The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris

Audible Audio, Pub Jan 8th 2019 by Penguin Audio. Hardcover, 336 pgs, Jan 8 2019, Penguin Press, ISBN13: 9780525560715

It is difficult to critique political memoirs without seeming to be critical the high-minded ideals these writers espouse. Kamala Harris appears outside the norm for the kind of Washington politician we’ve put up with these past twenty years. Formerly Attorney General of California, she had to find solutions to big thorny problems that plagued governance of that state. If she didn’t “solve” the problems for all time, she always came down fighting for the side of individuals against corporate entities, big business, or thoughtless, inadequate government.

Early on in this memoir Senator Harris speaks with some awe of the work of Maura Healy, current Attorney General of Massachusetts, who has been firm in defending statewide consumer protections in that state unlike any other. She mentions the work now-Senator and presidential-hopeful Elizabeth Warren has done to protect consumers from predatory lending practices and investment scams of big banks, or the greed of big pharma.

Harris’ own work is strictly in this vein: criminal justice reform, racial justice, environmental protections, wage equality, regulation of banks and corporation, fair practices for consumers. For a woman who has never served in the military, no one could ever argue this woman doesn’t know what war looks like. She has investigated the heart of drug smuggling from Mexico, immigration, sex trafficking, and other rough criminal ventures that make our hair curl. She knows what government power means and when and how to use it. She’s tough. And disciplined. And principled.

After seeing how the country suffers when the presidency is filled by someone inadequate to the demands of the job, we should ever be grateful that someone of Harris’ gifts stands up to take on the brutality we’ve witnessed in Washington. Harris is winged Nemesis wielding a sword; she is implacable justice, avenger of crime. It will be bloody but it will be over when she’s done.

Until Donald Trump (and more and more I am convinced the 2016 election was not a fair demonstration of the national will), we’ve never elected someone with as little support from the major parties. Democrats now have very little patience left for what is the husk of a Republican Party, and Republicans detest what Democrats stand for. Harris will not be a cross-over candidate. She will be vengeance.

This book is an introduction to Harris and is very good for that. Kamala was born in Oakland in the sixties of a Jamaican-economist father and a Tamil Indian-endocrinologist mother who’d met at Berkeley during the civil rights movement. She and a sister, Maya, who is two years younger, were brought up by her single-parent mother after the breakup of her parents while Kamala was still a child. She married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, in 2014. Emhoff had two children during a previous marriage.

Harris begins her book talking about her youth and the importance of recognizing that our nation has been enriched by immigration. She is proud of her black heritage and chose Howard University for her undergraduate degree and graduated University of CA Hastings College of Law in 1989. She admits to terrible embarrassment at failing the CA bar the first time, but her employers supported her next, successful attempt.

Harris began as Deputy District Attorney in San Francisco, then won the race for District Attorney in San Francisco in 2003. By 2004 she’d begun a program called Back on Track, to help youthful nonviolent offenders to get back into the community through work. The program was considered a success though it had a low graduation rate. It was instituted in several other counties and eventually became state law.

When Harris won the election for CA State Attorney General in 2010, the race tally was so close the election results were not announced for three weeks. One of her first successes was against banks liable after the sub-prime mortgage crisis, winning $26 billion from the banks, including $12 million for homeowners. As AG, Harris initiated investigations into sex and drug trafficking, hate crimes, environmental degradation, predatory lending, school truancy and foster care, as well as prison conditions and sentencing reform.

Barbara Boxer announced she was going to retire as Senator to CA in 2016, and Harris was one of the first to announce her candidacy for Boxer’s seat. Harris is generally well-regarded at home in CA and among those who search for and vet candidates for high national office like Supreme Court and Attorney General of the U.S. There has been some grumbling that Harris defends misconduct by law enforcement, but overall these complaints have not hurt her popularity in the state. Harris won the 2016 congressional election against Loretta Sanchez with 62% of the vote, winning in all but four counties.

Since being in Washington, Senator Harris has been a hard-hitting and outspoken critic of Trump’s policies and the Democratic Party now considers her a front-runner for president. We learn that her name Kamala (COMMA-la) means lotus, a flower that blooms above the water while its roots are planted in mud. That’s quite a visual for a successful presidency.

I listened to the audio of this read by the author and produced by Penguin Audio. It is a successful sprint through the high points of a career not yet over. We get a sense of her personality, her drive, her family and friends. She is quite an opponent.



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War on Peace by Ronan Farrow

Hardcover, 392 pgs, Pub Apr 24th 2018 by W. W. Norton Company, ISBN13: 9780393652109

Who could have known Ronan Farrow would develop into such a remarkable thinker? He credits his mother, of whom he speaks with genuine awe in his voice. Not only has 30-year-old Ronan Farrow been a diplomat, in his early twenties working closely with Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of American’s longest war, but just last year he broke the story published in The New Yorker which set America on a new trajectory for gender relations.

War on Peace is an examination of American foreign policy in the last two decades, though Farrow occasionally wanders further afield to highlight a trend or to stress a break in continuity. Did we have a foreign service in the past two decades that was not consumed by military matters? Believe it or not, we had a robust diplomatic core who was toiling away unsung, trying to wrest decision-making from generals focused on anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Richard Holbrooke was one of these.

Holbrooke wasn’t well-liked in Washington, but was effective in his role in the Bosnia peace talks. He was hard-headed, obsessive, egotistical. He’d wanted to be Secretary of State during President Clinton’s administration but the job went to Madeleine Albright. He was Secretary of State Clinton’s choice for envoy to the Afghanistan war zone. It was a bum job, but Holbrooke was happy to get it. Ronan knew Holbrooke as a family friend and was invited onto Holbrooke’s team. We get a view of Holbrooke from someone who knew his gifts and his faults.

Ronan has a disarmingly frank manner. For this book he interviewed on the record every living Secretary of State, and just about every other Washingtonian who had anything to do with international work. What he charts herein is the militarization of the diplomatic corps, starting way back in Bill Clinton’s presidency through Bush and Obama, neither of whom did anything to slow or halt the trend. Farrow does talk about the current president, but only to highlight how diplomacy has become a dirty word in D.C.

Most interesting for me was the access that Farrow had in talking about American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how we never seemed to actually get anywhere. In Pakistan especially we never seemed able to take advantage of cooperation with the people who could bridge the trust gap. Farrow makes it sound like we were so close to better, more cooperative relations but the ship of state is hard to steer. Our relationships with other countries tended to impact our relations in Pakistan, to say nothing of the assassination of Bhutto, the misuse of aid funds, and bin Laden living in hiding there.

Farrow gives some idea how DJT is playing in Europe at the moment, as if we didn’t know. He quotes Merkel's dry and damning statements about "we really should all be trying harder to work out problems with our allies..." But when this 30-yr-old says we must stay engaged in the leadership of the world because if we don’t, someone else will, we understand and we believe him. When Clinton said this during the campaign, actually answering a question I’d posed about America’s role in the world, I was resistant. I am still working through disappointment that she couldn’t manage to make even her countrymen want her to be that leader.

Our dysfunctional relationship with Colombia is spelled out in painful detail. How stupid and disrespectful has America ever been in South America? America’s war on drugs became a sordid saga of the U.S. training drug runners. Towards the end of Farrow’s book, this story is just so sobering and souring. Perhaps we come off looking like the buffoons we are because of the unending corruption in every single South American country. It is just exhausting and hard to believe an honest person cannot rise to the top anywhere in South America. But we just keep playing out the worst examples of bad behavior, on both sides of the border.

In the end this book is an impassioned call to young people to create the change they want to see. Farrow is trying to gin up some enthusiasm for a diplomatic corps who can think, talk, and make treaties around the world rather than militarize our relationships. It is obviously true that if you start with a gun in your hand you are going to have a very different mindset about solving disagreements. Diplomacy is long, frustrating, and often useless seeming…until it isn’t.

Great book. The inside scoop on how the Department of State functions is worth the price of admission. I listened to the audio of this, read by Farrow himself and it was terrific. Produced by Audible.



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Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son by Lori Duron

I have always been curious about how folks discover and then adapt to some kind of specialness in their children—and admit to a real fascination with a child such as Duron’s CJ. At age 2½, CJ exhibits such delight in Duron’s boxed 25th-anniversary Barbie that she opens it and…it was the toy he’d always wanted.

Duron’s first-born son, Chase, was all boy. CJ, her second-born son, had a strong affinity for girls, and girl things. Duron and her husband were surprised and not entirely thrilled at first, and tried to steer CJ’s inclinations a little, thinking ahead to all the issues her son might encounter in the neighborhood and in the years ahead. But CJ would have none of it. It seems he was fully aware of what he liked “right out of the box,” as it were. He liked dresses, earrings, makeup and high heels rather than Sponge Bob, soccer, and the manly arts. His mother learned to call this “gender nonconforming.”

Duron spent some time struggling with the notion, searching online, talking with specialists, and offering CJ more common options for sports and clothes, and gradually comes to accept that her child is something very special indeed. The year CJ begins pre-kindergarten, she starts writing a blog to address the information deficit online for her experience as a mother of a gender nonconforming child. Through that avenue she makes friends, exchanges information and resources, and eventually becomes a spokesperson for gender-questing individuals. She also receives a lot of hate mail saying she was a bad mother, but fortunately she felt confident that wasn’t true. She was discovering real time that her son was unique. CJ’s proclivities are bred in the bone, and didn’t appear to have anything to do with nurture.

This is a fascinating story, mostly because CJ is one hot ticket. I don’t know how much Duron jazzed up CJ’s language as she reports what he says, but he has real personality in speech, and in choosing styles, colors, and “drape” in his clothing, even as a bitty child. CJ’s brother Chase takes some heat as the result of having a brother with what others perceive as gender confusion, but Duron herself intervenes when it begins to impact Chase’s school work and social interactions.

Duron narrates the audiobook of this title, produced by Audible. In an interview at the end of her reading, Duron tells us that she felt she wanted to read the produced book herself to give the needed emphases. She knows her sons will read it one day and wanted to make it sound the way she heard it in her head—accepting and ferociously protective of them. She did well.

Duron admits to being anxious and confused herself, so if occasionally she was a little rough on folks that seemed surprised about or mentioned CJ’s clothes or attitudes, we can probably cut her a break. Encountering a gender creative child for the first time might be a little surprising for some folks, and they may need a little time to process it cognitively. I have never encountered a child like her CJ. From the sounds of things, he is one easy fellow to like. She might be able to lose some of her attitude now: a quietly instructive voice on Duron’s part might be more helpful. I wouldn’t want to give up Duron’s very careful yet casual and joyous way of celebrating her son’s differences, though. I guess I can take a little attitude if we continue to hear more of CJ’s specialness.

Duron’s book was enlightening on a number of levels, not the least being the suggestion that her son’s gender fluidity may be genetic. In addition, one learns a great deal about legal protections already instituted for gender nonconforming children, hopefully ensuring that they needn’t be bullied in schools or communities. This means lots of folks have been through Duron’s experience before, though she did not find personal narratives online and felt she had to write her own. Her blog got so much attention that she was approached about writing a book, film projects, among other things. She is still posting: check it out.

The story of this family is really pretty special, in no small part to Duron’s own personality. Everyone would get something out of Duron’s experience: even if you don’t have a child who is gender questing, many parents have children who wish they could play with girl toys or boy toys at some time or another. The clothes might be another matter. I was surprised to hear Duron lived in Orange County, CA. Am I stereotyping if I say I would have thought creative folks around Los Angeles would have inoculated the population against surprise about dressing up? Ah, well. We can‘t all be as fabulous as CJ. What a guy!


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The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising by Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn may come as a surprise to American readers who do not follow his reports in the British newspaper The Independent. This book, published in November 2014, is a collection of his writings on Syria and ISIS and a summation of his opinion to that time. His assessment is not optimistic about stability in the region for some years to come and he is harsh in his judgment of the missteps that led us to this place.

When I first saw the depth and clarity of his analysis, I couldn’t understand why media outlets in the United States weren’t reporting what he was reporting. After I finished the book, however, I could see that Cockburn reserved some of his most lashing criticism for the U.S. government and big media. Cockburn believes Western alliances with states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have precluded a clear-eyed view of those states’ promotion and assistance of regressive Islamic doctrines like Wahhabism that have since taken up by ISIS.

Cockburn is a very experienced reporter; part of this book is the best description of war reporting that I have ever seen. He downplays “the fog of war” excuse for the confusion in the Western press about successes or failures of certain specific battles or even the overall direction of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. Reporting the war from embedded positions cannot capture the important component of political change in these countries, and allows temporary military victories to take on more importance than they warrant in light of the overall situation on the ground. “Irregular or guerilla conflicts are always intensely political.” Cockburn makes the point that, although most reporters are trying to do good work in a dangerous environment, they were being manipulated by rebel factions, their editors, the enemy, etc. and must not so easily accept what is presented to them, in English, by “opposition forces” in media-friendly environments.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone reading Cockburn would not concede, whether or not they agree with him, that he makes excellent points. I wish I had seen his work earlier, for then I could have been more discriminating in my own acceptance of official reports and government decisions.

Some reviews have complained that this work was not sufficiently edited, and that some material is presented twice. Each chapter is a self-standing article. Collected, they comprise this book. Some material is used twice in pieces that examine different aspects of the conflicts from various angles. It was not difficult for me to listen to some of the information twice: this is very complicated stuff and I had not seen some of this information before in my reading about the conflicts in the Middle East.

He does say the United States was disingenuous at best in its targeting Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. It was Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who were funding the militants that had the U.S. in their sights, but because the U.S. was earning millions each year in military contracts with these two, we didn’t even criticize them in a meaningful way. The section on Saudi Arabia and its support for the resurgence of Wahhabism was something I had completely missed in the reporting I’d seen to date. Read it and weep.

Cockburn goes into some depth about the disintegration of Iraq and how that is both fueling and the result of the fighting in Syria. He mentions the corrosive sectarian atmosphere in Iraq as a root cause for the militancy of Sunnis, and cites the corruption in the Iraqi Army as a reason for why the army can’t or won’t fight. His description of corruption has the feel of truth; for years we’d known there were problems with troops unwilling or unable to fight but Cockburn’s description of generals buying their rank at great expense makes it all come together. Now it all makes sense. Cockburn doesn’t have much hope that Iraq can hold itself together.

As for the fighting in Syria, Cockburn thinks U.S. involvement on the side of rebels was a mistake. Assad was not a good guy, but the resistance did not have enough time to pull together a coalition of different interests and was still very splintered when we began sending arms. Saudi and other Gulf states were training and sending in groups which aligned with the more radical elements, causing less damage to Assad than to the populace and Western interests there. Some U.S. arms and equipment showed up in the hands of groups under the ISIS aegis, bought, given or captured.

The situation in Syria was catastrophic before the overt support for Assad by the Russians this year. Cockburn couldn’t address that directly since it happened after his book was published, but he does mention that Russia, Iran, and Turkey have serious stake in stabilizing the region and that the U.S. should never have made Assad’s ouster the linchpin of their policy. Cockburn’s argument is that what comes after Assad may be far worse, is already far worse, than allowing him to regain control.

ISIS in Syria apparently cooperates with lots of Sunni groups with competing interests, some not as radical as those who are spreading fear through the violence of their videos online. Saudi-funded groups, once on the ground in Syria, have surprised everyone by taking up with the “terrorists,” aligning themselves in ways that are making them independent from Saudi. Hence the confusion on the ground and in reporting.

I recently reviewed Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick and am forced to admit that Cockburn’s analysis is far more what I was looking for in terms of discussion of events, analysis, and information. Certainly the recapture of Mosul, Iraq by ISIS affiliates in 2014 was just one of the nasty surprises in store for observers with insufficient information. But unless one works up to familiarity with the players and situations in the region, reading Cockburn is like drinking from a firehose. I’m paying attention now.

By the time I learned about this title, prices for it in used paperback had risen to $3000+ per on Amazon. I downloaded the audible.com version, which I highly recommend. On the Goodreads.com site, different editions of this book have different titles and covers, some of which appear to be in Kindle format by Verso. The new title appears to be The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution and is probably are the same book, re-edited and re-issued only months after the first one was published. It is available at less than $3000, I am pleased to report. Read either version. This man is enlightening.

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In October, 2015 Cockburn updated his view of the conflict in Syria, in an article published in The London Review of Books. More reading on ISIS:

• Black Flags by Joby Warrick
• The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction by Charles R. Lister
• Understanding ISIS and The New Global War on Terror by Phyllis Bennis
• ISIS: State of Terror by Jessica Stern & J.M. Berger

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Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

“…a string vibrating at one frequency will give you a quark, say, and a string vibrating at another frequency will give you a photon…Nature is made of all the musical notes that are played on this superstring, so the universe is like a kind of symphony.” (Ruprecht, p. 152)

It’s been years since this book came out. It made such a big splash on its debut I feared it may be popular fiction of a type that doesn’t interest me. I waited a little, had a peek, retreated. A big book in the vernacular of adolescent boys: a wave of exhaustion overcame me. Gradually I began to notice that many people whose reviews I follow were finding it an exceptional read. I took another look. No. Still couldn’t ever seem to find the time to wade through the (what I am embarrassed to say I thought at the time) triviality of the thoughts of fourteen-year-olds.

Wrong.

The voice I had in my head as I read was inadequate to this opus. Out of frustration for my lack of understanding the significance of what others were enjoying, I bought the audio of this, performed with great brio, skill, and cognizance by Nicola Barber, Fred Berman, Clodagh Bowyer, Terry Donnelly, Sean Gormley, Khristine Hvam, John Keating, Lawrence Lowry, Graeme Malcolm, Paul Nugent, produced by Audible, Inc. Suddenly I experienced what I had been missing. This has to be one of the very best audiobook performances I have ever heard.

The book is a symphony in four parts, but in the voices of these performers, it is a four-part spoken opera. It is broken into three parts in print and in audio, but make no mistake: This is music. It is Murray’s attempt to reach those of us in alternate universes:

“There is a certain amount of evidence that music of various kinds is audible in the higher dimensions—“(Ruprecht, p. 590)

This is also a classic of literature, worthy of all the kudos heaped upon it, and many more besides. If I could place it next to another book of comparable stature, it would be Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s was slim and this is comparatively huge. But Murray makes his words count.

The four parts are named after video games. I believe Hopeland is an invention of the author, but Skippy finds details in the game seem to reflect his own challenges. The other game names may also be inventions, but there are real games out there with those names & the challenges sort of follow along with Skippy's. They may, however, have been created after, and as a result of the novel rather than having been referenced by Murray. Heartland (The Heartland has fallen under the rule of the ruthless tyrant Midan and his minions...). Ghostland (The blood elves applied the scorched earth policy to these woodlands...). Afterland (a traveling carnival of magical misfits in the afterlife).

Every review I have seen mentions its size as a stumbling block. Pity. It takes days, weeks even, to get to it all, but after having lived with the boys and teachers of Seabrook College for some time now, I am convinced this tragicomic masterpiece is one of the great books of the new century. Funny, tragic, sad, true, and painfully revealing, it addresses major themes of our times and reminds us, with lacerating humor, just how it is to be young today.

The ferociously hormonal boys central to the drama are engaged in the epic battle we all face but prefer to forget: how best does one grow up, today, in a world of global warming? To a fourteen-year-old, the gloom this question casts is rarely acknowledged but manages to shadow thoughts of the future. Murray captures the idiocy of youth, how they are so unsure of themselves, yet feel immortal at the same time.

The cast of characters is positively Dickensonian. Murray peoples an embattled Catholic boarding school with an administration loathe to lose paying students to competitors yet fully aware and conspiratorially silent about the school’s deficiencies; teachers involved in personal dramas struggle to inspire the teens in their charge while warily watching and abetting the administration in their deceptions.

But he is funny, really funny at the same time he is tearing your heart out with the stories of the boys trying to make their way in such a world. Howard, the history teacher, stays on the subject of the First World War for much of the term. The following riff could be taken for one of Murray's central themes, just by substituting global warming for WWI.

"In today's History class, Howard the Coward--who looks like he hasn't slept much lately, or washed, or shaved--wants to talk about betrayal.'That's what the war was really about. The betrayal of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong, above all the young by the old. "If any question why we died / Tell them because our fathers lied" --that's how Rudyard Kipling put it. Young men were told all kinds of stories in order to get them to go and fight. Not just by their fathers of course. By their teachers, the government, the press. Everybody lied about the reasons for war and the true nature of the war. Serve your country. Serve the King, Serve Ireland...[Robert] Graves's friend Siegfried Sasson called the war "a dirty trick which had been played on me and my generation"...'"

And what of the White Goddess, who makes appearances throughout the story? The muse is an embodiment of the White Goddess, a cycle of desire and destruction. One will always desire her but one can never possess her lest she lose her power to inspire. Those that survive her ravishment will eventually pass to the Black Goddess who represents enduring, reciprocating love. A reader might take this to mean that if one manages to "take the road less traveled by" and overcome their desire for the ultimately meaningless trifles that are the result of 'wealth creation', one might finally reach a higher stage of consciousness featuring enduring love.

“At the docks…we saw…the whole front half of a destroyer that had been completely crushed, like a car that had hit a telegraph pole at high speed…we were told that it had been hit by a wave—one wave, which came out of nowhere, crashed into the bow and smashed everything right back to the bridge…What if the eleventh dimension was not a serene place, but a place of storms, with entire universes ripping through it like huge turbulent waves? Imagine the kind of cataclysm you’d have if one of these white-wave universes collided into another universe…” (Professor Tomashi, p. 215)

This is how I feel now, after having reviewed and revisited this work for some weeks. I feel quite as though a gigantic wave has crashed over me and Murray has broken through to another dimension. It is a fabulous experience…Ruprecht would be happy.

An interview with Paul Murray speaking to Jesse Montgomery gives us the mind of the author. He speaks the way he writes: he is funny, but he reminds us of the darkness surrounding us and our lives of plenty. “I think the tragedy of the world at the moment is that it’s more and more intent on turning us all into teenagers and making us long for this period in our life when we were totally at sea.” He reminds us of responsibility: of our tendency to act the “kidult” when what we really need to do is, each of us, take personal responsibility for the world we have created.

Jill Owens interviewed Murray for Powell’s: “The only reality in our lives is loss, you know? The kids in the last part of the book are realizing that, and realizing that all the illusions they've been chasing are false, and the only real thing they have is each other…But at the same time I think the ending has a certain amount of optimism to it, because even in the middle of this quite cynical system that they're in, these kids have made a valuable discovery, that they have friendship and they have this capacity to take care of each other.”

In Murray’s book, Howard is one of the teachers who tells the boys what they need to pull together after Skippy dies. Speaking of the men of “D” Company going to fight in WWI:

“They had joined up as friends, and when they got out to the Front, when the grand words evaporated, the bond between them remained. That they stayed friends, that they looked out for each other, most agreed, was what kept them from cracking up altogether. And in the end was the only thing, was the one true thing, that was genuinely worth fighting for.” (Howard, p. 557)

Murray: “M-theory is so complex and it's so astonishingly intricate. It has the fascination of what's difficult, in the same way that drugs are fascinating, or music is fascinating…At the same time, ultimately, they are leading you down a rabbit hole and they are leading you away from the world, and they are leading you away from people into this little narcissistic closed circuit.”

“It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality’s building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents. (Ruprecht, p. 301)”

Murray was mum in 2010 about his next project, but he did give a few hints to LitBlog interviewer in April 2011:”…I’d like to write something short and funny. I think the central gag of it is that this French banker meets a writer and the banker is very sensitive and poetic and the writer is just looking for a quick buck. I think it’ll be first person.”

There is more on his new project on a Farrar Strauss Giroux blog here.

Pachelbel's Canon combines the techniques of canon and ground bass. Canon is a polyphonic device in which several voices play the same music, entering in sequence. In Pachelbel's piece, there are three voices engaged in canon, but there is also a fourth voice, the basso continuo, which plays an independent part. [Wikipedia]

A fictional short story by Paul Murray published in The New York Times is not to be missed. In the story a young boy goes to school for the first time. As his father walks him to school, the son asks, “Did you go to school, Dad?”

“If there is a substitute for love, it is memory.”-- Kipling

“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why not story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter or even a whole word…” (Lori, p. 654)

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