It’s strange to confess that I’ve just had a relationship, a rather intimate one, with a person I don’t know. I’ve spent each night for the past week with this person, in bed, in the thirty minutes or so before I turn off the light. This is how we met. Bill, Natalie and I had flown from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where we were going on a couple of college tours. In between tours, we decided to spend two days exploring a favorite neighborhood, with fabulous old houses and panoramic views of the Bay. When we checked into our room at the Inn at the Presidio, we immediately…
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The Power and Pleasure of Introverts
If solitude is an important key to creativity, then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. from Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking My friend has sent me Quiet, and she has enclosed this note: “I think you will be able, like me, to find some excellent morsels in here that will remind you of things you like about yourself, your husband and your daughter, as well as some insights.” My friend knows us well —…
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Reading in Bathrooms & Standardizing Testing
Every once in a while, an essay by Claire Needell Hollander appears in The New York Times. I make sure to read it. She is smart & witty & wise. And, her writing, which both entertains and enlightens, always inspires me to write down my own thoughts in response to whatever it is she is writing about, in this case: standardized testing in classrooms & the wisdom of reading in bathrooms. Here’s the link to her latest essay titled “Testing My Twins,” in the The New York Times (10/20/12): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/opinion/sunday/testing-my-twins.html?_r=0 And here are the memories, observations and thoughts about bathroom reading and testing she inspired me to jot down: I…
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More Than Just a Book to Read
Natalie and I both read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird this summer after going to a screening of a restored film print at the Billy Wilder Theater at the UCLA Hammer Museum. While we were reading the novel, we happened upon a wonderful exhibit at Loyola Marymount University’s Hannon Library titled the “Saraval Collection: Reproductions of Rare Hebrew Manuscripts Spanning Seven Centuries.” (SEE NOTE BELOW ABOUT SARAVAL COLLECTION) The text by Monika Jaremków included this interesting observation: “More Than Just a Book to Read”: “Books are not limited to literary and scholarly texts; they are real objects created throughout the ages, with the use of different materials, by people…
