Category: Just Shelley

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Writing

Favorite children’s book

One more post in my little orgy of posting tonight, and then off to bed. Sharon finished a class in Children’s Literature, and reading her words triggered fond memories of my own childhood reading.

Question: What was your favorite reading when you were a kid? And if you say Harry Potter, then you’re too young to be reading this weblog. There must be some kind of Britney Spears weblog you can read somewhere.

For me there were the usual books — Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse, as well as Little Women and The Secret Garden. There was also one book that I can’t remember the name of but it was about a day when all the toys in the land became alive — for just one day. It was a great book. I also read every animal-related book I could get my hands on. And comic books when I could snitch them from my brother’s collection.

However, my favorite reading was faery tales. The best was Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, though I also liked the Snow Queen and the Nightengale. And for a tale to curl your toes, there was the Grimm’s version of Cinderella (BTW, not for the faint of heart — what can I say, I was twisted at a young age).

Speaking of faery tales, the best movie depicting a faery tale is Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête. This movie put to shame Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, though the latter was an excellent introduction to the melding of traditional and computer animation.

BTW — Sharon, you’re going to be a terrific librarian, but they’re not going to let you swear among the stacks, m’dear.

Categories
Just Shelley People Political Weblogging

Where weblogging shouldn’t go

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I made a mistake last Friday — I thought to introduce conflicting viewpoints to demonstrate that one can, intellectually, appreciate more than one viewpoint on an issue. This was a mistake because there are some issues that one cannot discuss from the detached, bloodless core that exists at the root of all intellectual discourse.

We’re seeing the collapse of the Arab Summit amidst more suicide bombings in Israel. We’re witnessing a seemingly non-ending spiral that can only have devastating consequences. Ira Riftkin writes of the conflict:

Israelis cannot kill Palestinian aspirations without obliterating the Palestinians, and no number of Palestinian attacks will force Israel to surrender meekly, certainly not after the Holocaust.

Faced with such stark words, what possible intellectual spin could we put on this issue? Without sounding hollow and vain?

I was a foolish woman who forgot for a moment that blood issues such as this go beyond any form of “reasoning” one can do with the written word, no matter how eloquent the writing, no matter how intelligent the communicator, no matter how erudite the audience. To have brought this topic up in my weblog was the absolute height of vanity and arrogance. And I have paid for this attempted intellectual encapsulation of such a dire, incredibly sad, and heartbreaking situation as exists in the Middle East.

My desperate hope is that there are others out there more capable than I that can find a solution to this tragedy before we are faced with the complete extermination of a people — whether the people be Israelis or Palestinians, or both.

And now I apologize to all of you for having originated this topic in this weblog, first out of intellectual vanity, and later in a fit of anger and self-righteousness. If I decide to continue with this weblog, I will not do so again in the future.

Categories
Writing

Happy Tutor fangirl

I am becoming such a fan of Happy Tutor. In particular, today’s (and yesterday’s) posting on Writing of Injustice grabbed my attention and my thoughts.

It takes a rare talent to put forth such thoughtful prose wrapped, but not obscured, in a cloak of humor.

Categories
Just Shelley

Mellow out, or burn out

No matter how strongly you feel on a subject, at a certain point you either mellow out, or burn out.

Moth to a flame. We circle our inner passions, beating at the fire with our wings, driving in air to make the flames leap higher. At some point, if we continue this feeding of the fire, our wings will catch in the flame.

Jonathon writes of a meeting between an old friend and himself, and the differences between the person who was John Anthony, intense participant of seventies demonstrations, and the more mellow Jonathon of today.

I also attended demonstrations in the seventies. I yelled and yelled and yelled, through cupped hands and microphone. During one march down the middle of I5 in Seattle, I pounded one of the lights along the side of the road with a stick, jumped up on the cement border, and yelled and yelled with all my might into the crowd. When I stopped to draw in breath, hoarse from the effort, one of the guys in the crowd yells back, “I can’t hear you — there’s too much noise!”

Like Jonathon, I too changed my name during this time, from Michelle Rae to Shelley. Unlike Jonathon, though, I am still as intense now as I was then and find myself living in a state of alt from day to day.

However, I also wouldn’t mind being thinner. If one is going to go up in a puff of smoke, one can at least look good while doing it.

Categories
Just Shelley

Gatekeepers

I wrote this on the 6th of March. Not sure why I didn’t post it then. One of those things. However, I looked at it again today and decided that today was a good day to post it.

Leaving the parking garage for my lunch appointment on Tuesday, I found the exit blocked, yet again, by the construction crew of the new condo across the street. I tapped my horn and when a couple of members of the crew turned towards me, I pointed to the pallets blocking the way. One of the guys holds up his finger in a gesture of “one moment”, walks over and moves the pallets — but not the huge truck behind them, basically giving me just barely enough room to turn the corner and not scrape the sides of my car.

As I fought to move the car around the obstacles, other construction crew members stopped working to watch and laugh at my efforts.

Last week when I took my car into the Ford service center, I missed the regular entrance and ended up driving through the actual center itself. At the center exit, a car blocked the way out, with a mechanic standing beside the car talking to another mechanic driving the car. I waited, not saying anything, not sounding the horn — I was a stranger in a strange land in this place. Eventually, the two guys finished their conversation, the car started to move, and I started to go…

…when I was stopped because the mechanic who had been standing by the car walked directly in front of me, slowly, looking at me, making sure I realized that he “owned” this territory, and that I pass by at his sufferance.

These two acts go beyond issues of courtesy. They were about power. These two individuals were the gatekeepers and I had to pay toll.

With the construction crew, my toll was to be humiliated as I tried my best to drive around the obstacles. At the service center, my toll was being made aware of the fact that I didn’t belong in this place, and I had best remember it.

There are well established (though often ignored) laws about driving to ensure we don’t kill each other. There are roads to enable driving from any point A to any point B. There is also a mapping and addressing scheme that works remarkably well in regards to location of same.

All of which can be arbitrarily shut down by one person who, in a moment of ultimate power, controls my only access to the organized but open system of the road.