere. The anywhere-ness of NJ is something I understand as someone who lived on the turnpike and in the heart of all of her garden-ness for three years. "Jersey was the place between the places you wanted to be." Yes. I feel that but I am nostalgic for it as well. The crisp afternoons in the sun, pumpkin patches in Hackettstown, even the train - always stuck in the tunnel - taking me into the city for work, returning at the end of a long day only to wait for the Dinky to Princeton (always missing it, always waiting the extra 35!). Look this one up and enjoy the "shortcut through America" - a New Jersey frozen in time and place in all its mundane-ness and anywhere-ness.

6- A Little Known Woman of Power, a review of The Confidante by Christopher C. Gorham reviewed by Brandy Schillace

Anna Rosenberg “remained in the shadow of the very success she helped to achieve.” Christopher Gorham brings this story to life in The Confidante and I loved this snippet of the book and plan to purchase. I hadn't heard of Rosenberg, I'm glad she isn't in the shadow for me anymore. Rosenberg once wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt of the dangerous enemies we have within our own borders: “racism, sexism, anti-semitism, extremism” and produced a life of confidence and strategy to overcome these issues. Her brand of feminism was not always embraced by other feminists: "her penchant for fashionable suits, jewelry etc… used as marks against her seriousness.” I get it! I love it. I resonate. She refused to write her own biography. Many of the biographies I am reading lately were written later in life, and not always completely agreed upon even to the end. People can be humble, or no-nonsense about their own contribution, perhaps to a fault. They, like Kafka, would rather everything get burned up. Glad that isn't the case here. There is so much to learn from lives well lived.

7- Better for the Wear, Katherine Zarrella WSJ Feb 18/19

The main idea: scratches and scuff are ok, help you not look overly curated. People are embracing the realness and messiness that comes with every day life. (love this). With a worn bag you look like you weren’t trying too hard. Fashion is going in the direction of being willing to show that you have stood the test of time, that you are sturdy and resilient. Wow. Love.

8 - The Yellow House, Sarah M Broom

I got this from The Snail in one of my book bundles. She explores the layers and story of place. Who earns the rights to the story of place? This is, as always, one of my favorite themes to explore. The theme of place, memory and our own position in life in relation both to the other and to the land. Intersected throughout this book is the idea of place and memory - how do they work together and how far can they be relied on. "Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret." I loved this and I'll probably dig into other sections of it later but for now I am going to go ponder my own memory, my own sense of place and alllll the context. Very good.

That's the bulk of it for this week. Nothing extremely comprehensive, but maybe you end up reading about something that you didn't know about and it sparks your own investigation or interest. Anyway, helpful for me to have it all in one place. Happy Sunday!