Sarah Welling > Recent Status Updates

Ik kan op pagina 111 al zeggen dat ik FAN ben van Heinrich Boll.

Dit boek laat je MEESTERLIJK het Duitsland van kort na de oorlog ervaren, een wereld van dode jonge vaders, ouder wordende moeders, goede en slechte ooms, woorden die IMMOREEL of zelfs ONZEDELIJK zijn, en verpakkingen van producten die schaars zijn of verdwenen.

(Hoofdlettergebruik geinspireerd door dit werk.)

Students with poor working memories, who often learn through their procedural memories, can become frustrated and feel disenfranchised when a teacher insists that declarative explanations are the only way to demonstrate knowledge. [...] The student can truly understand the content but become demotivated by being forced to slowly limp through confusing verbal explanations of material they already grasp intuitively.

"Long-term memory is a little like people resting in deck chairs who just HAVE to get up and join the mental conga line when working memory starts singing their song."

I love this book already.

Conforming to the cliché of an English teacher here, but I find the repeated comma splices in this book irksome. If this is a stylistic choice, the effect is to jolt me out of the narrative at frequent intervals; based on the tone and nature of the book I'm not sure that is the intention though.

"I had felt this kind of grief before, when my father died -- a kind of awakening to the world, a feeling of never having been more alive. It occurred to me that it wasn't particularly difficult to live through tragedy because, in tragedy, life simply happened to and around you. Far more difficult, far more exhausting, were the ordinary days, when it was up to you to decide what was important and what was not."

"Why did she share so little of herself with me? I was always telling her things. There was the Disneyland boyfriend, my mother's obsession with filtered water, my sunscreen phobia, the recurring dream I had about finding myself dead in a plastic bag. I told her these things, in part because I knew she wouldn't judge, but also because, sometimes, one of us had to speak."

"They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar."

What a great book this is to sink back into. All about how "they f*ck you up, your mum and dad" , but also about how that doesn't have to determine the rest of (second half of in the case of Arthur Clennam) your life,

"Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it - or the worst, according to the probabilities."

"With applique you can shout in big bold words but with embroidery you can whisper, make small suggestions in chain stitch."
- Clare Hunter quoting fellow banner maker Thalia Campbell

Takeaway from chapter on so-called 'plague villages': lack of field labor after the Black Death was one factor that led to enclosure of land. With fewer labourers being able to demand higher wages, converting land into pasture for sheep was more feasible and profitable (cue the loss of common lands and greater concentrations of capital. Sheep gained a reputation as "devourers of people and destroyers of worlds."

Interesting stuff on new Winchelsea, founded by Edward I to replace the old town that was washed away by the sea. A prosperous hub of trade and key contributor to the naval fleet in the 13th century, it declined and fell into ruin itself as the harbour silted up, becoming a forlorn abode inviting the romantic descriptions of poets and writers.

"His habits may have been peculiar (he liked to drink half-pints of rum and milk), but no one could deny his colossal intellect. The trouble was, he was worried no one was going to appreciate it on Orkney."

Why half-pints? I'm hooked already...