Book Gluttony!

Book Gluttony! Are your eyes bigger than your book belly? Do you have a habit of buying up books far quicker than you could possibly read them? Have you had to curb your book buying habits until you can catch up with yourself? Or are you a controlled buyer, only purchasing books when you have run out of things to read?

I find television to be very educating.
Every time somebody turns on the set,
I go in the other room and read a book.
~Groucho Marx

We lost thousands and thousands of books in the 1998 flood and admittedly there were some books I had not yet read but knew I would read - some day. Do I still buy books at every opportunity? You bet I do.

So many books - so many unexplored worlds . . .

Book Gluttony? I suppose so.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

Let books be your dining table,

And you shall be full of delights

Let them be your mattress

And you shall sleep restful nights.

~Author Unknown

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~Harper Lee

Music

"...something special happens when a group starts to sing togther--something extraordinary from a cognitive (and dynamic complex systems) perspective, something you've probably experienced yourself in any place where people come together to sing: football games, church, campfires, or political rallies."

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"Confucius reportedly said, 'Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.'"

"Music and health are intimately related in human history, from shamanic healing to 'witch doctors,' from the Hebrews to current-day programs of music therapy. King David played the harp to relieve the stress of King Saul (Samuel I, 16:1-23), and the ancient Greeks (in particular Zenocrates, Sarpander, and Arien) used harp music to ease the outbursts of people with mental illnesses."

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"The six types of songs that shaped human nature

--friendship, joy, comfort,

knowledge, religion,

and love songs--

I've come to think are obvious..."

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Quote of the Day

Horton Foote with his daughter Hallie Foote

"I believe very deeply in the human spirit and I have a sense of awe about it because I don’t know how people carry on. What makes the difference in people? What is it? I’ve known people that the world has thrown everything at to discourage them, to kill them, to break their spirit. And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and don’t ask quarters." — Horton Foote

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It is obvious from my amateurish blog that I so admired Horton Foote and will truly miss him. Isn't that strange? That someone we never even met in person can influence and affect our lives? Not only was Horton Foote a talented writer, his humanity and his human-ness and his caring was so very evident. I'm sure that I am not the only one who never actually met him who will deeply miss him. But then there are many I have not known on a personal level who have moved me and I dare say, changed my life.

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Horton Foote - Farewell

Horton Foote writes

I was born Tuesday, March 14, 1916, in a rented room in the town of Wharton, Texas. The Wharton Spectator, founded by two of my great-uncles, printed the following item on Friday, March 18, 1916:

Mr. and Mrs. Horton Foote were the proud parents of a son born Tuesday.

Horton Foote Dies

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/03/voices----horto.html
http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/03/remembering-hor.html
http://daily.greencine.com/archives/007368.html
http://www.cunepress.com/cunepress/booksonline/essays/etg/etg-pages/e-q/foote.htm
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/horton_foote/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/theater/05foote.html?_r=1
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"But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos." -- Horton Foote

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I cannot remember who told me (years ago) about meeting Horton Foote and what a Gentleman he was. Of course, I know what a great playwright/writer he was and so loved his works. But there was something about the man that typified Dignity as well as talent. So, although I did not know him personally, I knew his writing and felt as though I knew him - and I will miss him. Most certainly we will all miss his talent.

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Extract from New York Times article (URL above):

...Mr. Foote spent most of his life writing about such people. In more than 60 plays and films, most set in the fictive town of Harrison, Tex., he charted their struggle through the century by recording their familial conflicts.
He often seemed to resemble a character from one of his plays. Always courteous and courtly, he spoke with a Texas drawl. He enjoyed good food and wine, but he usually opted for barbecue and iced tea or fried chicken with a Coca-Cola when he was home in Texas. He was jovial with a wry humor, and his white hair and robust frame gave him the appearance of a Southern senator or the favorite uncle who always had a story. Harper Lee, a lifelong friend since Mr. Foote adapted her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” once said that Mr. Foote “looked like God, only cleanshaven.”

Teaser Tuesday

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
Grab your current read.
Let the book fall open to a random page.
Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
Please avoid spoilers!

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The Southerners A Journalist's Odyssey by Marshall Frady

"I grew up not only a Southern Baptist, but a Southern Baptist minister's son, in the small cities and towns of my father's nomadic pastorates over the inland South -- the plainer, pre-shopping-center South of roadside gas pumps and rusted RC Cola signs and flat little main streets, where a rigorous religiousness was simply one of the natural elements, like heat or lightning, of the surroundings." [page xv]

page xxiii:

"...I also came to suspicion that, no matter what sophistications he may later imagine he has acquired and however intensely he may become involved in the wider affairs of the world, anyone bred a Southern Baptist will always have a sense of still being on the outside looking in: he can never completely overcome a certain wonder and titillation at being a part of large secular matters."

A third sentence from the chapter about Huey Long, "The House of Long."

"There is, to be sure, something elusively exhilarating about his unabashed and romping celebration in his power -- suddenly bellowing to an unruly assembly of other Louisiana politicians, 'Shut up, you sonsabitches, shut up! This is the Kingfish talking!'." [page 23]