9/11 - Day filled with Pain, Remorse and a glimmer of Hope

I no longer like to talk about 9/11. It remains a psychological and emotional bruise or scar, while healed and faded, still there in the background.

Today we had 9/11 weather, crisp blue skies no clouds in sight. At least in the morning. It got cloudier as the day wore on. And 9/11 once again landed on that dreaded Tuesday. The paper had reports regarding it, but not quite as many as before. 9/11 to date is costing the city over a billion dollars. It cost 60 million to maintain the memorial. There's also the cost of supporting and aiding the rescue workers, their families, and survivors of 9/11 who are suffering from 50 different types of Cancer. One man, a firefighter, died at 44 from 9/11 related cancer. The toxins from the dust resulted in cancer.

In the paper today there was an article about a teacher who spent a year teaching his 6th grade class about 9/11 - after several students stated that it was an accident. Eleven years later...and the information has already become garbled. There are those who don't see much difference between the period before 9/11 and the period after - and I have to wonder are you blind to world affairs? To the economy? To the Wars? To the heightened security? Do you live in plastic bubble verse? And can I join you? Granted I live in NYC, and there's not a day that goes by that I am not reminded. Or a year. It gets better. It fades. The front page of the NY Times posted on the junk store window on my block has finally over time, turned brown, crumbled, and is barely even legible.

And the buildings they've built in the towers place are slowly reaching towards the sky. Even if they are having a tough time finding tenants to fill them. ( Read more... )

On a more positive note? Here's a picture I took last week showing how we've moved forward and that gives me hope:

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Book quotes from Good Reads:

*I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
― Charlotte Brontë

Interesting. But it does make sense that a ponderous, dreary, often flowery Victorian writer would make this sort of comment about Austen. Suffice it to say, I can re-read Austen. I can even watch various versions of Pride and Prejudice. While I read Jane Eyre once, seen three versions, went to sleep during the last one. And each time want to go back in time and hit Charlotte repeatedly over the head with her own book. Lady? Lighten up. And stop pontificating.

*" “I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

It should be noted that Twain despised most of the writers of the 18th and 17th Centuries.
He sinks the Henry James in Huck Finn, and the Sir Walter Scott. (As much as I love Twain's wit, I admittedly found everything he wrote but Huck Finn to be maddening. Too much dialect. Too folksy. Innocents Abroad...tended to ramble and lacked momentum. Hate to say it Twain, but in some respects - Austen's Pride and Prejudice's satiric wit was a bit more subtle, and a tad more clever. It also was a lot easier to read.)

*“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Algonquin Wits

I've admittedly felt the same way about a few books. Twilight. Atonement. House of Sand and Fog. But most notably American Psycho...that book I truly wanted to throw aside with great force. (It should be noted that I gave all of them away to people who would adore them, except for Twilight which I never bothered to buy. I treat books like cats, as treasures.) I rather like Parker, she is disarmingly honest and self-deprecating.

When reading reviews of books or anything for that matter - you should check out the reviewer/critic's tastes, what do they consider amazing, what do they hate, and how do they think - before following their recommendation.

For example? When a reviewer tells me that the master of horror and suspense is Stephen King and one of their favorite books is Eat Pray, Love...I think alrighty then. Let's move on. (This reviewer hated "The Thief Book" which I'm considering and "Gone Girl" which I'm wary of.) Granted, if the reviewer has insanely eclectic taste like I do, you may have to dig deeper than that. Particularly if they are moody and have a tendency to change their mind about things in mid-stream.