The dallergut dream department store - Mi-Ye Lee

Dit was cute en fun, maar helaas niet meer dan dat. Een soort healing fiction met een fantasy slag. Binnen het genre vond ik dit wel leuk om te lezen, vooral door de Dream department store, en de namen van iedereen, DallerGut, Mogberry, Babynap Rockabye, Yasnoozz Otra, Kick Slumber, Wawa Sleepland.

Changing my mind - Julian Barnes

 

Ook bij de oppaspoes las ik Changing my mind van Julian Barnes, over hoe hij zijn gedachte veranderde op allerlei terreinen, memory, words, politics, books en age and time. Ik heb mooie quotes uit dit boek opgeschreven in mijn schriftje:

- memory -

• The world may sadly incline to inconsistency, but not us
• The dadaist Francis Picoba once put it like this: Our heads are round, so that our thoughts van change direction
• Intuition was back then a female speciality
• But where is this I that is changing this mind? [...] This I we feel so confident about isn't something beyond or seperate from the mind, but rather something inside the mind and arising from it. [...] So, if things are this way around, if it's the brain, the mind, that gives birth to what we think of as I, then the phrase 'I changed my mind' doesn't make much sense. You might as well say, 'My mind changed me'.
• We always believe that changing our mind is an improvement, bringing a greater thruthfullness or a greater sense of realism to our dealings with the world and other people.
• We have come to understand that every time we take a memory out of the locker and expose it to view, we make some tiny alteration to it. And so the stories we tell the most, are likely to be the least reliable.

- words -

• Adolescense and the awareness of sex made me realise that there were more words in heaven and erath then there were dreamt of in the dictionary
• I came to believe instead that language was and is often approximate.
• Within the tolerant former lexicographer lies the grmpy older citizen.

- politics -

• Opinions are like virility symbols not to be surrendered
• We keep the faith. It's the parties which are faithless, promiscuous short-termist, shamelesly flexible of principle
• But that is one of the functions of politicians - to disappoint us
• Some of us have strong opinions weakly held, others weak opinions strongly held

- Age and time -

• but on the whole we prefer to believe that we are consistent human being rather then seaweed tossed around the tides
• That I am either a cheerfull pessimist or a melancholy optimist, depending on which side of the bed I get out of
• Mostly we live as stumbling amateurs in a largely incomprehensible professional universe
• Albert Einstein was once asked to explain relativity in a way that even journalists could understand. 'An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute,' he said. 'But a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour. That's relativity.'
• One thing I've never been able to ask is wether the dying person's sense of time is affected.