Babbling Point

“On my first night in Vienna, Jonathan Carroll walked me over to the Danube, where we sat on a flight of steps leading down to the river. The dog walkers were out in force. Greetings were exchanged with small movements of the eyes, and the dogs sniffed one another fondly…Jonathan kept his eye on a woman at the next bridge. She was moving so slowly I thought she might be leading a dogsled pulled by escargots. After an hour, the woman walked in front of us, and she bowed her head in acknowledgment of Jonathan. With great dignity, he returned the gesture. To my surprise, she was walking two enormous tortoises, displaced natives from an Ethiopian desert. The woman walked them every night, and Jonathan was always there to admire their passage. ‘That’s what writers do, Conroy,’ he said. ‘We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve...

Two links I found via http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog1/archiveMain.html (So, should I call this a reTweet or a reBlog?) From a recent profile of the novelist Ian McEwan in THE NEW YORKER: Three years ago, McEwan culled the fiction library of his London town house, in Fitzroy Square. He and his younger son, Greg, handed out thirty novels in a nearby park. In an essay for the Guardian, McEwan reported that "every young woman we approached . . . was eager and grateful to take a book, whereas the men could not be persuaded. Nah, nah. Not for me. Thanks, mate, but no. The researcher's conclusion: When women stop reading, the novel will be dead." http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski?currentPage=all http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep/20/fiction.features11 http://www.dearoldlove.com/ is short notes to people we've loved (or at least liked). Requited or unrequited. For example: Reintroduction Facebook keeps putting you in the list of ...

"He puts down the pen, folds the sheet of paper, and slips it inside an envelope. He stands up, takes from his trunk a mahogany box, lifts the lid, lets the letter fall inside, open and unaddressed. In the box are hundreds of identical envelopes, open and unaddressed. He thinks that somewhere in the world he will meet a woman who has always been his woman. Every now and again he regrets that destiny has been so stubbornly determined to make him wait with such indelicate tenacity, but with time he has learned to consider the matter with great serenity. Almost every day, for years now, he has taken pen in hand to write to her. He has no names or addresses to put on the envelopes: but he has a life to recount. And to whom, if not to her? He thinks that when they meet it will be wonderful to place the mahogany box full of letters on her lap and say to her, 'I was waiting for you.' "She will open the box and slowly, when she so desires, read the letters one by one. As she...

"They had been in love once—equally and passionately. Like a spider web that you walk into, it is not so easy to get all the tendrils of real love off after you have passed through it." --Jonathan Carroll, THE GHOST IN LOVE Download the first chapter of the book at: http://www.jonathancarroll.com/books/theghostinlove.html I just wish the bookstores would start ordering more of his books!