Today is the annual meeting of TRM's company. In a presentation that will feature many fancy-schmancy Power Point slides, the TRM's CEO will unveil the "vital metrics" (key goals) of the company for 2012. Flannista thought of "vital metrics" when she saw this image posted in Westsista's Facebook newsfeed early this morning. This is what would have happened to Dr. Seuss in corporate America.
That's Flann's meta-narrative, and she's sticking to it.
Flann's goin' in.
I passed inspection. Was fingerprinted. No criminal history. So this morning, I'm going to meet a few First Graders . . . and then I'm going to fasten my seat belt because I'm going to learn some new things!
I outlined a simple lesson plan for Day One of my overall objective: "Tell YOUR Story!" This morning, kids will share with me ONE beautiful thing they saw after they woke up and what that ONE beautiful thing taught them about the world around them.
Then I shall read one of my favorite kid books, Baboon to them, and we'll talk about what the baby baboon learned from looking at the world all around him.
Next, I'll introduce them to their very own composition books and pencils! I'll let them know as long as they have these two things, they will never lose their way.
Listening to them, I know I won't lose my way, either. A HUGE wet one and a very deep bow to treesta for providing the opportunity to learn something from the kids she loves so much. I'll report back on the experience when I get back. In the mean time, send prayers and good thoughts for these sweet young things.
Like "masturbating monkeys", we check the internet, our email, facebook page or twitter tweets every 30 seconds, according to an essay in this past Sunday's, New York Times Book Review. This habit is especially perilous for writers.
To escape literary distraction, Tony Perrottet, the author of the article, "Why Writers Belong Behind Bars," believes that some writers (perhaps Flannista?) can only write "in extreme -- and involuntary -- isolation." Following are some examples:
Colette's husband "stashed her in a tiny room for four hours a day, refusing to let her out until she had finished a requisite amount of pages -- a drastic measure, but one that resulted in a novel a year for six years."
Annie Dillard pushed her desk away from the windows in ther tool shed study on Cape Cod, which looked out on lovely pine forests, to face a blank wall.
John Cheever "preferred his New York apartment building's dark and dismal basement."
Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections in "a dark room wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold and confessed to blocking his Ethernet port with Super Glue while working on Freedom."
Truth be told, the Sassistas! blog community has served to distract Flannista from the writing she needs to do to finish telling her story. Not that that has always been a bad thing as Flann has published some of her stories here. However, what's your advice on how Flann could be less distracted by her computer? How do you walk -- and stay away -- from your computer?
Above is the cover of a new children's book that was a best-seller before it was officially released this past Tuesday, June 14 -- months ahead of its original October publishing date because of consumer demand. Fox 2000 even snapped up the film rights. We expect curse words in pop songs and everyday talk -- but children's literature? Following are two sample pages from the book:
What's your theory about why this book is so popular?
Over the weekend, Flannista finally finished The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It took five months. Normally it doesn't take me so long to complete a book, but it is a detailed, complicated and ultimately eloquent story of a disease that humans have lived with -- and died from -- for more than five thousand years. Although the first sentence of the book is: "This book is a history of cancer," the author writes in the same paragraph, that it is a biography of cancer in:
. . . an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior. But my ultimate aim is to raise a question beyond biography: Is cancer's end conceivable in the future. Is it possible to eradicate this disease from our bodies and societies forever?
Apparently not. That is the book's stunning and sobering conclusion. Here is the last sentence: "The question then will not be if we will encounter this immortal illness in our lives, but when."
There are many reasons for this, of course. First, we are living longer and mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging. Two, many of us are lazy (or in denial or afraid of doctors) and do not have annual physicals, mammograms, pap smears or a colonoscopy beginning at age 50, etc. Screenings such as these are key to catching cancer when it is most treatable. Third, many of us do not eat properly and/or exercise regularly which keeps cancer at bay more than I realized. Last, many of us are unaware of the harmful chemicals that humans continue to produce that can cause cancer, and/or we completely ignore the harm of smoking products which are unquestionably the number one cause of many cancers. (I write "smoking" rather than "tobacco" because thanks to the more sophisticated chemicals now lacing marijuana, its "smoke may be as harmful, or perhaps even more toxic, than tobacco smoke. Smoking two marijuana cigarettes causes as much airway damage as smoking 10 cigarettes.") Needless to say, I won't be lighting up my annual birthday cigar this year.
Most striking about the book is the compassion Dr. Mukherjee has for his cancer patients and their fight to survive:
Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside itself and beyond itself; it subsumes all living. The daily life of a patient becomes so intensely preoccupied with his or her illness that the world fades away. Every last morsel of energy is spent tending the disease . . . . The poet Jason Shinder wrote, "Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality." But what patients see through the glass is not a world outside cancer, but a world taken over by it -- cancer reflected endlessly around them like a hall of mirrors.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, The Emperor of All Maladies is a riveting and urgent book. It did indeed help to demystify cancer for me, but it also reinforced that cancer seems inexorable, and once it catches someone, she or he will dodge "one blow only to be caught by another."
Will this emperor ever be disrobed?
What was your favorite book when you were a kid and why?
Part of the way Flannista inspires her creative brainstorming participants to loosen up is to get them to talk about the childhood book that meant most to them. Pictured above is my client's favorite book, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (that's the actual copy when he was a little tyke, by the way). My client said he loved it because "it shows how an obsolete machine and the guy who operates it both become useful again, and in doing so unite an entire community."
Flann's favorite reading when she was a kid was the Tarzan of the Apes series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The books belonged to my father and were the only books I remember seeing in my parents' house when I first began to read. (I specifically don't remember any picture books.) A small baby being raised by apes in the jungle fascinated me and brought me strange comfort. If this kid could survive living in a wild place, I could, too.
A couple of years ago, I perused this Tarzan series and was stunned by the graphic violence described in many scenes. But I loved those adventures and read about them over and over again.
What about you? What book or books did you read until the pages broke free from their binding?
What was your best read in 2010? Why?
Following are links to several lists of the Best Books of 2010:
Flannista likes to review lists like the ones above to see what books she's read that made different lists or what books she still needs to read.
But back to our topic today: What was your best read in 2010 and why?
When the news broke on Monday that Elizabeth Edwards had stopped all cancer treatment, the Sassistas! were so hoping that she would see another Christmas with her beloved children. But it was not to be. Yesterday morning, Elizabeth Edwards died following a six-year battle with breast cancer. She was 61 years old. We are very sad and suspect many other Americans are, too. For us, she personified grace under fire.
Flannista's admiration of Elizabeth began with a September 5, 2004 (prior to her breast cancer diagnosis and revelations about her spouse's infidelity) interview in the New York Times magazine -- so impressive that Flann copied parts of it directly into her journal:
QUESTION: What do you think Bush [W.] is most hampered by?
ELIZABETH: I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.
QUESTION: Do you get angry when your husband's credentials are attacked?
ELIZABETH: Anger is not constructive. I was just driving by a church, and the sign on the outside said, "The person who makes you mad controls you."
QUESTION: Do you find it hard to play the role of submissive wife?
ELIZABETH: I didn't know I was.
QUESTION: What is the secret to a good marriage?
ELIZABETH: Respect.
QUESTION: What is the secret to happiness?
ELIZABETH: Thinking it's possible.
To read the entire interview, click here.
The Sassistas! invite you to post your own reflections and/or quotes from Elizabeth today. She was a great soul and taught many of us a hard thing: how to die a good death. Rest in peace.
In 1972, Flannista purchased her very first volume of what she thought at the time was poetry -- Notes to Myself: My Search to Become a Person by Hugh Prather who died in his hot tub this past November 15 of an apparent heart attack.
A pastiche of witticisms, observations and rhetorical questions taken from Prather's diary, Notes to Myself was first published in 1970 and had an initial printing of 10,000 and no marketing or sales strategy. But the book's simple messages around themes of self-awareness, love, fear and spirituality captivated readers and made Prather a best-selling author. Notes to Myself has sold more than five million copies and spawned other books by Prather and his wife, including I Touch the Earth, the Earth Touches Me and Spiritual Notes to Myself: Essential Wisdom for the 21st Century.
Above is an excerpt from Notes to Myself and forgive Flann for what may seem like spitting in a dead man's hot tub, but this stuff is awful. Here are other excerpts:
Do-be-do-be-do.
This stuff was so terrible that it was spoofed on "Saturday Night Live" as Handley's, "Deep Thoughts," e.g., "It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man."
To honor Prather, the Sassistas! believe the sassosphere ought to create some of our own Pratherisms. Please share yours.
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