WHEN JOY OVERTAKES INHIBITION

“When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn’t believe it. It was astonishing. It was like—here’s the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God." Fran Lebowitz

"A novel is a chance to try on a different life for size." Marion C Garretty

THIS MONTH, I RECOMMEND:

ARCHITECTURE: BJARKE INGELS If you want to truly understand the meaning of the word visionary, take a look at the Ted Talk by the brilliant Danish architect Bjarke Ingels who not only develops astounding ideas and solutions for 21st century scenarios, but who has fun, yes FUN, doing it. His philosophy is, “Yes is more”, a response to Mies van der Rohe, the father of Modernism, who said “Less is more,” and Robert Venturei, the father of Post Modernism, who said “Less is a bore.” http://www.ted.com/talks/bjarke_ingels_3_warp_speed_architecture_tales.htm

ARTIST: JULIE HEFERNAN Fragonard meets Bruegel meets the pre=Raphaelites and Rousseau in this artist’s sinister, opulent kingdom of self-portraits. Be enchanted and cautious as you indulge her work and recognize the fearless beauty of her imagination. http://tinyurl.com/3gs72ed

FASHION: IRIS APFEL willfully disjunctive look, and the tart wit behind it, have been the subject of museum exhibitions, a coffee table book, and soon a documentary film. At the age of 90, she is fashion’s newest icon: “Straight people, gay people, students of art and social history, tourists and chattering adolescents, “even little kids,” she noted, gravitate to her lectures, blog about her and send her mash notes.” http://tinyurl.com/3gm8qzm

THE 21st CENTURY: THOMAS FRIEDMAN’s commentaries on our present moment in history are as visionary as Bjarke Ingels’s designs. “It used to be that only cheap foreign manual labor was easily available; now cheap foreign genius is easily available,” he writes. This globalization/I.T. revolution is also “super-empowering” individuals, enabling them to challenge hierarchies and traditional authority figures — from business to science to government. It is also enabling the creation of powerful minorities and making governing harder and minority rule easier than ever. See dictionary for: “Tea Party.” http://tinyurl.com/3okzx99

PUBLISHING: JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG describes the present moment in the publishing industry along the lines of Thomas Friedman’s perspectives. New Economics Rewrite Book Business: http://tinyurl.com/3qz43bz

Simultaneously, there is an interesting international bent to recent publishing acquisitions, among them editor of the Evening Standard Geordie Greig's BREAKFAST WITH LUCIAN, based on Greig's regular Sunday breakfasts with Lucian Freud; German author Bettina Stangneth's EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM, showing that the common view of Eichmann as 'just a cog' in Hitler's diabolical killing machine is incorrect; Nancy Kricorian's ALL THE LIGHT THERE WAS, the story of an Armenian family's struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of Paris; Dr. Sheri Speede's DOROTHY'S CIRCLE, from growing up in working-class Mississippi to building a chimpanzee rescue center in the middle of Africa to raising her young daughter in the jungles of Cameroon; and Michael Moran's THE RECKONING, an account of the end of American global dominance, with a foreword by Nouriel Roubini.

Nothing except your thoughts can attack you.

Nothing except your thoughts can make you think you are vulnerable.

And nothing except your thoughts can prove to you this is not so.

A Course in Miracles, lesson 26