Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) > Recent Status Updates

"That's what makes all this classical landscape gardening so desolate... More desolate than Stonehenge or the Pyramids. ...the eighteenth century gentlemen who built these temples didn't believe in Venus or Mercury any more than we do; that's why the reflection of those pale pillars in the lake is truly only the shadow of a shade."

Ever look through your piles of books (physical and digital) and realize everything is very heavy, serious, and not the thing you want to read if you're trying not to be depressed? ...Seems like time to reread some children's books...

"I've told a good many lies in my time, too, and perhaps I've got rather sick of them. But there are lies and lies, for all that. Gentlemen used to lie just as schoolboys lie, because they hung together and partly to help one another out. But I'm damned if I can see why we should lie for these cosmopolitan cads who only help themselves. They're not backing us up any more; they're simply crowding us out."

Anna Louise Strong: "To fall in love is very easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be."

Margaret Sanger: "Before you had seen it, the Congress of the United States loomed impressively in your consciousness... Then you watched Congress at work, listened to it, and were disillusioned. A few years of sitting in the gallery and looking down gave you less respect for the quality of our representatives, less faith in legislative action..."

Margaret Sanger: "They do not comprehend it is still possible in these United States for a woman to milk six cows at five o'clock in the morning and bring a baby into the world at nine. The terrific hardships of the farm mother are not in the least degree lessened by maternity."

Margaret Sanger: "I defined a woman's duty, "To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention." It was a marvelous time to say what we wished." - this was 1914, and that issue of her magazine Woman Rebel was declared "unmailable" by the US government.

Margaret Sanger finds that in France women had recipes handed down from generations past: "Some of the contraceptive formulas which had been handed down were almost as good as those of today. Although they had to make simple things, mothers prided themselves on their special recipes..."

Margaret Sanger: "I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold..."

I was looking at the Most Popular by Date page and thinking how few I'd read. Then I changed it to the year I was born and hey, I hadn't read many of those either. Somehow I'm now ok with the lack of popular books on my finished list. (Not that this makes much sense.)

I was looking at the Most Popular by Date page and thinking how few I'd read. Then I changed it to the year I was born and hey, I hadn't read many of those either. Somehow I'm now ok with the lack of popular books on my finished list now.

Anne Walter Fearn: [Fearn's daughter] "Elizabeth loved the gorgeous sunsets and always at sundown she was in a nervous state of excitement. She begged me to stay with her then and watch what she called "the opening of the gates of the sky.""

Jane Addams: "Actual experience had left me in much the same state of mind I had been in after reading Tolstoy's "What to Do," which is a description of his futile efforts to relieve the unspeakable distress and want in the Moscow winter of 1881, and his inevitable conviction that only he who literally shares his own shelter and food with the needy can claim to have served them."

Jane Addams: "In time it came to seem natural to all of us that the Settlement should be there. If it is natural to feed the hungry and care for the sick, it is certainly natural to give pleasure to the young, comfort to the aged, and to minister to the deep-seated craving for social intercourse that all men feel."

[The clubhouse] "had a billiard room and a bar, and even an excellent reference library for those officers who were so perverse as to take their profession seriously."

"What a queer chap you are," said Boyle. "You talk as if a fellow could believe those fables."
"Perhaps I believe the moral and not the fable," answered Fisher.

"Sir Walter's private secretary seemed more and more threatened with inappropriate slumber" - I do love the phrase "threatened with inappropriate slumber" - I can remember having this problem myself.

Despite the almost aggressive touch of luxury in the fur coat, it soon became apparent that Sir Walter's large leonine head was for use as well as ornament, and he considered the matter soberly and sanely enough.

Jane Addams, at college: "At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium" - which sounds like typical students, no matter that is was 1880s-ish.

In Anna Howard Shaw's story other women are mentioned that I hadn't studied: Mary Livermore, Reverend Marianna Thompson, Anna Oliver, etc. Lots of regional history that doesn't get into a lot of books.

Margaret Bourke-White:"I did not know till later that the crew members had placed bets on me. If we were attacked, would the waist gunner knock me out so that he could defend our airplane, or would I knock out the waist gunner so I would have room to take pictures?"

Margaret Bourke-White: "I go to every important portrait appointment with a conviction that my cameras are going to cease functioning - a dread that never leaves me, even after years of experience, and this time I was certain that nothing would work when I was face to face with Stalin."

Louise Bogan: "...You will survey the intelligent unhinged, the unenlightened witless, and the plain cracked. And you will realize (only for a moment, you understand) that if you took to eating blotting paper, painting things green, living in trees, or indulging in frequent, piercing maniacal cries, you could not exceed the high average of oddity and derangement that you perceive all about you."

Louise Bogan: "Elsewhere all is mild. But for you there is no hope. Your nervous system yawns before you like the entrance to the pit and you are going in."

Meanwhile a lot of Romans felt that Beatrice (Cenci) had been given a hard life due to how her father treated her (the incest was apparently common knowledge?! ugh) - though the Pope wants her and co-conspirators killed by dragging by wild horses. Pope is indignant that people are pleading for mercy.

(Ex. of torture)"...tied her hands behind her back, fastened them to a rope passed over a pulley bolted into the ceiling ...we had her hoisted in the air by the wrists to the height of about two feet from the ground, while we recited a Pater Noster; and then again questioned her as to the facts and circumstances of the aforesaid parricide..."My God! I am dead! You are killing me!" - that pretty well sums it up.

When last I left this one (it's 8 volumes in one book, I'd finished vol. 1) Beatrice was being tortured. Let's see if that's going to last much longer... (I was last reading this at jury duty, and it was not the place to fidget over and make faces at my kindle.)

Ellen Glasgow: "I have watched so many literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop, that I have learned to recognize a new movement while it is still on the way. Yet with the many I have seen come and go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture."

Ellen Glasgow: "...not til I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "Oh God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!" - which makes it even more sad when her sister reads her poetry aloud to her (the sister's) friends to laugh at.

Ellen Glasgow, opening lines: "This is my earliest impression: a face without a body hanging there in the sunset, beyond the top windowpanes. All the rest comes in fragments. I scream; I struggle; but my screams and my struggles tell them nothing. I cannot, even now, divide the after-growth from the recollection."