Annie Lennox's blog

Annie Lennox has a blog on her site and she's posting really frequently. One post has a list of beauty hints (I think of her song "Keep Young and Beautiful" when reading it).

She also has various thoughtful things to say about her activism for HIV/AIDS, plus random things like stories of seeing rats outside venues that she's performing in, of watching a couple actually arguing in the middle of one of her shows (!!!) etc.

It loads in really slowly because she has various artsy graphics. Right now I just want to read the text in the blog, but the page reloads every time I want to see a new blog post...

Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life by Michael Krasny

I just bought this book on Sunday morning when hanging around at Kepler's while Dave was working in Menlo Park nearby.
I got up to the counter to ring it up, and the guy said, "Are you going to the event?"

"What event?"

He points at the huge sign to the left of the counter. Michael Krasny, host of KQED's Forum (ie my constant companion if I'm in the car from 9 am to 11 am, and I often listen to the podcasts other times) - was discussing the book, the next day, Monday.

But I had to be at focus groups at work so I couldn't make it. Nicely, the Kepler's guy offers that they'll have Krasny sign it to me.

I just picked it up today, and was reading it tonight after bringing pizza to Dave, at work tonight too. He had written, "To Solveig - Best wishes for a good life with good books and good listening!"
All the "goods" were underlined. It's pretty cool - seems like he could be a bit more original with his adjectives, but I'm not complaining. I haven't finished the book yet. Maybe this is an inside joke.

It's kind of fun to read about some of his interviews, like his early one with Gore Vidal, that didn't go so well. He usually sounds so prepared and put-together on the radio, it's quite amazing. Also he manages to make the book, at least in the first part I've read before he meets his wife, a little bit spicy! I was surprised.

Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deavere Smith

Very inspirational and chatty book by Anna Deavere Smith, writer, actress, playwright, former Stanford professor and currently teaching at Yale!

Letters to a Young Artist: Buy on Amazon!

She's set the book up so that she is writing a series of letters to a young high school student, a painter named BZ who has "won a mentor" in a contest.
I want to take some notes on some of the memorable bits of advice below as I think I will bookcross this near the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland so that others will have a chance to read it (for free) also.

I actually have met Anna also, briefly when I was working in the office of the Dept of Drama at Stanford (under the incomparable Office Manager and all-around character, Athena, who should be the star of her own short story someday).
Anyway...I had answered the phone for Anna, took messages, put stuff in her mailbox, etc...and eventually got to see her play Twilight: Los Angeles (which is based on the LA riots) on my birthday for free as a comp play!
I had the weirdest experience concerning Anna's "fame" as an actress and also as someone who I actually "knew" - in the summer my sisters and I were driving back to Stanford from North Dakota and we stopped at a theater to see the movie Dave.
ADS is in Dave in a minor role, but still is onscreen for a good while, and I was totally frustrated because I knew I had seen her before and could not remember what other movie she was in.
When I was leaving the theater, it finally hit me.
This is Anna Deavere Smith who I've actually spoken to, in real life! I think this was the first time of just randomly seeing someone in a movie that I had seen first outside of movies and TV.
(I told this story to Karen from work on Friday night and she told a matching, yet opposite, story of seeing this gorgeous guy in the Gucci store, waving to him, and then trying to figure out why she knows him, since he had waved back and said hi. She realized that the guy had been Damon Wayans!)

Anyway.
I never actually took a class from ADS at Stanford, I sat in on her Interviewing class but didn't keep going with it. I think it looked more than a little bit scary and a lot of work. I wish I had taken the class.

This book is really quite inspiring just from its conversational tone - the letters are all one-sided, of course, from ADS to BZ, but she fills in the gaps for the other side, "So you say they're going to tear down your high school's painting studio and put in a biology lab? Fight back!"
and so on.

* Presence - example, Gloria Foster, the Oracle in the Matrix movies. Study photographs to learn about presence.
* "Being in it, and out of it, at the same time" - feeling as others is empathy - more useful and more important than sympathy, which is feeling for others
* confidence - determination sometimes even more important
* self-esteem "Be strong, be new, be you"
* discipline - example of Anna's swimming
* The Man - whoever has the money or whoever has the power to work out the money needed and the venue needed to expose your art - man or woman, etc.
* wow - she was a fat kid? hard to believe! She was terrible at jumping rope and so now is learning to jump rope to break some of those chains (perhaps I should take gymnastics or something...)
* procrastination - "active avoidance" - if she has something to do, she programs herself to do it so quickly that procrastination can't set in
* mentors - are different than teachers because you pick them, you seek them out
* from p. 87:

"I just got a call from my agent saying that there's a job for me on a television show called The West Wing. Have you seen it? It's written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote a movie called The American President, which I am in. And the actor Martin Sheen, whom I adore (and who was also in The American President), is in it. I don't think I'm going to do the show... Do you like it? Have you seen it?"

* From p. 88:

" You're funny! You think I'd be a fool not to do The West Wing?"

* From p. 89:

"My publicist agrees with you, he's saying, "Get on that plane, and go to LA!!!" He says The West Wing is a big hit."

* Lots of advice here about feeling alienated and depressed. BZ apparently was feeling pretty alone at her school as a high school painter.

Hi-Liner Class of 2005 Family Histories

So I was looking around on the website of my alma mater, Valley City High School, and saw this interesting link to several essays written by Mrs. Wendel's English class on their families' personal histories. (Mrs. Wendel was my 7th Grade English teacher, this is an 11th grade class here).

Since they are public record and out on the web I don't feel any guilt in linking to them and maybe perhaps being inspired by them for other stories. There's a lot of North Dakota grit here just in the first few stories in the As.
I do notice that the habit of starting your essay with a question "Have you ever... " and then "Well I ..." is firmly entrenched in these kids.

Hi-Liner Histories

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay

This book I picked up in the hallway at work, it had a "Free, take me" sign sticking up out of it, written on paper from the nearby print shop.

It's a story of Peekay, a young English boy growing up in South Africa, surviving initially in a boarding school where he is regularly beaten up by Afrikaaner boys who hate him because he is English and England sent many Afrikaaners to concentration camps during the First Boer War.
He eventually finds mentors when home for vacations, and spends most of the happy times of his childhood actually in a prison where his friend and mentor Doc has been imprisoned (mainly just for being German). He starts out coming to continue taking piano lessons from Doc but finds another passion in the boxing team at the prison and builds a lengthy successful boxing career which continues on to boarding school.

It's a very strong individualist, survivalist story, another reviewer on Amazon compared it to "The Kite Runner" and it is very similar but perhaps a bit more episodic and not as emotionally jarring as "The Kite Runner".

Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn

I heard Ruthanne Lum McCunn speak at the Women on Writing conference on my birthday as well and read this book that weekend. I had just kind of vaguely heard of her but the book really intrigued me.
It's a fictional telling of a historical story - a Chinese girl is sold into slavery by her father (even though she is his precious "thousand pieces of gold).
She eventually ends up traveling to America and apparently pretty narrowly escaping having to work as a prostitute. One of the men in the small mining town where she ends up in Oregon befriends her, helps her start up her own boarding house business, and eventually they fall in love.
It was very sweet how their relationship is described, and I did really enjoy the story, but I was almost surprised that there was not more happening in the last half of the book.

It's also a bit horrible to think of but I was almost thinking that Polly's experiences before she met Charlie would be even worse than they were. I think maybe the writing even in the beginning lacks some drama, Polly is really going through some hard events but it doesn't hit me as viscerally as some other works.
I did enjoy the book though, it was a pretty relatively fast read and interesting to hear McCunn talk about the research she did to write the book.

Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World

Actual date read (early December)
This is a book by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. - my sister gave it to me at Thanksgiving.
She read out a couple of the poems in the book at Thanksgiving and they were very moving.
It really made me wish that the world's women can continue to try to gather, lead, work for change, although I have really being doing none of this myself of course.
What would be the world be like if more of its leaders were women who might be more likely to talk to each other to resolve more of the problems?

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Click picture for link to NPR interview...
I just finished this book (bought at Kepler's last night) which won one of the big non-fiction book awards, and like Terry Gross on "Fresh Air" said, "I hated to read it and I loved to read it" at the same time.

Joan's husband died suddenly in Dec 2003 and this is her story of how she got through the year after that. I actually ended up identifying even more with her experiences of her daughter being sick, because it reminded me of when my mom was sick.

Although this really pushed a lot of emotional buttons for me, it was reassuring because I always thought magical thinking in terms of thinking "If I would have done something different or been different, it would have saved her" is something that mainly children experience (it always strikes me as sounding so wacky) ... but here is Joan Didion having the same thoughts.

I don't even remember consciously thinking that I could actually have done anything to save her (my mom, not Joan Didion :-)
as a 12 year old (when she got sick) and 16 year old (when she died), but my therapist says this is the root of much of this self-doubt, self-punishing that we do... we would be good people and deserving of (love, good jobs, etc) if we had been able to save this person that we loved.

So it was very reassuring that Joan Didion as a mature person was also going through things that happened before her husband died and trying to find ways that she screwed up by letting it happen.
And things like wanting to keep his shoes because unconsciously she wants him to be able to return.

Anyway, it is a very good book and it may bring up some stuff for you also but in the end I am very glad I read it. (And it's fairly short.)

Gene Wilder's Kiss Me like a stranger, book cover. 

Kiss Me Like a Stranger, by Gene Wilder (audio CD)

This is an awesome book and very reassuring to listen to while working.
Gene Wilder's voice is very calming and I find it inspiring to think of everything he has been through - in addition to Gilda Radner's death, his mother also died when he was young, and he also fought through non-Hodgkin's lymphoma with the use of stem cell therapy.

Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

I'm not sure if I'm going to actually re-read this today or not but I wanted to include it to mark the fact that today is my mother's birthday. She was born on February 20, 1948 and would have been 57 today.
She died in April 1990 at 42, when I was 16. I feel very close to the author of this book because although she is older than me, her mother also died when Hope was 16.

I'm in a Motherless Daughters meetup group which is meeting today, coincidentally. I'm thinking of bringing a picture of my mom for the group, as I have been talking about that for awhile.

Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra

I gave a speech for Toastmasters about my own layoff and how helpful this book was for me.
The subtitle is
Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career.

The basic principle is that adults are more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than to think their way into a new way of acting.
Meaning, that the idea that we all need to sit around and carefully research out what we are going to do next in our lives/careers usually doesn't work very well, because we actually need to keep testing these hypotheses to see if what we're thinking about is really what it seems to be and what we might want.

I was happy to read this book also because I have already been trying to do this, although not that successfully yet in terms of actually starting something new.
The three steps she lists in this book for this iterative wash, rinse, repeat process are:
1. Do new things -- for me, I'm getting trained as a volunteer literacy tutor. I am going to apply for an internship at a literary agency, and I've started up my website again and started this blog to bring out more of my creative sides. Perhaps also this will go into making radio shows, perhaps by working on Philip's show idea.
2. Make new connections. This is partly to be able to try out these "new selves" in new communities where you aren't only known for what your old self does. Also the book pointed out that most job connections happen on the "edges" of your network. It's not the person that you know directly, it's the person they know, or the person their friends know, who is often most helpful in getting you useful contacts in a new field. I'm not necessarily doing this very well yet but I am reconnecting with the current network and trying to meet more people as part of Toastmasters and the tutoring links also.
3. Retell and re-incorporate the findings into your personal story. This is giving you a chance to again test out these hypotheses and make the abstract idea of what you want to be closer to the reality, by incorporating these learnings into your personal story about yourself.

I'm not sure how well these points got across in my speech which I had not properly prepared for, but they are very useful and the book is very inspiring to anyone who is looking to make a change.

Madeleine L'Engle: Herself - Reflections on a Writing Life plus a little Annie Lennox

I'm already getting ahead of myself on this blog, as this is Sunday and I think I finished this book on Friday (or perhaps even Thursday) - but I haven't had a chance to write about it yet.
Note that from updates on the Madeleine L'Engle site I saw that she is writing a book about Meg from A Wrinkle in Time in her fifties, but it seems unlikely this will be published, as it was already in progress in 1998.

This book is a great source of inspiration to me as a person and as someone who might be trying to write fiction someday. Madeleine L'Engle to me is one of the wisest people in the world. She is the author of the Time Trilogy (Wrinkle in Time, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Wind in the Door) and many other fiction and non-fiction books, including Meet the Austins, A House Like a Lotus, and a set of autobiographical journals called The Crosswicks Journals - my favorite is The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, because she talks about the summer when her mother died and how hard it was (taking care of her, watching her decline, and so on).

In this book, Carole F. Chase has compiled several short essays/commentary from Madeleine on writing, faith, her books, and other topics, into ten sections.
Some of this material is from the Crosswicks Journals and other books mentioned above, and some is from workshops she gave in the seventies and more recently (these are all in the L'Engle collection of Boswell Library at Wheaton College.)

Reading these words is like sitting and having coffee with Madeleine right when your inspiration or faith that you can go on is lagging. It's really reassuring to read that she also needs to write every day (just like a pianist needs to practice every day) and to be reminded of the 2.5 years that A Wrinkle in Time spent going around to various publishers before it was finally published.
I just had lunch with a friend of mine who is working on a science fiction novel and much of Madeleine's comments and thoughts would be helpful to him - will send him the link as I bet he will just want to buy it.

Madeleine L'Engle and Annie Lennox
I am also a big fan of Annie Lennox, especially her new album "Bare" - and I was listening to this at the same time as reading this book. It's like having the combined wisdom of two wise older women (attention I always crave since I don't have a mother.)
The below song seems to fit into this inspirational theme even though the song and most of the songs on its album seem a little depressing:

Annie Lennox's Pavement Cracks
portions: (this song looks fairly depressing but notice she is "walking just the same" even though all this stuff is happening):

The city streets are wet again with rain.
But I'm walking just the same.
The skies turned to the usual grey.
When you turn to face the day

oh and love don't show up in the pavement cracks
all my watercolors fade to black
I'm going nowhere and I'm ten steps back
all my dreams are falling fast

where is my comfort zone?
a simple place to call my own?
cause everything I want to be
comes crashing down on me

Also I found this commentary from Annie herself on Pavement Cracks - I'm kind of happy about this as it seems to confirm my feeling about the song (that it is not really as depressing as it seems!)

Found at

Pavement Cracks: "Children have such an instinctive way of reacting to the world. They skip because they're happy. They delight in the moment - in the macaroni on the plate before them. We lose that freshness as we grow. Life knocks it out of us. Yet still, there's this miraculous capacity for new growth. In my darkest times, I'd walk with my head bowed, seeing only the cracks in the pavement slabs. But then I'd notice the weeds pushing up through them, like a metaphor for hope. All is not desperate. Change comes, even when it seems it won't."

Make Your Creative Dreams Real by Sark

This book is, as its subtitle says "A plan for procrastinators, perfectionists, busy people, and people who would really rather sleep all day.

It's really one of the most inspirational among all of SARK's other inspiring books - and has a lot more "meat" in it, as it is 278 pages long and includes many exercises as well as stories from people who have made their own creative dreams real.
SARK's info on "micro-movements" for those who have trouble getting large (or small) tasks done, is very helpful.