“Fortitude” the Library Lion and managing librarian Jennifer Knode try out the laptops at the New York Public Library’s newest branch.
Photo: J.B. NICHOLAS/METRO
“Fortitude” the Library Lion and managing librarian Jennifer Knode try out the laptops at the New York Public Library’s newest branch.
Photo: J.B. NICHOLAS/METRO
Roxana Saberi, age 31, is an American journalist of Iranian and Japanese descent who was arrested in February 2009, and is being held in Iran on charges of espionage, which her lawyer and the U.S. Dept. of State call baseless. Saberi is a freelance journalist who moved to Iran six years ago, and reports for NPR, the BBC, and other news organizations.
“The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation — fun. And, if you can find your way back to fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double-bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the extreme unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you’re now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing.
Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.
The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the rewards of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.”
- David Foster Wallace
No one will touch us
if we pick up a star
If you spin out
you can ride in my car
When we slide together
we generate sparks
in our wheels and our hearts

“You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.” - Hal Borland