There's a great big wonderful world out there, and thanks to the Internet, I can discover and research millions of barely related things...

I am a dilettante. This is a fact I am attempting to accept about myself.

The purpose of this web site is to celebrate this aspect of my personality. (That statement is meant to sound wry, not pompous.)

These pages are a collection of things which resonate with me, which have crossed my path usually accidently, often serendipitously. I wanted a way to gather them, maybe eventually cross-reference them (if I wasn't a librarian in a past life, I'm certainly going to be one in a future incarnation.) These will be examples of collections of instances which seemed to come full circle and form a complete connection. (There's really no way to get across how delightful I find these connections, so you have to accept the fact that this is my page, and I have my logic and it works for me.)

Short synopsis for starters:
1) Passing interest in article about Martha Gellhorn in New Yorker (never heard of her)
2) Months later, at the Library Book Sale, find a copy of the Collected Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen(never heard of her either), can't pass it up
3) Also at the Library Book Sale, find a history of Sun Valley, where I will be headed in a month for a conference, so pick it up.
4) There is a whole chapter dedicated to Hemingway, mentioning his third wife, Martha Gellhorn.
5) Re-read the article in the New Yorker (actually a collection of her letters), and it turns out she thought E. Bowen was a literary genius.

I subscribe to the New Yorker, a window to many different worlds, deeply explored and satisfying to visit. Months ago there were excerpts from Martha Gellhorn's letters, accompanied by two photographs of her; one taken when she was perhaps in her fifties/sixties; the other from her "Hemingway days" (and oh, she would be pissed to hear them described as such), perhaps in her twenties/thirties. I had never heard of her, but there was something about the way she gazed clear-eyed at the camera that caught me.

(This is leading somewhere, to be continued soon......)

Pertinent Links:

A great Salon article
Gellhorn wrote for the Atlantic
A thesis on her work
An Interview (I know nothing about this organization)