Anne Lamott on E-books v. Paper

From an interview in today's NYT Book Review:

I read both paper and e-books, but please don’t tell my publisher this. E-books are great for instant gratification — you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later. At least I still know it is wrong. But when all is said and done, holding a printed book in my hands can be a sacred experience — the weight of the paper, the windy sound of pages turning, like a breeze. To me, a printed book is like a cathedral or a library or a beach — holy space.

Winter Light

Processing a request for The Dreaded Feast:  Writers on Enduring the Holidays, (Abrams, 2009), I thought of Peter Maling, author of the splendid but now moribund Naked Blog.  For Peter, the holidays were a terrible ordeal until, finally, they ceased to be.  And then there is the old AA joke that alcoholism is a threefold disease:  Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's.

After my mother died in 2009, we have not had big family get-togethers at Thanksgiving or Christmas.  R. and I eat Thanksgiving dinner with friends at Wakulla Lodge. Christmas has become for us more of a church-centered feast-day.  We haven't bought a tree for a couple of years

Ellyn von Huben writes about what she calls HallowthanksgivingChristmaspalooza at The Word On Fire Blog.

My desire at this point is block out all of the Black Friday and Christmas chaos swirling around me. Not only is there the need to keep Christ in Christmas, but to keep Christmas at Christmas. To keep Christmas as the twelve days from December 25 to the feast of the Epiphany - not from November 1 to December 26, when the stores open for the post-Christmas sales.

Saint Woody

I read this article in Commonweal by Father Robert Lauder, Woody's Cold Comforts, a while back, and I have found it again after a little searching.  You might enjoy it, and when I want to read it again I will know where to find it.

RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could you just say something about what you meant by “salvation”?
WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.

( Edit 2012/11/8:  I found an earlier version of this article from 2006 in the magazine, America, Woody's World.)