REMEMBER?

REMEMBER when motherhood meant being more concerned about your child than your sexiness?

But I am not going to criticize Kim Kardashian here as she is too easy a target.

But it got me to thinking what other things are also dying in our society --

LIBRARIES --

Keith Wynn (Optimistic Existentialist)

http://keithawynn2011.blogspot.com/

He wrote how libraries had been magical places when a child.  Me, too. 

I remember when I sat in a darkened corner of a library and saw in my mind when Triton rose up out of a wine-dark sea, blowing death from his spiral horn.

Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY was tucked happily under my arm that day.

But the Day of the Library may be nearing its end:

 Library patrons want more e-book choices, but libraries can’t afford to purchase e-books at the inflated prices.

Effectively, libraries are leeching money by purchasing fewer e-books at higher prices to keep patrons happy.

Where will we take our future children to discover and enjoy reading if libraries are gone? Where can I go to browse the shelves for weird books?

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”
― Mark Twain

“I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.”
― Roger Zelazny

Have you lost any favorite comic strips lately?

The print industry is dying. Newspapers were the first to sink with magazines following close behind. Now print books are dying as well.

One problem with the dying newspaper industry is that comic strips are disappearing as well.

In the old days, every newspaper had a comics page so every newspaper was a potential market for a new comic strip.

CALVIN & HOBBES and PEANUTS were the last strips I daily read.

I've just bought a collection of the first year of ALLY OOP strips

to bring back the wistful dreams of childhood when I read the last of his strips as a young boy.

Do you look forward to reading any comic strips daily?

The Fading Art of Letter Writing

Letter-writing is among our most ancient of arts.

Think of letters and the mind falls on Paul of Tarsus, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen, Mark Twain;

OR love letters written during the American Civil War, or letters written to a parent by a frightened soldier at the battlefront.

      

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure.

It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability,

because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do.

You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

      

Yes, e-mail is a wonderful invention.

It links people across the world, destroying in an instant the hurdle of geography that confronts snail mail.

Yet it is by its nature ephemeral and lacks the spark of character that only handwriting can provide.

When you get an e-mail, you can never be sure that you are the only recipient — or even that it’s original.

We have always liked to pore over the letters of great figures like Winston Churchill and Abigail Adams for the insight this offers into their lives:

the writing, the crossings-out, the very feel of history on paper.

I MISS WRITING THAT CONTAINS EMOTIONS RATHER THAN EMOTICONS.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?