I have had such a good time sharing my experiences with you here at katherinejhan.com. Thanks for sharing with me as I took my first steps into the blogosphere and really started to explore my interest in food, books, photos, art, and … food.

What once started as a subsection of a personal website has taken on a life of it’s own. So D has been nice enough to put together a new website for us that is so beautiful it makes me smile whenever I see it. So please join me at the new site, A Flavor for Life, and if you find that you like it, maybe you can subscribe to the RSS feed, and tell your friends, too!

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. … And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

- Haruki Murakami, Kafa on the Shore

Read: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/world/europe/11golem.html?scp=1&sq=golem&st=cse for now. More to follow.

As Caroline Bingley once noted (albeit with subversive reasons) as she asked Elizabeth Bennet to walk gracefully with her in circles around the room, a walking companion is a delight. But unlike what Darcy thinks, walking companions are good for more than just the two reasons of sharing a confidence, or having men admire your physique and grace. Walking companions are good for keeping you company and making sure that each of the steps you take on familiar or unfamiliar ground is taken with a word on your lips, a remark in your ear, or an intriguing contemplation bubbling in your mind.

My walking companions of choice today were Milton and Tessie of Middlesex - a book I started months ago, picked up again a couple days ago, re-started on the T moments ago, and continued to read on the walk home. Once I emerged from the subterranean tunnels of the T, my feet knew to retrace the same path along the brick sidewalk that I have walked for the past 4 years from the T station, leaving me free to walk home with my nose buried in the Kindle, glancing up occasionally only to address the Spare Change News man in front of ABP, or to brush aside a wisp of hair that had fallen, obstructing my view.

And on that short walk home, Milton told me about how he had enlisted in the Navy and how he had been appointed to be a Signalman. Desdemona passed away with gravitas and flair, and Tessie whispered in confidence to me that she made up her mind to leave her proper, prim, priestly fiancee for the rebellious, wandering, tortured lover of sorts named Milton - A second cousin who had tickled her senses alive with his clarinet. And by the time Milton was saved from serving the thirty-eight second life expectancy of a signalman by being enlisted as a cadet, I found that my feet had brought me to my doorfront.

And as I turned the handle of our door, I switched off the Kindle, sad to see my walking companions go away, but content in knowing that Milton would be safe from the war, and Tessie would be waiting for the right man … at least until the next time I picked the Kindle up again to hear their stories once more.

Sometimes, we find ourselves identifying with characters. Too many times, we wish we couldn’t.

How do we forgive ourselves? Our parents watch us so carefully when we’re children, desperate not to miss a first scream, a first step, a first word, never taking their eyes off us. Yet we do not watch them. They near the end in solitude - even those who live beside us die in solitude - and rarely do we catch their own milestones: the last scream before the morphine settles in, last step before they can walk, last word before the throat seals. Still I can feel it, the sudden drop of the heart - that I would crack the world open if I could, that I would sell my bones to have her back. - The Confessions of Max Tivoli

3000 miles.

A great book sets itself apart in its ability to draw out the subtle truths of the human experience and to prod readers to grapple with them. It forces readers to relive experiences and emotions and it conjures memories that had long been forgotten. And as the characters develop with every flip of the page, so does the reader.

More often than not, such an exercise is mentally and emotionally taxing. So, it helps when the delivery of these human truths is light, humble, and unassuming rather than heavy-handed and authoritative. Because in the middle of deep reminiscence and thoughtfulness, a respite or two is dearly welcome. And I do sincerely believe that there are just as many truths to be uncovered through laughter and joy as there are to be discovered through tears and sorrow.

Jonathan Safran Foer is an excellent example of a storyteller with the uncanny ability to plunge readers into the depths of their pasts and the realities of their existences, pushing them to deal with them for just the right amount of time until he swoops in with a humorous anecdote or observation that rescues the readers from their selves.

JSF demonstrates this ability in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as he describes the quest of a nine year old child to solve a mystery surrounding his father’s death in the attacks of September 11. By writing from the innocent perspective of a a nine year old boy, JSF makes stomachable the intense emotional journey of contending with the greatest tragedy in recent American history and the universal human experience of losing a loved one.

You’ll know what I mean just from reading the first paragraphs of the novel:

“What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of ,Yellow Submarine,’ which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’etre, which is a French expression that I know. … I desperately wish I had my tambourine with me now, because even after everything I’m still wearing heavy boots, and sometimes it helps to play a good beat. My most impressive song that I can play on my tambourine is ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which is also the ring tone I downloaded for the cell phone I got after Dad died. It’s pretty amazing that I can play ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee,’ because you have to hit incredibly fast in parts, and that’s extremely hard for me, because I don’t really have wrists yet. Ron offered to buy me a five-piece drum set. Money can’t buy me love, obviously, but I asked if it would have Zildjian cymbals. He said, ‘Whatever you want,’ and then he took my yo-yo off my desk and started to walk the dog with it. I know he just wanted to be friendly, but it made me incredibly angry. ‘Yo-yo moi!‘ I told him, grabbing it back. What I really wanted to tell him was ‘You’re not my dad, and you never will be.’”

I finished this book on a 6-hr nonstop flight from LAX to BOS sitting in the center seat between a man in a black three-button suit, and an elderly woman who opted for mini pretzels and a ginger ale. I was laughing and crying the entire time. They thought I was nuts, but it was worth it.

Guernica

Pablo Picasso, 1937

Have you ever read a book that you really appreciate, but know that you’ll never really want to read again? You can see why people are heralding it and it scratches that mental itch, but if someone were to ask you if that were the one book you would want to take with you to a deserted island, you just might say, “Can I choose another, please?” or perhaps you may think to yourself, “Guess it’ll have some use in case all that coconut milk kicks in.”

In a sense, it’s sort of like art. Take Guernica (above), for example. No one can deny the mastery of the work and the significance that it has come to take on as the very embodiment of anti-war sentiments. Yet, it is something so fine and sometimes so emotionally and mentally perturbing that to hang it over your fireplace for daily viewing would do neither you nor the painting justice. An idyll or better yet, Malevich’s White on White, might better suit those purposes so that the viewing of Guernica can take place during select, special moments, such as a certain Colin Powell press conference at the U.N. (or not).

White on White

Kasimir Malevich, 1918

And so is the case with books. In reflecting on the few books that I have read over the past couple of weeks, I’ve realized that the books that have left me with that feeling of wanting to slowly turn the last page, hold my breath, and hug the book to my chest, hoping that some of the beauty of the book and of the author’s words will seep into my very being so that I can re-read the book over and over again in my mind (you know … that feeling …) have not been books on “The List” (the list being the list of 55 Pulitzer fictions I’m determined to read), but rather off “The List.” (gasp). That is right. I enjoy non-Pulitzer prize winners.

So in the next couple of days, I’ll share some thoughts with you on why those non-p’s are so amazing. Until then, I leave you with this gem. Guess where it is from!

“During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for ‘I love you’ or ‘I feel serious’. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when firghtened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for ‘Now I realize I was wrong to love you’. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, ‘Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you’. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking for forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.”