I am disgustingly addicted to Pintrest. It’s so damn fun.
You can find mine here: pinterest.com/becmatheson
Category: <span>General</span>
My great plan of blogging my Vietnam trip crashed with the intermittent internet and the exhaustion of engaging in work in lets face it (although I love humidity and the heat) less than helpful environment. It all happened excessively fast (as these things do). I found it a weird cross reference of Solmons climate to New Zealand beauty. It is still too early to put any photos up that I took in central Vietnam (the work related ones), which is where I invested most effort on the photographic front. Unfortunately my touristy days were a consumed with heavy rain and err… present shopping. I didn’t return with 32gig of just work photos though, although my favourites are most definitely some of the ones I took in the Villages.
Here is Hanoi in the rain.
Hanoi is a mash of architectural styles and odd bits. It is beautiful but somewhat overwhelming with streets that go every which way. Flew in this morning after an all-nighter flight, thankfully the ominous ash cloud didn’t interfere. The big fat book I bought with me didn’t even get a look, instead watched some mindless Harry Potter 1 and a Grand Designs, and tried to sleep. I think I slept.
This is not a paid advertisement (but, hey a free pair of shoes wouldn’t go amis!)
Just would like to applaud this website: Shoe Metro. I just bought a pair of Keen boots for a very reasonable price, they took all of 3 days to get to me and they fit perfectly. Postage was approximately $35 (to Australia). They have a wide range of good quality brands with a variety of sizes (limited depending on the shoe). Being size 6.5-7 is a good thing in the shoe world.
After a long period of buying cheap shoes I have worked out that it is not worth my while, so am endeavoring to change. It is both better on the wallet in the long run and better for sustainability.
So the Keens are super.
The problem is, now I’m eyeing off these ones.
Or in red. I can’t decide. They are both lovely. And if I buy another pair now Geoff will get angry 😀 They’re only $20 each! Pity that postage isn’t free or I would be there!
Despite all of the marvelous design specific publications out there, I find myself consistently drawn to a little Victorian publication about fresh Australian writing. Harvest is excellent. It is varied, it is pretty, it is emotive and contains some truly brilliant work and some rather nice illustration. I took Harvest on the train with me to work the other morning and read it with my window seat. The first article was an opinion piece, which you can kindly read here: To Our Generation of Precious Snowflakes and it made me stop. I was struck by either brilliant personal recognition or absolute horror and I couldn’t work it out. It forced me to think about life and about blogging and about youth/my peers.
The opinion piece addresses the thoughts of writer Ted Genoways.
At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers.
By way of overview – this is the opinion piece:
Pardon us for filtering out the unimaginable suffering we watch on live broadcasts with a sickening compulsion and can replay on YouTube. In the chasm between vacuous celebrity and the realities of insidious fundamentalism, perhaps it is only our own lives, logged hourly and picked over, that we can clutch on to for purpose, meaning and creative inspiration, in order to tune out the loud, fast world.
For now, might we be excused our navel gazing? When you have seen men glide down from burning towers on slipstreams of hate, perhaps it’s not too big a leap to conclude that one’s navel is the only safe place to be looking.
And to dear Ted, we are the wrecked and lovely world. It’s there in our writing if you can bring yourself to read it, and while it may not be ‘sterling’ enough for you, it’s as real as the Iraq war, and often as heartbreaking.
I find that I am struggling to hold my intense introverted and internal methods living and processing – my narcissism, with the outward looking life I desire to have. Perhaps this is why this article plucked deep hurt on the strings of my soul.
From letter 89 by Tolkien:
“…I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of truth…. It perceives– if the story has literary ‘truth’ –that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest fairy story– and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love…”
Cannot we find some way to correlate our local and personal sorrow and experiences of living with the greater sorrow of this world, to lean on eucatastrophe and hope – wait and live that reconciliation of the overlapping now but not yet.
There is another response (in a more literary sense) to the Harvest piece here: A response to harvest.