Wednesday, December 30, 2015

I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry

"I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress." 
Elizabeth Montagu


The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Successfully replicated On Media Dragon ...

Our society is supposedly drowning in a flood of information brought on by the frenzied pace of technological change...
The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task that taxes all of the individual’s power and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day.  Life of self-esteem

“Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”
The Wall Street Journal has published this wonderful editorial each Christmas since 1949, In Hoc Cold River of Anno Domini:
When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar...

The Outsider with the Public Voice: How Joan Didion Mirrored Us Back to Ourselves
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Joan Didion wrote in one of the early masterworks that turned her, over the course of the half-century that followed, into a patron saint of the personal essay and one of the most recognizable and influential voices of our time. In The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (public library), biographer Tracy Daugherty delves into the wellspring of Didion’s character with a responsible and generous willingness to examine her life, trace her intellectual and creative development, and transmute what he finds into larger insight not only on what made Didion a great writer but on what it means to be one, both for the writer and for the society whose collective memory she or he reflects, preserves, and shapes. The Outsider with the Public Voice: How Joan Didion Mirrored Us Back to Ourselves

Wallabies live in the bushland in and around Frenchs Forest.  

“Real self-esteem is an integration of an inner value with things in the world around you,” Anna Deavere Smith wrote in her invaluable advice to young artists. But howoes one master the intricacies of that integration?

In the Sydney zodiac, 2015 was the year of Salim Mehajer – a man whose lurid excesses and legal struggles transfixed a city that suspected, wrongly, it had seen it all Salim Mehajer

Police shut down photo exhibition of naked natural women because they’re ‘indecent’ Independent  

coyote links

'Ah, the joy of suckling! She lovingly watched the fishlike motions of the toothless mouth and she imagined that with her milk there flowed into her little son her deepest thoughts, concepts, and dreams.' Alyssa Milano shares intimate breastfeeding photo and quotes Kundera