February 16, 2016

The Life-Changing Magic of Marie Kondo --- backing out of chaos at what price?




It's a new religion, and I dig it -- deliverance from our material insanity, our cumulative and accumulative manias, deep-seated DNA memories of poverty and deprivation that have us crying more! More is good!

I read her book (the first one - there's a sequel) and yes, with help from my son cleared the living-room-dining-room of books, trinkets, plus a bunch of stuff I didn't love and everything stored on the floor (months of back issues of the NY Review of Books and the Courrier International, books, papers, DVDs, charity letters, cartoon clippings, Christmas cards...)

I saw the light!

Now I can chill in the living-room and read a single book I've culled from a book-shelf (not in the living-room) and read a current article and feel, what--more objective? more intellectually fresh? undistracted? All of the above.

Now I love my living-room. I love reading in my living-room.
Thing is---there's a very small space allotted to books. Most of them are downstairs in the 'book room' which is books surrounded by wood panelling, keeping company with boots and  shoes and a stack of rolled rugs.
Needless to say I haven't yet brought Kondo downstairs in the bookroom.
How to I handle it? When it comes to books.....what do you do?
Kondo wants us touch it, feel the vibe, feel the love - do you love it? do you get a buzz? Is your life enriched by this object, er sorry, book?

What do you do with Brainfood?

Here's an eloquent article I tripped over.

http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/the-magic-of-untidiness

There's still magic in them thar' books.
Maybe we need to inhabit our caves of chaos until the end.
Our mental riches, the heritage of our own lived and vicariously lived lives.

In retirement, I'm beginning to double back to odd tomes of yesteryear -- Love's Body by N.O.Brown, Give Sorrow Words by Maryse Holder, feminist works of the '70s, The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman...

So when it comes time to Kondo-izing the book room, I think I'll be standing at the door, gazing lovingly over dusty, long-neglected volumes and thinking:

An old book.
Yes, I could get back to that book.
I could hold it in my carpal-tunneled, freckled hands and see how it speaks to me fifty years after I first opened it.



February 7, 2016

WEATHER.......OR NOT---IT'S A HAIRDRYER


I'm not fanatic about checking weather reports, but as there's an open house today at the new, temporary Opera des Nations, I had quick look at meteo.ch on my computer, with the German translated into English automatically -- thank you Robot! I copied part of the report directly from the wabsite.
One of those things that adds spice to multi-linguality.

German-Speaking Switzerland, northern and central Grisons:

On Sunday morning, the hairdryer achieved in the northern Alpine valleys its maximum with wind gusts between 100 and 120 km / h.He brings again temperatures around 15 degrees and can be felt to Lake Constance and Lake Zurich. A cold front reached the morning the Jura. Here it starts to rain strongly. The rain zone comes to lunch ahead to Reuss and achieved afternoon eastern Switzerland. The hair comes to an end, followed by stormy winds from the west. Behind the front there are still some showers with snow to about 800 meters. Towards evening calmed the weather.

Rereading this I just noticed the rain zone coming to lunch and the hair coming to an end.

This is the link, but when I checked 15 minutes later, the above paragraph was.....gone!
Oh well. I swear this is an exact copy!!



Mini-glossary

French and German for " a hot southerly wind on the northern slopes of the Alpes"  = foehn or föhn, which is also the term for a hairdryer.

Hair =  er.....air???

Rain zone comes to lunch = well at least it's not the Iceman cometh.....

And while we're on weather, I always loved this symbol used by météo -- they hedge their bets....and their butts. 
Sun? 
Just as we told you. 
Cloudy? 
Don't blame us, it's part of the picture. 
Rain? 
Got it covered.










February 5, 2016

BACK ON BLOG

After a long break like this one, got to get back on that horse!
Not that I exactly fell off the horse....I sort of slipped slowly off it into blog silence, all the while brewing verbal decoctions that I never served up.
Metaphor alert: horses, tisanes.

Since April so many events:  horrifying terrorist attacks, storms, floods, continued rise of ISIS, populations on the move, with still mounting refugee and humanitarian crises, lead-up to US election time and the waltz of the candidates, the devastating Zika virus, to name a few.
Not to mention fibrillations of everyday life - illness, also death of close ones.

Still, I celebrate by flogging the dead metaphor and then applying a new look from the pre-programmed rack on blogger.com - a change from the vaguely Greek ruins of recent years.
Not too hard on the eyes but not too artistic either.
Books with no titles you say? To be written? To be en-titled?

Anyway...simple can be good.
So here's simple!