Word of the week

jin⋅go; or jin⋅go⋅ism , a person who professes his or her patriotism loudly and excessively, favoring vigilant preparedness for war and an aggressive foreign policy; bellicose chauvinist. noun, plural -goes, adjective –noun

Quotes of the week

Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.

~William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

Do not then stand idly waiting,
For some greater work to do;
Fortune is a lazy goddess,
She will never come to you.

~Ellen M. H. Gates (1834 - 1920)

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meditation of the week

"Our impact on the world is slight
so take life as a comedy,
play it for laughs.
You die, there is a sort of decent grief
a few people really do suffer from your absence
but the impact on the greater world is not that big.
You do not leave a big hole.
They dig a hole and they put you in it."
"Now that I am the age that I am
I find myself less interested in the adult world.
I feel myself going back to the ravine
and going back to the sort of loose, dreamy feeling
that you had when you were twelve and thirteen.
We see the world clearly when we are children,
and we spend the rest of our lives
trying to remember what is was we saw."

Garrison Keillor - American Master

Poem of the Week

Rose Garden, Summer Solstice

by Carolyn Miller

Everyone here believes that the roses
are blooming only for them, there where the air
by the formal beds is layered with the scent
of roses. From deep in their flushed and darkening hearts
pour odors of lemons and pepper, apricots, honey,
vanilla and myrrh and musk and semen, apples and quince,
raspberries and wine and ocean, the faint
scent of blood and the fragrance of death and the breath
of the life we are living now, in this place
where the roses are blooming for each of us, alone.

Author of the week

It was on this day in 1960 that To Kill a Mockingbird was published. It was written by Nelle Harper Lee, (books by this author) who dropped the "Nelle" because she didn't want anyone calling her "Nellie."

She grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, which was the model for her fictional town of Maycomb. When she was a kindergartner, she made friends with her next-door-neighbor, a boy of the same age named Truman Capote. The character of Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird was based on him.

When Lee was in her early twenties, she dropped out of law school in Alabama and moved to New York to join Capote and write. She spent eight years working on a novel, and she had several drafts but couldn't get it to come together, and she got so frustrated that she threw it out her apartment window. It was the middle of winter, and all the pages landed in the snow. She called her editor, who sternly told her to get outside and pick up those pages, which she did. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. It became a best seller within weeks, and won the Pulitzer Prize. It has sold more than 30 million copies.