Wednesday, January 04, 2006



Just as much I hated the Iron Curtain 25 or so years ago, these days instead I love another iron and with the same intensity, the Sydney Iron Bridge The bridge's heart takes shape.

The bridge's heart takes shape.
The Image tells thousand stories: The Story of My Foolish Love in Exile




In these crazy times, we have to keep our eyes on the things that matter most: the life and health of our families, our communities, the planet. And to keep our sanity, some of us need to reserve a bit of time for reading and for writing. It is said that writers are people who, as children, did not receive sufficient rejection either from adults or peers and so are compelled to seek it relentlessly in later life. Today I knocked on a door marked 3 Hall Street Bondi and Rita Nash of Martin Smith’s Booshop embraced the idea of placing a few copies of Cold River on the shelf of the local bookshop ;-) Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords ;-)

Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we may fall from the Iron Bridge ... But, let’s link to happiness ... and sex An Infinite Lives. An Infinite Deaths

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Happiness Favors the Bold
Life is full of Why I'm Happy I Evolved: Twisted Emotions! Here are some recent entries from the hypothetical blog of H. L. Mencken, the premier American social critic of the first half of the 20th century.

2006 Is So Yesterday: Faces Only a Mother, and the Movies, Could Love. Movies offer beautiful faces and construct fantasies around them. But other, more idiosyncratic images of humanity have always been present as well.


• I have not lived in vain but lived for 2006. What in the World We'll Do in 2006. When love and passion unites, my heart opens and the muse flows [ 100 things we didn't know this time last year ; It's almost too overwhelming to live in a time where hate and love, humor and pathos are often disguised as one another. Where insanity is thought to be sanity, and sanity is labeled as insanity. Where violence is considered normal, and in order for us to protect ourselves and function in a rational, sane way, we now have to go around behaving rather paranoid. The foundation of a healthy civil society is a marriage of two human faculties often undervalued or misunderstood: reason and love Love, reason and the future of civil society; Understanding when weakness is not a virtue; There is no solution to the problems of debility and death, but Leon Kass says there are better and worse ways of thinking about them Death and dying are once again subjects of intense public attention ]
• · But how do we not go off the deep end when our lives are so frenetic working and there are so many changes in our lives? Won't living with so much stress have some drastic effect on the family? ; The Tupperware party as an iconic image of suburban womanhood seems long gone. It's hard to imagine, for example, the characters on "Desperate Housewives" attending such an event, unless it was played for viciously comic effect. Party Favor Emergence, diaspora, the 'imperial consumer': Which ideas will shape the coming year? ; The Destruction of the Public Sphere
• · · The overselling of personal empowerment, the hyping of hope, may be the great unsung irony of modern American life Self-help's big lie ; It was bad enough that women had to scrutinize every inch of their bodies, now this too? Our Vaginas, Ourselves
• · · · Nobody notices if you die between separation and divorce Nobody notices when you die between Christmas and New Year's ; Kathryn Hughes decides to ditch her bad reading habits. Being a book slut means feeling compelled to gulp down anything that comes your way Purge or purgatory? ; I've always found it pleasurable to gaze at an ordinary shoe box, not because of the Manolo Blahniks or Air Jordans concealed within but because of the thing itself. Thanks to John Carey's smart, saucy book, I now know why The art of making special
• · · · · What’s selling this year? And what kinds of sales would be considered good if a book is published? What the Press Editors Want ; The year of publishing safely ; David Brooks honors the best political and cultural essays of the year The Sidney Awards 2005 ; The Valley is humming again Web 2.0, Flickr. Google Maps, Pneumatic Parliaments 15 Big Ideas from 2005
• · · · · · Going forward in era of contradiction: How will the age in which we live someday be remembered? Going forward in era of contradiction ; Disney movies portrayed women and ''difference" of all kinds in a positive light Small world, revisited


Someone to hold you too close,
Someone to hurt you too deep,
Someone to sit in your chair,
To ruin your sleep.
Someone to need you too much,
Someone to know you too well,
Someone to pull you up short,
To put you through hell.
Someone you have to let in,
Someone whose feelings you spare,
Someone who, like it or not,
Will want you to share
A little, a lot.
Someone to crowd you with love,
Someone to force you to care,
Someone to make you come through,
Who’ll always be there,
As frightened as you
Of being alive.
Stephen Sondheim, “Being Alive” (music by Sondheim)
Take it easy, run a risk, have fun, go for it!