FROM THE BOOK DIARY

The Pillow Book

(Author: Sei Shonagon)

On occasion,I'll share what I have read off-line from my book diary, sometimes with additional commentary.

Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book/Penguin Books 1967. I found this in an old books store in Vancouver BC. Had been looking for this for AGES.

Original Commentary: "The Pillow Book is an interesting bit of Heian court life, albeit not representing the larger culture of the time".

Additional: In other words,The Pillow Book was basically like when I went to an exhibit of Hermitage art at the Frye Gallery a few years ago. I went there to see the Vigee Le Brun paintings but was very disappointed. It was patronage art which was stilted in its composition, stuffy in its muted stately colours of ermine and regal blue, and altogether soulless in the attitude of the era's pre-revolutionary smugness. I much preferred the work of Zhi Lin an artist who painted life under early Communist China. He captured on the canvas the horrible atrocities that still happen in China today. The work was alive and realistic in its pain and blood, not posed and sanitary like the Hermitage paintings or The Pillow Book

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USEFUL THINGS

LinkedIn is a business networking site that offers job searches and international networking.

I use this site frequently to make employment and business connections, to keep up with present clients, to find employment, and to exchange knowledge within my specialties of freelance writing and education.

LinkedIn is a must for business owners and prospective employees.

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FAVOURITE THINGS

I decided to pull a post, Diary of a Young Girl, because when I began to read latter portions of the book, I found passages that were anti-Semitic. I could have left the link as a historical artifact, but I do not feel comfortable in promoting even historical hatred. I will find a substitute in the following weeks.

NOTE: DATED JULY 2, 2008: The book was written by a Viennese psychologist, Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth not by a teenager.



A French Wiki entry definitely states that the book is a fake.

---Anne

USEFUL THINGS

Harvestfield.ca is one of my favourite sites for clip art.

I must admit that I am addicted to this site. It is very useful for black and white clip art. I use some of the graphics on this blog and highly recommend it for design use.

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BEST THINGS

Freelance Writing.com is a great site for many links to a variety of freelance work opportunities. Sign up for their Tuesday Morning Coffee which is a digest of current jobs.

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KNOWING YOUR LIMITS

Wise Moves In The Profession

Recently, I turned down a gig to translate a lifestyle entrepreneur's fifteen page manuscript from English into French. I am not having much of a go with the translation business. Sigh... It was one of those dubious health and wealth peddlers whom I do not trust to have my best interests at heart. Especially after I did a little research and the person's website was down. Yeah.

Part of writing is giving oneself a good pace. It is also important to reflect on what creates moral value and what does not. Is it more important to push a dubious product or to create something poetic? In the long view, poetry or a finely crafted novel is of more ethical value than a get-rich-immediate scheme.

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IN MEMORIAM

Tillie Olson

(January 14,1912–

January 1, 2007)

I read Tillie Olson in college but her message of how hard it is to be a writer and a parent did not resonate until I had a family of my own. It is difficult whether you are a father or a mother to get to the keyboard or the pad of paper when the laundry is piling up, the bathtub leaks down into the second floor,or the youngest has the tummy bug and has spewed once again all over the last bedsheets.Writing is not a leisure sport for parents. Instead, it is a sprint between disasters and bills (which are the same evils). It is the lonely feeling that you get late at night when the wind howls outside and the words refuse to make their stubborn appearance. You wonder at these times whether or not you should have got the MBA instead of an English degree in medieval to Victorian literature and you have doubt about one's self-worth that haunts inside like a lurking windigo. There are no easy answers to the question of being a writer. Why?

It is a sometimes an unreasonable job that, like a forest demon, can be either a blessing or curse to those possessed with ink in their blood.

Tillie Olson articulated this solitude that a writer has when there seems to be only the black box of one's mind among the day to day of housecleaning, penny budgeting, and stretching the self outside of the safe realm of one's imagination to nurture the children that surround you. She will be greatly missed as an author.

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