July 15 - 27, 2008

Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link

2005, Paperback

7 cards

Kelly Link, the book's back cover says, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where I used to live. It would have been wonderful to meet her and talk about wonderful things like Faery Handbags. But then again maybe it's better to read about Faery Handbags, because as she writes, "Meeting writers is usually disappointing at best."

Faery Handbags is the title of the first short story in this captivating book and while it stands out as the shiniest gem in the bunch, the others are enjoyable too in their descriptions and tales told about zombies and the people who wear cat skins. I am always drawn to writers who notice the minor things that make up life, and sometimes the things that make it seem worth living. Link notices Cadbury Creme eggs, Moon Pies and (perhaps invents) squeezeble pork (which, while not something I would enjoy others might), with the best of them (I remember first noticing such slight mentions of everyday things that fill our lives in Douglas Coupland's books). Link arrives at truisms in her stories with moments in thrift stores and with friends and families, truisms that we all need to be reminded of sometimes, and truisms we hope are indeed true.

Some excerpts:

1- "I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. ... Everything is arranged by color, somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful."

2- "But the point is, if you're looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard."

4- Scrabble

-zippery

5- faery handbag

7- "purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people..."

8- "Even nightmares have to sleep now and then."

9- "He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough to figure out how to fit in."

11- "It's better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up."

12- "I also know how to say I love you, but I'm not going to ever say it to anyone again, except Jake, when I find him.

14- Cadbury Creme egg

20- "Remember when you don't know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble."

37- squeezable pork, Moon Pies

39- "The customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole."

52- "'Nobody ever really knows what they want,' Charley said. 'Why should that change after you die?'"

65- "Summer is the time of ghosts. In winter, ghosts are easy to spot."

-"There is no word for war or travel."

77- donuts

119- "her mother has painted a little door. It isn't a real door, except when Tilly goes over to look at it, it is real."

129- "The witch vomits up...love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read)..."

137- "And when you have children you need houses to put them in."

161- "'Do you like museums?' Will says. She looks like a girl who goes to museums."

166- postcard

168- lemurs

170- "Modern art is a wast of time. When the zombies show up you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies."

170-171- things Soap has been thinking about

171- Busby Berkeley

176- "Everyone has a zombie contingency plan."

178- olives

179- "He doesn't belong anywhere."

181- shopleaving

206- orange-juice colored corduroy couch

207- "What kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch."

-"She's an enigma wrapped in a mysterious t-shirt."

208- "When the woman who invented Hello Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, 'Because she has no mouth.'"

-pirate-magicians

212- Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich

218- "Can I ask you a question?"

220- Meeting writers...

235- "It would be easier if I had a brother ...Or a sister. I'm tired of being good all the time. If I had a sibling, then we could take turns being good...but it sucks having to figure out everything all by myself."

236- (calls to the phone booth) J. "complains about all the things there are to complain about, and the silent person on the other end listens and listens."

243- (Talis) "Somebody has to be the person who doesn't [talk]. The person who listens."

244- "Except secrets can't have secrets, they just are."

249- maps

-corn mosaic

250- "Bob Dylan is singing about monkeys."

251- "He writes in his blog about what he's reading."

256- "...I didn't get any postcards."

262- "Imaginary houses are sexy. Real houses are work."

274- records

278- "Tell me a story so that I'll remember you."

287- kazoo

292- giraffes

297- "I love you, but it's not about love, Ed, it's about timing."

July 17 - 20, 2008

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris

2008, hardcover

9 cards

You might think the painting on the cover of David Seadaris's new book is intriguing. (The jacket was designed by the fabulous Chip Kidd.) Perhaps you even looked to see who it was by. That Vincent van Gogh might have painted it as a joke in art school is great. When I've mentioned I was reading this book to people lately, they've mentioned they heard it isn't as good as some of his other books. While maybe the crazy tales of his childhood have been told and stack up differently in terms of a life lived when middle aged, Sedaris's stories still entertain and make note of the minor things in life with acute precision. Living now where I do, references to Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham ring true in new ways. Many of these stories have been published in The New Yorker, but even those still entertain with second reads.

A few selections

3- germs

4- cocktail at a supermarket

9- "every year 5,000 children are startled to death"

10- "No surprises, no practical jokes, nothing unexpected, but a parent can't control everything and there's still the outside world to contend with, a world of backfiring cars and their human equivalents."

15- "I also didn't want to go alone, and this was where our problem started."

21- "...what was a vacation but a chance to be someone different?"

36 Chapel Hill

39- "The idea was that we were different, not like the rest of America..."

40- old-timey, malarkey

46- sweat angel

-"it was hard to live in a college town and not go to college."

48- "Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive."

49- "velveteen for everybody"

-"It was only at Halloween that we were allowed to choose our own outfits."

-pirate

-hobo- "It's a word you don't often hear anymore."

50- "the hobo roughed it by choice"

51- (sweater) "Having been destroyed, it is now indestructible, meaning I can wear it without worry."

-"...if I have one fashion rule, it's this: never change."

52- "What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion."

61- "It's a pretty sorry world when wearing a bow tie amounts to being 'out there.' I'm just not sure which is worse, the people who consider it out there that someone's wearing a bow tie, or the person who thinks he's out there for wearing it."

62- "Grown or not. I still feel best- more true to myself- when dressed like a hobo."

89- (Chicago) "Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, thought I'm not exactly sure why."

107- "her hair, like her face, was the color of old cement."

113- "Never live alone"

135- North Carolina Museum of Art

136- postcards

141- "The idea of matching artwork to decor was, to me, an abomination..."

148- doughnut

152- "the sorts of things that are not for everyone"

153- "It's the things you don't buy that stay with you the longest."

154- (washer and dryer) "they remind me that I'm doing fairly well"

-(skeleton) "You are going to die."

159- "What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone's guess."

176- Kate Bush

182- "magpies are constantly searching for a way out"

196- "a single flaming mouse"

213- "Why is it you never see a baby squirrel?"
234- "At a nearby table there's always a couple in their late seventies, holding their menus with trembling, spotted hands..."

243- 4th grade field trip- American Tobacco plant- Durham

244- "My room was clean and orderly, and if I'd had my way it would have smelled like an album jacket the moment you removed the plastic. That is to say, it would have smelled like anticipation."

263- index cards

289- "Japanese is a listener's language. 'What's not being mentioned is usually more important that what is.'"

290- the mass-produced mistakes

293- "But nobody's afraid of moths." "I am."

301- "...and you're not going anywhere until you finish your pickles."

303-(sheet of rules written in Japanese, symbols) "either 'not eating candy hearts' or 'no falling in love.'"

June 25 - 28, 2008

A Series of Small Boxes

Thomas Devaney

2007, paperback

3 cards

Thomas Devaney is a brilliant poet. He writes of life and life lived in such precise ways while not forgetting stamps and refrigerator boxes from childhood. I discovered his poetry also through the June issue of the Believer. The review offered a few lines of the title poem, A Series of Small Boxes (which you can read in full here). After reading those lines I knew I needed this book. While the title poem is still my favorite many gems and brilliant lines linger throughout the entire book. He even writes about Nothing in a well-informed wrestling with John Cage. The fabulous photographer Zoe Strauss, whose work I saw at the Whitney a few years ago, even took his photograph for the back jacket.

Selections:

1- "Which I also love in a way one can love

A City one has loved and been loved in

Because it enters you, in a way, as you walk,

Buy stamps, tell time..."

3- "Does silence have to mean a lack of silence?"

4- eyes, saying hello

6- "Is this what 'half' looks like?"

8- "all those times we never kept meeting"

10-12- A Series of Small Boxes

12- "corrugated magic"

13- "Clouds replace the clouds."

18- donuts

22- WE STILL REFOLD MAPS

23- "New Jersey is the greatest poem never written."

35- "Birdwatchers had nothing on what the birds saw."

39- "The most remarkable love poems in the world have nothing to do with it."

-"The calm, late-night companionship of a book.

Assured in words not to be reassured in words.

No promises past the page only all the moment can hold."

41- One Hour, October

-skyscraper

43- "Like records when they were records and letters letters."

46- Rimbaud

54- "Everything I had to say I didn't need to say."

55- John Cage

-"the Wallace Stevens line: 'Nothing that is not there and nothing that is"

-"Nothing + Nothing = Something, that is 'Nothing' which is really something," I said not knowing where that came from.

-"Here is a line for not talking, which isn't silence"

56- "I am only describing, as words are one way, and walking is another."

-"new John Cages get added"

May 31 - June 6, 2008

Out of Sheer Rage Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer

1997, hardcover

25 cards

The first book I read by Geoff Dyer was Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. While the title sold me immediately I loved his discussion and reflection upon the train station in Detroit as a ruin. Next I read The Ongoing Moment about photography (which I should probably re-read) where Dyer makes interesting connections in photography. Photography is actually part of Out of Sheer Rage and perhaps it shows how Dyer wrote this later book about photography as much as he shares the process of writing (and not writing) this unique and brilliant book about (and not about) D. H. Lawrence. Out of Sheer Rage came to my attention through the blog, with hidden noise through two posts, this one and this one. It was this quote from Dyer's discussion of islands via Lawrence compelled me to track down this book: "Me neither. All you can think of when you are on a small island is the impossibility of leaving when you want to, either because the island you are on is too big and you want to go to a smaller one or because the island is too small and you want to go to a bigger one.”

A few selected notes (there are many, many more treasures within these covers):

-"It must all be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel." Roland Barthes

1- "Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself."

2- "the writer who had made me want to become a writer. ... I wanted to read him with a purpose."

-"All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for."

4- "...books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment."

5- "I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose but it was impossible to choose- because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose."

12- D. H. Lawrence, "Where does one want to live?"

14- "I love the idea of speaking foreign languages. I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort."

16- The Complete Poems

18-19- that fabulous island quote

19- Rilke's letters

23- "Even writing a postcard required more concentration than I could muster."

28- "...which, on reflection, is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head."

31- Campidoglio- "It's a perfect square. And do you know why it's a perfect square?" "No. Why?" "Because it's not."

33- Nietzsche

34- "I was more interested in photographs of Lawrence than in the books he wrote."

-Michelet and Barthes

35- album and captions idea

-"I did not know what Lawrence looked like."

-Lawrence: "I hate photographs and things of myself, which are never me, and I wonder all the time who it can be."

38- Lawrence: "What do I care for first or last editions? To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding."

40- getting a camera

-"I am a camera"

41- "An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs."

45- "To travel is to eat."

-"The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun."

47- the sea

52- handshake origins

53- "Anything not overlooking something is to be looked down on."

55- people telling you will like something

57- "Opera begins in the market...stall holders have to convey the colour and taste of fruit in their voices."

-"His job was not to sell oregano but to fill the air with the sound of the scent."

59- "A common point of literary pilgrimage is that you often don't know which house you're meant to be visiting. In a sense it doesn't make any difference because it's very difficult to return home unless you have absolute proof that you've been to the right place. Hence the need, I conclude, for a plaque on the wall: to free us from doubt."

72- "Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes."

76- "Museum installations always have a touch of death about them. Houses have to live; they cannot be embalmed."

77- Lawrence hating the town, the town honoring him

81- community and neighborhood

89- Rilke on Rodin

90- Rilke: "For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

94- Goya

-early photograph portraits "people focused their lives 'in the moment rather than hurrying past it.'"

97- photographs and captions

100- corduroy

102- "The best readings of art are art," said George Steiner

104- trace of the self- re-reading a book

107- "...because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end."

109, 111- poems, letters

111- getting nearer to the person

122- "the novelists I like best are...not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscincki, Thomas Bernhard..."

126- "Life for people with children is crammed with obligations and duties to be fulfilled. Nothing is done for pleasure."

-"Most people don't want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted."

129-130- hatred of England

133- "The trajectory of Lawrence's life was not to leave his origins behind but to go beyond them."

134-135-Nietzsche- Human All Too Human- "...in a book written for 'free spirits' who do not yet exist, whose path he is hoping to ease into the world, it is as if he is describing Lawrence's feelings; conversely, Lawrence, at this moment, is, as it were, reading Nietzsche.

-"But when do you return?"

136- Neruda- "He who returns has never left."

-Lawrence- "I feel I shall wander for the rest of my days. But I don't care."

137- Lawrence- last letter: "This place no good!"

-films and books and life

138- "there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free."

-"freedom requires tenaciousness...Freedom is always precarious."

-Lawrence- "Freedom is a gift inside one's soul. You can't have it if it isn't in you."

139- "Catherine Carswell applauded Lawrence for the way 'he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did.'"

140- Lawrence- "It is my destiny to wander."

-"A destiny is not something that awaits us, it is something we have to achieve in the midst of innumerable circumstantial impediments and detours."

-The Question of Geography by John Berger and Nella Bielski- "Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility which is like an aim, if you wish, almost like a law. The job of our lives is to become- day by day, year by year, more conscious of that aim so that it can at last be realised."

141- Rilke- "Basically it's none of our business how somebody manages to grow if only he does grow, if only we're on the trail of our own growth."

142- detour as a straight line

151- writers and painting

-Lawrence's paintings

152- "He knew how to do nothing. He could just sit and be perfectly content."

153- "That's what I'm doing, shaking my fist at the world."

154- doughnuts

156- Lawrence's temper

157- Lawrence: "Damn the world anyhow. And I hate 'understanding' people and I hate more still to be understood. ..."

161- typewriter ribbon

168- "there is no love or life without despair of life"

170- regret, breakdowns

204- "Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it."

205- "To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf."

207- "Lawrence said that one sheds one's sickness in books..."

208- driving vs. flying

211- revisiting a place

222- "Clouds were stampeding across the sky."

225- Lawrence- travel- "What is it, makes one want to go anyway? Why can't one sit still? Why does one create such discomfort from oneself!"

226- Had we not seen and done all these things we would not be the people are are."

-"My greatest urge in life is to do nothing."

230- "Should anyone flatter us by asking what we are looking for, what we are searching for, then we think immediately, almost instinctively in vase terms- God, fulfillment, love- but our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches..."

231- "Add them together and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime."

231-232-"One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable records of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence."

May 26 - 31, 2008

Famous for Fifteen Minutes
My Years with Andy Warhol
By Ultra Violet
1998, hardcover
9 cards

I picked up this book about Warhol, written by one of his Superstars Ultra Violet. Partly about Warhol and partly about Ultra Violet's own life an experiences, a quote at the beginning points out that all conversations are reconstructed, warning one to not take some of the quotations at their word. While interesting in parts, Ultra Violet was out for publicity, in fast pursuit of the media, and the name dropping gets a bit overwhelming at times. She knew (and dated) lots of people including Dali and Ed Ruscha and while she has some great insights, at other times it seems like she's trying to hard to make sweeping statements about the time.

1- "In death, as in life, Warhol deals in contradictions."
3- "I met the King of Pop years ago. His name was Marcel Duchamp. To me, Andy was the Queen of Pop."
5- (Warhol) "He changed the way we look at the world, arguably the way we look at ourselves."
6- "The primary creation of Warhol was Andy Warhol himself."
7- "Magic was a word Andy gargled with for hours."
8- gimlet eye
-"There is no taking of Polaroids in heaven: the ineffable light precludes it."
11- "Here in the Factory the mirrors have come out of their frames and merged into a total environment of silvery reflections and refractions."
12- "...a wonderland where you step in and out of yourself, where memory and fantasy race into each other at full tilt."
-"Maybe what you're creating is artifact not art."
13- "Mirrors- they have the most memories. I am quoting John Graham."
18- Billy Name- "trained in the spirit of Black Mountain. 'All of us carried Rimbaud under our arms.'"
28- doughnuts
31-33- screening of Blow Job
42- worked in a five and dime store
89- luncheonette
90- "In the Factory, Andy always works with loud rock music on. In rock, repetition is the leitmotif. ... the drum, a replica of the heartbeat."
92- "But for Warhol, photography is not just a helping hand. It is a replacement of the chosen object. The photograph becomes the painting. ... no original painting; from the start, there are multiples."
95- "It amazes me that a country as liberal as the United States allows itself to take on the burden of capital punishment."
96- Red Race Riot- "the repetition produces an action painting."
97- subliminal art- "takes objects people are fascinated by and turns them into art."
98- quadruple impact
-"John Cage uses graffiti sounds in his pieces and Merce Cunningham uses everyday noise in his dances."
102- "The Velvet Underground plays so loud you never hear the music."
103- Nico- "She looks like a girl- but when she sings, it's hard to be sure of her sex."
-"The decibels are so deafening that talking is out of the question. That's why Andy loves it so much."
104- "The Velvet Underground is going with music what Andy is doing with images. They repeat and repeat and repeat the same word or phrase until someone screams out, 'Shut up!'"
105- "Minimal music echoes minimal art."
110- Empire "It is a picture postcard of the building transferred to the screen."
125- Duchamp
John Chamberlain- orange corduroy pants

142- Max's Kansas City

144- Brasserie in the Seagram Building

198- "The moon is no cheap date."

205- "Since the sixties people workshop the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone starts at the beaming energy of Edie..."

214- Ed Ruscha

216

221- Polaroid camera

254- "And his camera is still an integral part of his clothing."

273- Fiesta ware

April 22 - May 13, 2008

Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson

1999, hardcover

16 cards

Autobiography of Red was recommended to me by someone who has pointed me in the direction of brilliantly fabulous books. Anne Carson is an amazing writer. She chooses words and combines them in ways that delight and surprise, and also more. Her fascination with and command of language proves what can be done with language. Other writers in comparison often only arrange letters.

Some excerpts/points of interest:

3- Gertrude Stein quote

-words bouncing

4 "Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else."

-"These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the worlds to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being."

22- Emily Dickinson, "Can human nature not survive without a listener?"

-"The only secret people keep is Immortality."

23- (stones) "To stop and imagine the life of each one!"

26- "A space for its meaning remained there but blank. The letters themselves could be found hung on branches of furniture in the area."

28- "Facts are bigger in the dark"

30-rhinestoning

36- He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell of the screen itself as it pressed its grid onto his face."

39- "They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics."

42- map

43-"'How does distance look?' is a simple direct question, It extends from a spaceless within to the edge

of what can be loved. It depends on light."

46- "Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary."

-photograph

48- "He could feel the house of sleepers around him like loaves on shelves."

49- toast and death

51- "Red Patience"

55- painting

56- "Nothing to say. Nothing."

58- "Why are you along in this huge blank garden like a piece of electricity?"

59- Barnum circus

61- Krakatoa

65- "...photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships."

-stars, memories

66- "...nobody knows how to look at a photograph nowadays."

-Yeats

70- "Huge wads of silence stuffed the air."

72- yellowing index card

73- donuts

-Muhammad Ali, poems

75- slide projector

80- 15 names for clouds

-"What is time made of?"

-accordion

82- Heidegger, postcards

90- "It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."

92- "White is black. Black is white. Perhaps I will get some new information about Red."

93- time, photographs

94- olives

-"Children make you see distances."

97- slippery foods

98- "Empty street below gave back nothing of itself. Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street."

-"sleeping pavement"

-moods

103- nothing

105- Philosophic problems, red

106- Walt Whitman

109- wings

120- water tank

125- "trying to think how to photograph Lima"

131- "Human Valentines"

139- "I am a beast"

-gamboling

141- time

145- Photographs #1748

-"The Only Secret People Keep"

148- blinking, blindness

February 14-15, 2008

The Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman

2007 hardcover, library

5 cards

Maira Kalman is fabulous. The word fabulous exists because of people like Maira Kalman. If you've seen the new Elements of Style you know who Maira Kalman is; she painted the wonderful pictures in a fabulous new version of that book. She also wrote/painted/created/thought of this book, The Principles of Uncertainity, a conceptual walk that's also a picture book for those in a reflective and contemplative state of mind. I first saw this book during the holidays but I didn't look at it too much for fear that I would need to have it. The book jacket's inner sleeve confirmed my suspicion but I put the book back before leafing through. Then the library had it. Thank you library! Kalman's paintings are unique undertakings, seemingly simultaneously drawing upon Milton Avery, Francis Alys, Florine Stettheimer and Jenny Holzer's Truisms- completely magical and profound. The index and the appendix are also delights for bibliophiles and collectors, not to mention a map (A MAP!!!) in the back!

It's all fabulous but these pages I found particularly fabulous:

p. 3 dodo

p. 4 Evdaimonia

p. 5 stuffed Pavlov's dog

p.8-9 map her mother drew

p. 20 looking between slurps

p. 26 walking and cities and magnificent chairs

p. 28 "excellent United Pickle tag lying on the sidewalk" (pickles!!)

p. 37 old people and walking (so true)

p. 42 "How are we all so brave as to take step after dtep? Day after day?"

p. 46 we are all going to die

p. 47 fruit platters

p. 50 obituaries "Maybe it is a way of trying to figure out, before the day begins, what is important. And I am curious about the things that make up a life."

p. 52 (fabulous painting of a donut shop)

p. 55 bundt pan

p. 56-57 Tolstoy and Gorky

p. 65 Alzheimer's

p. 83 "The world is coming to an end. What to do Spend the day on the subway."

p. 97 string

p. 99 "How do you know who you are?"
p. 102 collections "...tangible evidence of history, memory. Longing, delight."

p. 111 Abe Lincoln

p. 122-23 candy collection (I had one of these when I was younger)

p. 124 "It is well known how much Goethe loved candy."

p. 162 "The silent sink in the Corbusier house that speaks the truth." (Tim would like this.)

p. 163 "The ottoman on the way to the Proust room."

p. 164-65 Proust notebook

p. 166 museum guard

p. 176 Sabine- "clothes and shoes she made herself." "She tells me to read "Butterball" by Maupassant. I will."

p. 184-85 Louise Bourgeois

p. 186 "I think of her Bed Construction that says, 'Art is the guarantee of sanity.' I really hope that's true."

p. 192 "Washing dishes is the antidote to confusion. I know that for a fact."

p. 194 Alzheimer's, Sweet 'n Low packets

p. 195 Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest "That is a very big poin in the plus column of life."

p. 208-211

p. 236-38

p. 242 "How do you go mad? How do you not go mad?"

p. 245 "The truth is everybody gets on everybody's nerves."

p. 251 Freud and Wittgenstein

p. 252-53

p. 259 "Berlin Childhood around 1900" by Walter Benjamin

p. 261 Helen Levitt

p. 270 "One thing leads to another."

p. 284-85 Cartier-BResson photo

p. 287 "You cannot order a Deluxe grilled cheese sandwich. There are limits to deluxe."

p. 296-97 "Keep calm and carry on"

Fabulous index

Fabulous appendix- especially: things that fall out of books, packets, postcards