Erica Lorraine Scheidt's Blog, page 11

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it. Joan Didion in a commencement address at UC Riverside via InspiraciohPhoto: Rolf Henke's farm via freunde von freunden

Watching: Todd Selby x Christine Sun Kim on Nowness.com

Artists can change and move on and that's much more interesting than being like Chagall, who painted the same damn thing all his life. Don't you think? I think that's like turning out shirts. Dorothea Tanning in The Guardian, 2004Photo: Inès de la Fressange via Miss Moss

I love how Jess tags and tracks the books she reads. I love it when they show up in my reader and I really loved her Top 10 at the end of the year. Hila has book reviews and M. has begun writing reviews as part of remembering and thinking about what she's read. I haven't tracked the books I read. My GoodReads shelf is more a mashup of books I've read, bought, bookmarked, thought about, whatever. And I buy (like Andrew Sean Greer says) many, many more books then I read. My bedside table, of course, reflects books I've started, not books I've finished. So I'll start tracking books I've finished here:
January 2012Wonderstruck, Brian SelznickLooking for Alaska, John GreenIn Our Time, Ernest HemingwayWhere She Went, Gayle FormanFighting Fire, Caroline PaulThe Sense of An Ending, Julian BarnesThe Great Gatsby, F. Scott FitzgeraldSacred, Elana K. Arnold (Random House, Fall 2012)
Photo: Tegan wearing my favorite T-shirt from Cali DeWitt and Blood is the New Black

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a kind of tender curiosity. The Great Gatsby
Photo: Rolf Henke, Freunde von Freunden

is wearing this dress. Mara Hoffman at Bona Drag

She loves bread and butter and wine and innards and cannot abide fussy eaters. Madhur Jaffrey on Judith Jones in SaveurThe Pleasures of Cooking for One, one of M's favorite cookbooks

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. The Great Gatsby
Photo: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel's flat in Freunde von Freunden

A new book from Pam Houston is due out next month. Photo from: Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

Maurice Sendak via Big Other