Loose Leaf Notes

1. I like that when I’m in the thrift shop I can find everything from a cap to a cape to capris.

2. I like writing poetry, but the hardest part is creating the open time it takes to do it. When I can’t write a poem, having a good dream is the next best thing, a dream that, like poetry, is rich with multiple meaning.

3. I recently had a dream where my sister Kathy wrapped herself up in a blanket and laid next to my mother, who was also wrapped up.  When I woke up I wondered if they, who both died this year, were wrapped like cocoons waiting for transformation. Or did it mean that in life they had gotten “all wrapped up” in something together?  Maybe it meant their lives were wrapped up.

4. Memoirist/poet Mary Karr says, “Working on poems is like cheating on your husband.  It’s what I really want to do but they won’t pay me for it.”

5. She writes in her book, The Art of the Memoir, “On the first day of a memoir class, I often try to douse my students’ flaming certainty about the unassailability of their memories. So I fake a fight with a colleague while a videographer’s camera whirs in back. Then I ask the class to record what they saw.” Even the best minds get it wrong, she says.  She points out how we often record the felt emotions of an event while the details blur.  Our innate prejudices also shape how we view things.

6. “Our brains are programmed to take shortcuts, and as a result, produce systematic patterns of illogical thinking and behaviors. These flaws are called cognitive biases, and as multiple studies have shown, they can even bypass well-established rules and lead to disasters ― from the loss of lives in Mount Everest expeditions to the global financial crisis in 2008.”

7. “Some of these biases are very commonly seen in everyday life. The bandwagon effect, for example, makes people adhere to an idea or vote for someone merely based on the high number of other supporters. The blind spot bias causes us to see logical flaws in others’ thinking more often than we do in our own. The confirmation bias makes us more attuned to evidence that supports our own view, a problem plaguing many political and social landscapes.”  – From You Can’t Always Trust Your Own Thoughts, And This Terrifying Chart Shows Why HERE.

8. “In psychology, they have this phenomenon called projection. The Cambridge Dictionary of Psychology defines it as a “primitive defense mechanism” that involves “the unconscious warding off of negative experiences or emotions by denying an experience, perceiving it in another person and then seeing that negative experience as being directed back at the projector.”  – From Donald Trump turns ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ into political tool HERE. 

9. “So the man who claims that he’s always been opposed the Iraq War (even though he wasn’t), the man who said the election is rigged, (even though it isn’t), the man who told us Barack Obama founded ISIS (even though — duh! — he didn’t), the man whose PolitiFact scorecard rules over 80 percent of his rated statements as half-truths and untruths . . . that man complains that Hillary Clinton is “a world-class liar.”

10. Lately, I’ve been driving an alternative route to town because, not only do I not have to look at one Trump/Pence sign, there’s a Hillary/Kaine sign along that route that makes me happy to see.

11. I write to know what I’m thinking and have compared taking pen to paper to taking my psychic blood pressure.

12. Writing as a form of art, but typing is more like a mechanical shortcut.  I wonder what we are losing by bypassing the physical dance and personalization of writing. US researchers, Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, claim that note-taking with a pen, rather than a laptop, gives people a better grasp of the subject. Drawing each letter by hand improves our grasp of the alphabet because we really have a “body memory.”  More HERE.

13. “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”  – Louise Glück, “Nostos”

___________Thirteen Thursday