Reading Dec. issue of the Atlantic. No doubt if you are anywhere near my age, you, at least once. read The Rolling Stone. This is the 50th anniversary and like a person who lived it up and never cared about health or longevity, it doesn't look like the RS is going much past 50. The last 52% owned by founder Jann Wenner is up for sale. He had already sold the first 48%. A biography of Jann Wenner, himself, is also about to be released and was reviewed in the Atlantic. There were three quotes I thought interesting enough for orange highlighter and posting here. One has to do with writing and the other with history:
1.A writer needs to feel the freedom to look stupid, even to make a fool of himself, in order to do the kind of work he has always imagined but never before quite pulled off.
2.Everything we read about the past is bound to be incomplete, because although we might know what unfolded, we can never really know how the experience felt.
As a writer and as a person looking back on a long life, both of these ideas made a glow in my mind when I read them. Hope they provoke some interesting thoughts in yours too!
The story that gets pieced together takes the place of memory, then becomes the memory.
3.History is not what happened but what remains when everything else is forgotten.
A couple of days ago, I saw the movie LBJ and it was fantastic. First of all Woody Harrelson did a great character study of LBJ. But you did have to get past the prosthetic ugly face that they made him wear, unnecessarily, I think.
It was a very pertinent film to our own time in that it does a creditable sketch of the way LBJ made a bridge between irreconcilable opposite sides. He got the racist Southern politicians to make enough compromise with the Northern liberals to get the Civil Rights Act passed. And, we have LBJ to thank for Medicare - THANK YOU!!
It was also a fascinating thing to ponder how the real LBJ made a huge turn-about from his former political conservative position to the Great Society reformer that he became. He saw the future and he got on board while others, stuck in the quicksand of their outdated positions sank only deeper.
If you get the time, go see the movie. If not, catch it on tv. You will have a lot to think about! And compare. To think we went from my heroic past Presidents Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ to the greedy, impulsive, reckless fool the other 42% have put in charge now.
Well, Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
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