Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. –Maya Angelou

Love, Music, Solitude, and How to Be More Alive: The Best of The Marginalian 2022

My hands down favorite source of inspiration and books to read. A lot of inspiration for the New Year in this selection.

Jack Davidson’s Alchemical Photographic Etchings

“I’ve never been a darkroom kid,” says British photographer Jack Davison. “I tried, [but] it just didn’t appeal to me.” With a new solo exhibition, Photographic Etchings, opening in north London’s Cob Gallery, Davison is instead reflecting on the tactile wonders and alchemical magic of photogravure, a labour-intensive, high-cost alternative to the darkroom that lies at the heart of this exhibition.

Jack Davison, Untitled (JD-08), 2022© the artist, courtesy of Cob Gallery

… what is it about snarling or perhaps just snapping or perhaps just skulking in a menacing way?… and depicted in a shadowy, high contrast way… see Daido Moriyama’s stray dog…

Somaya Critchlow, the Artist Reconfiguring the Black Female Nude

12 of Critchlow’s new paintings and drawings are now on display at Maximillian William gallery in London, in an exhibition called Afternoon’s Darkness. A sense of the macabre lingers across these new works, in which Black women are depicted revelling in their solitude – nude, semi-nude or in costume – backdropped by dimly-lit, domestic interiors.

Count Me Out, 2022© Somaya Critchlow. Image courtesy the artist and Maximillian William, London. Photography: Prudence Cuming Associates.

… increasingly, women artists are portraying women in ways that do invite the male gaze… the male gaze is such a convoluted gaze… is it appropriate or not in this “hashtag me too” era?… at the end of the day, we feel what we feel when we look at images of beautiful women partially or fully undressed… it’s what we do with those feelings that matters… do we treat such images as gateway invitations to the abuse of womanhood or do we simply appreciate the beauty of the female body?… have we matured as a culture?… patriarchy is alive and well… there are risks to trying to break through to a new attitude…

Henry Miller on Friendship and the Relationship Between Creativity and Community

This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship.

… i have all but abandoned FB and Instagram, using the former to check in with “friends” now and again and the latter to post an image here and there… i never did have much use of twitter… these days i can be found on Vero (@smbk) and Micro.blog (@mbkriegh)…

“Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend… to work miracles.” Henry Miller

Disgruntled American Tourist Smashes Roman Busts at the Vatican

An American man visiting the Vatican threw two Ancient Roman busts to the ground in a fit of rage after being informed that he could not see the Pope, Italian newspapers report.

… ok, the headline, “Disgruntled American”?… click bait really… when i first read it, it seemed unfortunately natural to think of any American as being an angry child…

The man who vandalized the sculptures, aged 65 and apparently “psychologically distressed,” seemed to have been visiting the Vatican alone and was turned over to Italian authorities the same day. He received an aggravated property damage charge and was subsequently released.

… and then i read the bit about “psychologically distressed” and wondered why not this headline… “Psychologically Distressed Tourist Smashes Roman Busts at the Vatican”?… then we would discover the tourist was American… which fact is more important?… “American” if you think or want people to think all Americans are childish rage-holics, and “psychologically distressed” if we are talking about the general propensity in humanity for there to be people not in their right mind…

Find My Friends… an app that tells you where your friends are at any given moment in time?… beyond the obvious serendipitous being in close by places at the same time… meet up!… there are the also obvious ways this might not be a good idea…

I feel so unispired. Inspiration. Can I have some of yours?

… my wife is a huge fan of David Bowie, me, not so much, but i love Nick Cave!… and i love his Red Hand Files in which he answers questions sent to him by his fans… that he seems to have his head on really straight helps too…

In my experience, inspiration is not something that finds you, or offers itself to you, nor for that matter is faith. Inspiration and faith are similar in so far as they both ask something of us. They each require real and constant practical application. For me, inspiration comes only when I practice certain things regularly and rigorously. I must commit fully to the task in hand, sit down each day, pick up my pencil (actually it is a medium black or blue Bic Biro) and get to work. It is not exactly toiling down the coal mines, but it is labour enough, and I undertake it through the good times and the bad, through the dry periods and the periods of abundance, and I keep on going regardless of my successes or failures. Inspiration comes because I put in the work.

Blue Rev, Alvvays

The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, witty, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre.

October 07, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson, October 06, 2022

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

… the next two elections will be determinative about which way the country is going… democracy or authoritarianism… conservatives, don’t believe in democracy, haven’t believed in democracy for some time now… why?… because conservatism in this country is presently focused on the preservation of the power of the mostly white patriarchy and they can’t preserve their power if elections are free and fair… they are in desperate survival mode where any means justifies the end… thus, scandals like those of Herschel Walker, which would have taken down any politician just 10 years ago are no longer disqualifying… there is an absolute abasement in this desperation… the trouble is, it may prevail…

Want Lipstick That Actually Lasts? Rouge Dior Forever is the Answer

… i have a deep love of the feminine and what is more feminine than lipstick, or more important to lipstick than it be lasting?…

1. Who should use it? Anyone who wants intense, pigment-rich matte lipstick that actually stays where it’s supposed to – there are no smears, smudges or fading here

2. How long until I love it? Probably 16 hours after you first put it on, as one application promises to last that long
3. How planet-/people-friendly is it? As part of Dior Beauty’s Responsible Formulation Charter, the brand aims to source all ingredients in the most socially and environmentally responsible way possible
4. How do I use it? Make sure your lips are primed and moisturised with a good balm, then add a slick of Rouge Dior Forever and leave to dry for three minutes

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoe Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

They were the first to colonize the Earth. They will inherit it long after we are gone as a species. And when we go as individuals, it is they who return our borrowed stardust to the universe, feasting on our mortal flesh to turn it into oak and blackbird, grass and grasshopper. Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting. Without them, this planet would not be a world. Like everything vast and various, they shimmer with metaphors for life itself.

Viruses Are More Like Cone Snails Than Hijackers

… as i read this article, there is this growing sense of interconnectedness… that all things are connected to all other things and that the universe can only be understood as an incredibly wondrous tapestry of matter and energy and a byproduct, life… we can’t understand the parts without some comprehension of the whole… and we can never think that anything can be understood in isolation…

Viruses, like cone snails, evolve to be more like what sustains them. It is an uncomfortable form of relatedness, this predatory metabolic convergence, but it cannot be denied that it generates amazing patterns of likeness across biological kingdoms without everything having to be descended from the same line of direct genetic inheritance.

Even if something has evolved to get away from its mimic, it holds the imprint of that entity’s influence in its difference, like a shadow.

Immersing Yourself in the Works of Gustav Klimt #art #gustav-klimt #exhibitions

In the unlikely setting of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Manhattan, seeping into the ceilings, floors, walls, and recesses of the hall, projections of Gustav Klimt’s paintings are now set on an hour-long loop. Built between 1909 and 1912, the bank’s interior retains many of its original decorative elements, which include elegant glass panels, patterned limestone carvings, and brass detailing. Contrary to what its facade seems to convey about what happens inside — mysterious and important affairs of the economy and the state — people inside are huddled and seated in clusters on the ground and on chairs in darkness, hushed and sedated by a carousing Johann Strauss waltz.

Wrightwood 659 Hosts Exhibitions on the “First Homosexuals” and Michiko Itatani

Roberto Montenegro, “Retrato de un anticuario o Retrato de Chucho Reyes y autorretrato” (detail) (1926), oil on canvas, 102.5 x 102.5 cm, Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico

The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869-1930 starts with the year 1869, when the word “homosexual” was first coined in Europe, inaugurating the idea of same-sex desire as the basis for a new identity category. More than 100 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and film clips from public and private collections around the world are on view, including works that have never before been allowed to travel outside their respective countries. This groundbreaking exhibition is the first multi-medium survey of early, determinedly queer art that explored what the “first homosexuals” understood themselves to be — and how the dominant culture, in turn, understood them. This is part one of a two-part exhibition (the second is planned for 2025 and will feature 250 masterworks) developed by a team of 23 international scholars led by distinguished art historian Jonathan D. Katz with associate curator Johnny Willis.

French author Annie Ernaux has won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature

Annie Ernaux is the author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the Prix Renaudot for _A Man’s Place_, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work, and recently the winner of the International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for The Years.

Annie Ernaux on the “Infinite Lack” in Our Search for Love

Anyway, what does this sign really mean, the phone call from the Latin Quarter? That he’s thinking of me? But in what way? There’s nothing more impossible to imagine than the desire, the emotion, of the Other. And yet, only that is beautiful. All I dream of is this perfection, without yet being sure of attaining it—of being the “last woman,” the one who erases all the others, with her attentiveness, her skilled knowledge of his body: the “sublime affair.”

In the world of wordsmithing:

• I have been reading Etel Adnan’s Sea and Fog a few pages at a time. That’s how it is with poetry. I need to go low and slow. As if I am smoking a brisket, but poetically. This take on Photography stood out to me:

  Photography is akin to medieval thinking: it values the instant, is based on the microcosm, the atom which mirrors the whole, the DNA which identifies. To see is to arrest the world, to save it from submersion.

  Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

• I learned about Eve Babitz from this article in The Atlantic.

  Eve Babitz was one of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los Angeles: essayist, memoirist, novelist, groupie, feminist, canny ingenue.

  Babitz was four inches short of that 5 foot 11, but she had other attributes that made her presence, and her femininity, impossible to ignore. Her most explicit attempt to address this challenge was “My Life in a 36DD Bra, or, the All-American Obsession,” a piece she wrote for Ms. in April 1976.

• And there was this interview with [Lisa Taddeo on Death, Desire and Her “Super Dark” View of the World](https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/14293/lisa-taddeo-on-her-short-story-collection-ghost-lover?utm_source=Link&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=RSSFeed&utm_term=lisa-taddeo-on-death-desire-and-her-super-dark-view-of-the-world “Lisa Taddeo on Death, Desire and Her “Super Dark” View of the World”) in AnOther Magazine.

  Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (2019) was a work of devastating brilliance, flooring readers with its illuminating investigation of female desire. She spent eight years creating this compelling feat of literary reportage (which is currently in production as a new television series starring Shailene Woodley as the author). Immersing herself in the stories of her three subjects, Sloane, Lina, and Maggie, Taddeo moved cross-country multiple times, bearing witness to these women’s lives as they unfolded, exhaustively recording their testimony and speaking to those closest to the book’s trio of central figures. What emerged was a complex, candid, and deeply compassionate portrait of labyrinthine female sexuality.

  I purchased Three Women for Kindle. Anything to do with feminine sexuality attracts me. I expect to be titillated by it but also hope to be educated by it.

In the world of film:

• A review of ‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’

  It’s just that modern competition revolves around the ability to claim persecution: In a land of modern strivers granted wealth and power the likes of which the world has never seen, she who can lay claim to the greatest number of handicaps and the lowest number of privileges is Queen Victim.

  A competition based on the greatest number of handicaps and least number of privileges strikes me as an apt metaphor for the present moment in America in lots of ways.

• Why Japanese Director Kinuyo Tanaka’s Films Are Criminally Overlooked

  Kinuyo Tanaka: A Life in Film, it explores the outstanding works of one of the country’s first-ever female auteurs – whose incredible and under-seen films have been newly restored in 4K. A screen icon in her own right (highlights from her incredible acting career, including collaborations with nearly all of the aforementioned filmmaking giants, are to be shown in September), Tanaka defied the male gatekeepers of the industry to carve out her own career behind the camera. She thrived in the process, delivering works that matched those of her male counterparts and often surpassed them.

  Though her directing career was short (Tanaka completed six films in nine years in total), the stories she told were vital tales of female agency and desire that were essential to the cinematic development of one of the world’s great filmmaking nations.

• Lena Dunham’s new film, Sharp Stick, seems like a must see to me, but then I am easily sold by the promise of sex on the screen. Still, this review in Hyperallergic and the fact that its Dunham, promises humor and intelligence in addressing the subject of a young woman setting out to loose her virginity.

In the World of my daily walks:

Leaf chatter as a breeze moves through the trees. Crickets. Cicadas.

In the world of art:

I liked Lucy Johnson’s - Reality Breakdown photography series.

Lucy Johnson (b.1986) is a UK artist who works in sound and visual art. Her work explores themes of the sublime, the mundane and the absurd in the human experience. She has self published two photo zines with imprint Pearl Press and her sound work has featured in The Wire, NTS Radio, Tusk Festival, Fact Magazine and Index Festival (Yorkshire Sculpture International). Alongside soundtracking her own visual art, she collaborates with artists of different disciplines in creating audio visual projects, some of which appear on ‘Soundtracks Vol.1’, released by Opal Tapes in 2020.

• A Show Traces Philip Guston’s Impact on Contemporary Artists - I have long been a fan.

  A Thing for the Mind at commercial gallery Timothy Taylor takes an altogether more creative approach to demonstrating influence, one informed less by strict historical evidence than by the curator’s creative interpretation based on painterly themes and similarities.

  

• Two Santa Monica Artists Create a Legacy Through Potlucks

  The backyard potlucks followed a consistent formula that worked because so many people stepped up to contribute and help out. Around 6pm on a Saturday night, a long table filled up with potluck delicacies — both store bought and homemade — while a drink table was stocked with wine and beer. Jon and his tech crew would set up for the artist slideshow as Kim greeted visitors in her studio at the back of the house.

  It’s always about connecting with other people. When we connect, when we talk face to face, that makes a difference.

In the world of human rights:

• Telling the Devastating Stories of Pre-Abortion Ireland(https://lithub.com/telling-the-devastating-stories-of-pre-abortion-ireland/)

  Decades on from the writing of Irish laws that caused the death and enslavement of women, the deaths and abduction of their babies, and the decimation of their families and communities, we are seeing similar laws being rewritten in America—the land of the free and a country that was once a sanctuary for Irish women fleeing shame and judgment in their country. And it’s slowly dawning on us that history can repeat itself if we let it. It’s down to us to tell the stories that help us to move forward, not back.

** In the world of politics:**

• News of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago of course stands out. Of particular interest to me is this speculative line Heather Cox Richardson draws to Saudi Arabia in her August 11 Post.

  … what springs to mind for me is the plan pushed by Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and fundraiser and campaign advisor Tom Barrack, to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.

  It seems clear that items of significant national security import were illegally removed from Washington and brought to Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know why or by whom, but the presumption is 45. We know that 45 is venal so the suspicion is that the materials were to be used for profit. Or perhaps have been. There appears to have been nuclear secrets among the materials.

  I detest the very idea of 45. That so many embrace him unquestioningly is baffling and frightening to me.

• I whole heartedly agree with this article in The Dispatch on Liz Cheney’s integrity. She is a shining example of politics with integrity. If 45 is brought down and the anti-democratic forces in this country are turned back, it will be because of her. She has changed my idea of what to look for in a politician. Integrity first, then policy. Polling makes it clear she will not be nominated by the Republican Party in Wyoming to her seat in congress. That is sad. What is it about humanity that values loyalty over integrity? I’ll take Liz Cheney any day. If she runs for president I may well vote for her because I see her as the sanest way out of the mess we are in.

• Tilting Our Politics Back Toward Democracy

  It seemed important to quote extensively from this article in The Bulwark:

  These constant struggles over eligibility and access are part of our constitutional birthright. The beauty in the story of America is not found in an uncritical adherence to the Founders’ design but, rather, in the struggle—in various groups’ demand, often resisted by others, that our democracy be more participatory and inclusive. For those who love liberal democracy, the one thing worse than letting vox-pop stars (election deniers, for example) touch our democracy is cutting off their access to it.

  Such unchecked anti-democratic actions are made possible by the toxic partisanship driving the country apart—today’s version of the factions about which James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10. More than half of adults view other Americans as the biggest threat to their way of life. Approximately half of Democrats and Republicans view the other as immoral, and a recent study shows partisans view their political opponents as more unintelligent than immoral, more “stupid than evil” as it were. These views make it easier for people to excuse the illiberal undertakings of elected officials because such activities are deemed necessary to defeat the existential threat presented by the other side.

  In contrast to this understanding of our political history as a series of deviations from a model republic—an understanding hardly convincing for the 90-plus percent of us who would not have been permitted to vote at the time the Constitution was first implemented—there is the other understanding I described earlier, which sees our political history as a never-ending struggle over eligibility and access. This alternative understanding makes it possible to look at our system of government with clear eyes to assess whether it has tilted too far toward democracy (toward becoming a tyranny of the majority) or too far away from it (toward becoming a tyranny of the minority or of minorities). Each direction carries risks.

  But pulling off a republican democracy that puts the demos in the driver’s seat will require trust and investment in the people—not an easy undertaking given the foundation of our democratic culture. But failing to do so will ensure we get more of the type of representatives Madison warned us about in Federalist No. 10: “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, who may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”

  We seem to be squarely in that place now. And the election deniers winning Republican primaries and state election offices with the intent of undermining our democracy out of self-interest may soon put the ridiculousness of the vox pops to shame.

  I struggle to resist the thought that people on the far right are “more stupid than evil.” I don’t always succeed. My assessment of the situation is that they are afraid of the brave new world that could be. The Multiarchy. They loose some privileges in such a world. It’s existential. It’s sad. I hope we can come back from the brink of civil war and make constructive choices. I have good and bad days on this. Like Democracy itself in the present moment.

• In other 45 related news, this observation from Heather Cox Richardson:

  It is an astonishing thing to see that a former president, the person who was responsible for faithfully executing the laws of our nation, has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

  Referring to his deposition in New York State this past week.

• How Trump’s top general worried the Hitler-curious president was seeking “a Reichstag moment."

  The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

  “Which generals?” Kelly asked.

  “The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

  “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

  But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.

  I remember worrying at the time that 45 would succeed in corrupting the military. It seems my worries were warranted, but then i knew that.

I think this is a good place to stop.

…232.2 lbs…

… the dogs get me up at 3:30 AM… wanted to stay in bed till 4 but… Fiona pacing the room… i think an animal was passing through our neighbor’s yard… the other day we saw a skunk family pass through… we seem to finally have secured the perimeter of our fence so Fiona isn’t getting out and animals aren’t getting in… except for squirrels…

… H has become determined to attract humming birds to the yard… we’ve had many sightings of them this year… we have flowers in the garden they are attracted to… she wants them to come to the feeders… so far, not much activity there… we have many feeders now… she is trying to find the perfect one… i hope they come to her feeders…

… we made pizza on the green egg last night… tending a fire more bearable than i would have thought in this heat… today and tomorrow are the peak of the heat wave… high 90’s… 100 predicted for tomorrow…

… a story in Hyperallergic about a mural in Queens defaced by Sony Spider Man additions and now restored…

… the mural, “Queens is the Future,” created by Eve Biddle and Joshua Frankel…

… an article about Abby Manzella, a micro fiction writer and host of Micro, a podcast… her 400 word piece, Lepidoptera, mentioned… a story about a little girl in the midst of a pandemic… she wakes up with butterfly wings one day… a paragraph about how she writes into her phone at night to get ideas off her mind… how this one emerged almost fully formed… i think, yes, i write into my phone… i have been trying to write more… this will be inspiration…

… this from Maria Popova in the Marginalian this morning…

By the time we can even begin answering for ourselves the question of whether or not is worth living, myriad things have been answered for us by the fundamental forces that have conspired into the confluence of chance that is our self. None of us choose the bodies or brains or neurochemistries we are born with, the time and place we are deposited into, the parents we are raised by, the culture we are cultured in. Any sense of choice we might have is already saturated with these chance inheritances and is therefore, as James Baldwin so astutely observed, part illusion and part vanity.¹

… the post is about Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, To The Young Who Want To Die… wait another day… see what’s coming around the corner… wait another day…

… i, myself, have never been suicidal… depression is not frequent with me and never very deep… i once played with suicide, as a kid, in the basement of my parents home… i made a noose… attached it to the steel beam supporting the joists of the house and carefully lowered myself to feel the noose tighten around my neck… i had no intention of swinging from the beam… i only wanted to know what it felt like… when i think back on it, i think… what if i had slipped and hung myself… the world would have thought i was sad… there would have been no clue as to why… i would have seemed a generally happy boy… i don’t think my troubles with my father had started by then, beyond his being a strict disciplinarian… there is a short story in this… i should try to write it… something involving Schrodinger’s cat… am i alive or dead?…

… an article in Mother Jones about an article in Axios that H told me about yesterday… it’s about how the MAGA group plan to remake government when they get in office… fill it with cronies… and then leave the subsequent administration with the choice of doing their own cronies make over or returning to the bureaucratic state of olden times… i think, what makes them think there will be another administration if that plan is successfully carried out?… this would be the mostly white patriarchy taking over and never letting go… this would be the end of the multiarchy… oh god, why must we contend with this shit?… 45 must never be responsible for anything in government again…

… an article about Pelosi’s planned trip to Taiwan and China’s threat to retaliate “forcefully.”… there seem to be so many ways the world could go sideways right now…

… another review of Nope further reinforces that i want to see it… H feels the same way…

… Ukraine is winning… i read the article… i nod to its arguments… it lightens my mood a bit, but, i wonder, i still don’t see the end game where Putin retreats with tail between legs… another one that could easily go sideways…

… a Jonathan Blaustein review of the photobook Kyanite Miners… i don’t share his opinion of the book… it’s slick, corporate, meant to promote the mining company… it’s competent… i don’t think it is pushing any boundaries…

… Kitchen and Coffee… the handsome bleach blond dude barista… he is less personable than the women… i wonder how women customers respond to his handsomeness?… he reminds me of a young Paul Hollywood…

… as i walk down Main Street i am thinking about writing a short story about a boy toying with a noose… i am thinking that i will write multiple stories within a story, one where the boy toys with the noose, satisfies his curiosity and then takes the noose apart and goes on with his life… another in which he slips and accidentally hangs himself… others in which various plausible scenarios play out, including that he wishes to die, is not only playing with the idea of death… could be a very interesting story…

… i am liking my return to routine and structured workflow… for so many weeks things were moving all about… i was making pictures, writing, but not in the routine and rhythmic way i am now… i have started posting titled journal entries on a daily basis… each day i publish the previous day’s entry… they are Notes On Attention Paid… each day i am posting a selection of photographs taken that day… they are also Notes On Attention Paid… it’s that simple…

… on the way here, a bunch of male sexual performance enhancement packaging on the ground… i photograph all of them… one has the words “rock hard” on it… i don’t know, sounds painful to me… anyway, i am thinking today’s image post will include a number of them, may be only them…

The starting point of infinity is always at the center, where mind resides. Behind an image there’s an image. Nothingness is Being’s foundation, put on stage by poetry, which makes the erotic and the intellect meet. It’s not life, it’s alive.²

… 231.8 lbs…

… stayed up to watch the J6 Select Committee hearing… it detailed 45’s determination that the capitol riot should stop the election from being certified by congress… there was not a huge amount of new information, but there was more flesh put on the bones, so to speak… whether it is yet demonstrable in a court of law, it is clear that 45 wanted and motivated the insurrection and that he had control of the mob, could have ended it at any time, but only did so when he saw the gambit had failed… of particular note to me was the way in which Liz Cheney reached out to women… she praised the women, by name, who had come forward to testify and reminded women of how hard they had to fight to win the right to vote… this from Heather Cox Richardson this AM…

At the end of the hearing, Cheney praised the witnesses, especially the women. She offered special thanks to Cassidy Hutchinson, who “knew all along that she would be attacked by President Trump, and by the 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old men who hide behind executive privilege,” but had courage to testify nonetheless. Cheney mentioned the female witnesses by name, saying they were “an inspiration to American women and to American girls.” ¹

… and…

Speaking especially to the American women whose votes will be key to the upcoming election, she noted that the room in which they were meeting was where the committee on women’s suffrage met in 1918. We… “have a solemn obligation not to idly squander what so many Americans have fought and died for.” ²

… the committee reminded us that the threat is not over… that 45 is still trying to claim the election was stollen, still has the same devout followers enthralled and ready to go and still poses a threat to democracy…

… just posted a reply on HCR about Liz Cheney’s callout to women at the end of the hearing…

… this sculpture by Ai Weiwei is beautiful in appearance and concept…

… i read this review of Nope and confirm the already growing feeling that i would like to see it…

… an article on Crazy Kat and e e cummings is an intriguing read… i read it from beginning to end… one of George Herriman’s strips in the article…

… as i get the coffee ready for H, i am reminded of the sugar water spill she left last night… the floor a sticky mess… i get the mop out, set it up, leave instructions for how to use it…

… i head for Kitchen and Coffee… in a leisurely way… making photographs as i go… at one corner i stop to make a picture and two women in head scarves walk out from behind the building… they stop… i did not want people in the picture… one woman walks back behind the building… the other looks after her… i decide to make the picture with the woman in it… she turns at the instant i snap the picture and looks at me… i wonder if she somehow felt the camera on her… as i was editing yesterdays journal entry i ran across this…

… i think about this… divine attracts consciousness with the power of the sea’s liquid material manifestations… without consciousness, is there any divine?… the pansychic idea that everything has awareness… material at its most basic level has awareness, even if only attraction to that which attracts and in turn is attracted… this is the base level of awareness… to “know” something is adjacent…

… i am even more intrigued by the idea that she sensed me taking the picture and turned to see… i am not sure she liked that i did, but it was at a distance…

… loud talking barista is here today, though being relatively quiet… she is wearing a grey knit top and black stretch shorts down to just above her knees… i note that she has tattoos on both arms…

… the music is soft, easy to ignore… LM barista is talking about going to the pool after work…

… Etel Adnan…

In between there was Greece and Rome, but Rome’s gods, unlike Greece’s, seem to have left for good.³

… i think about this… it rings true… so much of western civilization resting on the foundations of ancient Greece, not Rome… EA observes that God “could be absolute darkness or absolute light,” and i think the only absolute is darkness, when it happens… the absence of light, the absence of consciousness… is there such a thing?… God, EA tells me, is “born out of the fear of pain, decay, or disappearance”… i nod, but my fears don’t create god for me except as absolute darkness… i reject the existence a separate from me they are everywhere and everything all at once… it is meaningless to consider God as some kind of apartness… which is the stance of worshiping, i and thou… rather… god… like the sea, is immersion, we simply can’t separate ourselves from God, if she exists… so what is worship but a kind of arrogance of the worshiper?… there is no point in naming Gods except to name ourselves… “eternity is death’s favorite name” EA tells me… “only consciousness is life,” and consciousness ends… or does it?… yes, in any way meaningful to me here and now… but perhaps not in general…

… a mother asking her toddler Ben what number he is… ten is apparently the right answer, i don’t know why… he’s a toddler, not a ten year old, so i don’t know the significance of ten to Ben… she makes a picture of him as he says to her “ten”… maybe a short video, that would make more sense… dad seems to prefer Benjamin to Ben…

… finished editing photos taken today… ran some errands to gather food for dinner and for dogs… on the way back stopped in a friends wine store and found out their son is sick… in the hospital… doctors not sure what is going on yet… they are waiting for more test results… then he told me his daughter’s dog had cancer and nothing can be done… a bad week he said… i did my best to comfort… glad he told me about it…

… chicken duties today… will plan to get there right at 5:30 as coup is likely to be hot… don’t want the chickens to be cooped up too early… some storms in the area… may cool things down a bit…

… i am delayed in my chicken duties by a thunderstorm passing through… as i am going to the car, a lightning bolt flashes in the near distance… i go back inside and watch the progression of the storm on my weather app… when it is safe i get in the car and go…

… we unearthed some crab mac and cheese from the freezer last …night… so good… had seconds and did more snacking than i should have… also, a couple of vodka tonics and wine… all together, a bit calorific… more exercise yesterday than other days…

… just looked up the weather… mid 90’s through Sunday, when temps are projected to hit 100… not so unusual this time of year…

… some struggle with Lightroom yesterday… but got work done… wound up with not much to do in afternoon…

… HCR about SS deletion of texts from Jan 5 and 6… about 45 still trying to overturn election… about the election fraud investigation in Georgia… Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers being formerly censured by the Arizona Republican Party… for doing the right thing… protests in front of the Supreme Court where a number of legislators were arrested, including Carolyn Maloney, AOC… Lauren Robel filing a misconduct complaint against Todd Rosita who went on Fox News and said the doctor treating the ten year old rape victim had not done proper filings with the state when she had… the house passing a bill to protect gay marriage… will the senate follow?… 54 Republicans unwilling to go on record against gay marriage… 70% of all Americans and 55% of Republicans support gay marriage… including, i recently learned… Liz Cheney…

… then there is the Idaho Republican party which has included a plank in it’s platform that abortion is illegal in all circumstances, including those in which the mother’s life is at stake and the fetus won’t survive … Scott Herndon, running for the Idaho Senate sponsored the platform amendment saying…

“For the last 49 years we have essentially lost the argument in the culture because we have focused on abortion as the termination of a pregnancy and not the termination of a living human being,” Herndon said to fellow delegates, according to the Idaho Capital Sun. “We will never win this human rights issue, the greatest of our time, if we make allowances for the intentional killing of another human being.

… a man of course… doesn’t have to deal with the consequences… how could any woman support such a stance unless blinded by the Christian Patriarchy… this kind of stupidity makes the best case against religion of any kind… so much unnecessary suffering…

… another article reviewing the landscape of abortion battles across the nation… suggest sthat several polls show Dems picking up momentum in spite of Biden Administration poor approval ratings and a number of issues that normally drive voters away from the party in power… this all actually has the feel to me of an issue that will rapidly settle itself into national legislation as the horror stories start to proliferate… question is… who will be in control after 2024…

Among overall registered voters, 41 percent said they would prefer to see a Democrat-controlled Congress after the midterms, while 40 percent said they would opt for a Republican-controlled one. Republicans led by 1 percentage point among likely voters. The poll was based on responses from 849 registered voters in early July.

… this from an article on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Buddhism…

Most music has a structure and purpose leading to a resolution.

… this struck me immediately as a condition of life… we want structure, purpose and resolution… so much of our entertainment industry is built on telling stories with structure, purpose and resolution… but what if such a thing is an illusion at best?… we are only passing through… there is nothing about individual lives that is a resolution to anything… we are all part of a greater flow and we do our best to swim within that flow in ways that give us hope and purpose… or at least i do… lately i have struggled with hope… struggled with purpose… in part… this is a condition of getting older… as time on earth runs short, we wonder what our purpose was?… we wonder, was there any meaning to it?… more from the article…

One can engage the sand mandala on many levels; its beauty, its precision, the mastery required to produce it, or the patterns and protection it offers towards awakening. But in the end, we cannot hold onto any of these as the mandala is destroyed and dispersed as a reminder of our own impermanence and return to our primordial source.

… i come to the end of my personal feeds so i suppose it might be time to go for a walk… make some pictures… get a coffee or hot chocolate… maybe down by the river today…

… later, after a long walk by the river… K&C… intense delicate tattooed barista at the helm this AM… she remembers me from last week… i commented on her tattoos favorably last week… still like them this week… she remembers me like we have seen each other more than once, which i don’t think we have…

… i start writing in my analog journal, then switch here… if i were to write something more penetrating, i would only need to copy it here… i don’t think the analog method offers enough perceptible benefit to make it the prevalent place to write…

… it is hot chocolate this morning… i decided the effort of the walk required it… also, needed something to feed my energy level…

… crying baby… my their voices can be so penetrating!… hard to tolerate… my immediate thought is get the baby out of here… this is peaceful morning time… why does the kid get to interrupt it that way?… it’s not a generous response… my ultimate tolerance is more generous… she walks down the aisle with her mother and gives me a charming almost smile while looking at me intently… mom takes her outside where she will be less of annoying if she cry/screams again… thank you mom…

Reading Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog, this…

Not ever hesitating, waves surge to reach human speech. They propose a truce. When we forget Ahab and converse only with Moby-Dick, the universe will manifest itself in full clarity.

… Moby Dick… one of my favorite reads… the message, forget human hubris and insanity, commune with nature, this is our salvation, or could be, if we’d dispense with appetite culture… if 45 is Ahab, are we Moby Dick?, no, we are the unwitting and unwilling among the crew… where then is Moby Dick?… the multiarchy… the misunderstood mythical beast… yes it is we who are being hunted to be extinguished…

… mother with baby, this one not a toddler, not noisy, not screaming just to hear itself scream…

… and the following paragraph from Sea and Fog…

And the sea ceased to be because it became the sea, and we stopped at the station of impermanence, and rose from our bewilderment to witness the junction of the past with the present.

… and this…

The uncontrollable desire to think the fleeting elements of the world, to fuse them into images, into words, is probably the most hypnotic of all Eros' manifestations.

… i find a Paris Review article on Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan… i read this quote…

“My writing and my paintings do not have a direct connection in my mind. But I am sure they influence each other in the measure that everything we do is linked to whatever we are, which includes whatever we have done or are doing. But in general, my writing is involved with history as it is made (but not only) and my painting is very much a reflection of my immense love for the world, the happiness to just be, for nature, and the forces that shape a landscape.”

… i think about my own practice and how i seem lost right now… i am encouraged to reengage…

Heather Cox Richardson, July 19, 2022

Idaho State GOP Says Abortion Should Be Illegal, Even When Used to Save a Woman’s Life

The abortion law fight grows in Texas and Wet Virginia. Here’s what you missed

Awakening with “A Love Supreme”

Etel Adnan, Sea and Fog

Sea and Fog: The Art of Etel Adnan

… no alcohol last night… told myself in the morning i would not and i did not… wasn’t strongly tempted…

… storms came through yesterday… rain… H said not enough… need to up the watering time for yard… lots of fireflies in the back yard… i like to step out and watch them for a bit when i let the dogs out in the evening…

… M, B and i set up the coop for the meat chickens… we installed heat lamps even though it’s going to be in the 90’s this week… the little chicks like it around 100, so the heat lamps… will be needed at night for sure… B put on lipstick to help us… i think, “that isn’t needed,” but she thinks so, so it is…

… HCR wrote about how extreme the Republican Party is right now… she ended with some indication that it might be rebounding against them…

… Claes Oldenburg dies at the age of 93… i was not a big fan, my interests run more to rendering the sublime… but, that i have always been aware of his work says something…

Claes Oldenburg, best known for his large, playful works of everyday objects — from a clothespin and a flashlight to a baseball bat and a fried egg — died on the morning of Monday, July 18 at his home in Manhattan, where he was recovering from a hip injury last month. He was 93. The artist’s death was confirmed by Paula Cooper and Pace, the two galleries that have long represented him.

… reading a review of a book about female art monsters… Letters to Gwen John, by Celia Paul… Ceila Paul was the lover/muse of Lucien Freud… Gwen John was the lover/muse of August Rodin… both had art ambitions… Gwen John, Rodin aside, had the greater dedication it appears… she conceived and birthed a child which she promptly turned over to her mother so she would not be distracted by motherhood… Paul decided to become a mother… just now, H’s mother comes to mind…

John organized her life much like the archetypal male art monster, severing family ties and forgoing marriage and children. Any other way of life, in her view, would be antithetical to art. Just as a monk renounces earthly pleasures to access the divine, the artist sequesters herself to access genius. “Your goal was Great Art,” Paul writes to John, “and you knew you had to make sacrifices to attain it.” John would have been disinterested in — if not repulsed by — Paul’s decision to become a mother, despite the untraditional rationale behind it. Her pregnancy was an act of beneficence: “I had wanted to get pregnant so that I could comfort my mother, who was grieving for my father,” she writes.

… i have tried to be dedicated as a photographic artist… i have struggled to do that lately… i am trying to give up alcohol so the struggle is less… i am trying to get back to the creative routines that have sustained me… i am trying to overcome H’s indifference and sometimes hostility to my art practice…

… Dia art workers seeking a Union… this has become something of an epidemic in the art world… i am guessing it is much needed… unions in general seem to be resurgent…

Approximately 135 part-time and full-time workers at the Dia Art Foundation petitioned to unionize with Local 2110 UAW on Friday, July 15. Their organizing efforts are the latest in a wave that has swept cultural institutions across the nation, with recent labor developments at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

… low wages are cited though they are paid a minimum wage of $16 an hour… the article is poorly written getting some factual information wrong… like locating Storm King Art Center in Beacon, which it is not… across the river, yes… not in Beacon… did i say i live in Beacon?…

… a review(?) of a novel published 90 years ago… Now in November by Josephine Johnson… set during the great depression, won the Pulitzer Prize… youngest person to ever win the prize, one of the too few women to win it…

This is the same America that loves a good bootstrapper success story, but this trope Johnson sidesteps, focusing instead on the precariousness of working-class life, when a slip, a fall, a burn, or a broken bone can begin a slow slide, the way the cost of medical care and absence of a social safety net still sink working people today. The shame of watching others suffer without being able to help weighs heavily.

… the horridness of the extreme conservative republicans, who would do away with that social safety net and condemn poor people to servitude…

In many ways, the drought and devastation of the Dust Bowl in Now in November rhyme with our modern experiences of climate change, when a tipped electric line can send a tidal wave of flames surging across the landscape, licking hundreds of homes from the map.

… did you know the Gimlet cocktail originated, at least in part, as a treatment for scurvy?… i did not… excerpts from the book, Doctors and Distillers, The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails, by Camper English…

Proposed antiscorbutics (scurvy preventatives or cures) included rice, beans, sulfuric acid, vinegar, molasses, cinchona bark, mustard, opium, mercury, rhubarb, hops, juniper berries, seal carcass oil, scurvy grass, and especially sauerkraut or horseradish. Fermented beverages like spruce beer, regular beer, and cider, plus fizzy soda water and rum punch were quite often employed. So was gargling with urine, which probably didn’t help with the foul-breath issue. Other ineffective treatments included purgatives, bleeding, sweating, bathing in animal blood, and—surprisingly often—burial of a person up to the neck in sand.

Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial is used in place of fresh lime juice in some dive bars and homes, though it contains sweeteners, preservatives, and added coloring. The ingredient was immortalized in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 book The Long Goodbye, in which a character states, “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”

… i am amazed at how many bad mistakes i find in articles from supposedly serious places about thoughtful things… i mean, mistakes that one re-reading for editing purposes by author or other should catch… and many are articles that had no reason to be rushed to print… what gives?…

… more reading of Hannah Arendt…

… an article on inflation and climate change… it feels we are heading to a bad time on that front…

In Italy, the hot and dry conditions are expected to destroy a third of the seasonal harvest of rice, corn, and animal fodder — at a minimum. Locusts have descended on the island of Sardinia in the worst invasion in three decades, hurting the production of hay and alfalfa. The European Commission recently downgraded its soft-wheat harvest estimates from 130 million tons to 125 million tons—more bad news amid a food shortage precipitated by Russia’s blockade on exports from Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest exporters of grain.)

Across the world in China, a record-breaking heat wave is causing major problems. Roofs are melting, residents are relocating to public cooling zones in underground air-raid shelters, and health workers are strapping frozen food to their too-hot hazmat suits. The Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo has warned that the heat could further hurt the production of corn and soy, worsening inflation. These crops are used to feed pigs, and early-season failures have already sent the price of pork, China’s staple meat, soaring.

… the desktop computer still pretty slow and crashed on me once… but i got some photos edited from this morning… not a stellar batch but a few good ones…

Heather Cox Richardson, July 18, 2022

Claes Oldenburg, Whose Sculptures Transformed the Everyday, Dies at 93

Letters to Gwen, Celia Paul

“A Book About Thirst.” Josephine Johnson’s 1934 Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel

How Trying to Find a Cure for Scurvy Led to the Gimlet

Searing Summer Heat is Driving Food Prices Higher Still

This is my niece…

A Riveting Memoir of Life as a Chef with an Eating Disorder | The New Yorker

I first read Loew-Banayan’s book because I was a fan of their cooking. Last year, they opened Café Mutton, their first restaurant, in the upstate town where I live, and it quickly became my favorite local place to eat. They work there in an open kitchen, wearing a baseball hat and T-shirt, roasting pigeons, pickling mussels, making pigs’-head terrines.

20220428.05

In Nature, a Poet Finds a Visionary Language

You had me at Cody-Rose Clevidence… i mean… could there be a more alluring name for a poet?… one wonders if it is a name de plume, or a given name… if given, it would be like his parents fully expected him to be a poet…

And then there is the poetry itself…

all-the-way, magnificent

cluster-fuck, accident—

dodecahedron, demi-god

parallax, “kiss thy rod”

… i may have to buy his books…

20220428.03

First few stanzas of a really good poem by H. R. Webster via Guernica…

The hottest summer on record I couldn’t open the windows.

A stranger had sent flowers to my house with a note that read say thank you.

I walked from my car to my door like a snake oxbows

across the sandy road from dune to dune. Balanced a colander

full of silver spoons, a saucer of cat’s eyes, a matchbook

spreading a mouse trap’s jaw, a potted conifer

I trimmed with scissors made for a doll on the sill

so I would wake if someone broke the feeble lock.

I’ve always been a deep sleeper, though. Roused for a fire drill, …

20220421.13

… this is one of my favorite quotes of all time… it’s message is so important…

I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.

Melville, Herman, Moby Dick

This article on rap music by Daniel Levin Becker catches my attention… especially this assessment of Rap music…

Rap music serves, consistently, contagiously, sometimes in spite of its own claims to the contrary, as a delivery mechanism for the most exhilarating and crafty and inspiring use of language in contemporary American culture.

… i struggle to get very much into Rap, even as i am aware of its enormous significance… i keep trying though… this article may be a window in, as it analyzes lines from a number of songs (raps?) and so could point me to some raps to listen to…

This is just it: taking words at face value is what good rappers almost militantly don’t do. They find the blind angles, the shortcuts, the secret overlaps, and use them, sometimes, to build stunning models of invention and entente, spaces where small discords combine into larger resolutions and we see, hear, how boring it would be to live in a perfect world where like belongs only with like.

… hmmm… saving this article…

First notes…

227.8 lbs

… 24 hrs till departure… things are more or less on track… a few more dangling ends than i would like, but they should be tied up by end of day…

… we watched A Very Murray Christmas last night… it was generally good except for the patriarchal configuration which was generally pretty traditional and maybe more than a little outdated?… it contained the song Baby, It’s Cold Outside, which has come to be known in some quarters as the “date rape song”… as i was listening to it the only thing that stood out to me was the “what’s in this drink” line, which suggests to some in present day audiences that the woman is being drugged… i get that, but, as usual the situation seems more nuanced… it’s worth reading this wikipedia article which outlines the controversy over the song… it is interesting that as contexts change, meanings change too… i generally like the song and the most significant thing to me is that the woman, while resisting, essentially consents… at no time in any performance of the song does she seem out of control… the “what’s in this drink?” line did hang me up a bit… the wikipedia article explains that this line essentially quotes “a common idiom of the period used to sidestep social expectations by blaming one’s actions on the influence of alcohol.”…

… we also watched Chocolat, which was a great movie with a wonderful cast, Jonny Depp, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin… it was a Babbette’s Feast movie except it’s more direct target was the Catholic Church entrenched Patriarchy of a small town… i look up Babbette’s Feast and just reading the Wikipedia article explaining the plot i am in tears… what a beautiful film and story… i discover it is based on a short story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)… i find a pdf of the story and save it to Evernote… i want to read it…

… i’ve gone down a rabbit hole, one thing leading to the next… what bliss…

What i read…

Exclusive: Nadia Lee Cohen’s Powerful Portraits of Strong Femininity, Ted Stansfield, AnOther Magazine… Nadia Lee Cohen turns the idea of Male/Female gaze into something quite different…

Power is the key word here – these images vibrate with the stuff. They confront you. Command you. Compel you. Meet your gaze head on. And they are full of contradictions, too: simultaneously retro and modern, they draw on a legacy of British and American cinema, but feel new and current. Likewise they are staged and stylised, but at the same time real and irrefutably raw. Meanwhile, the women themselves display both a vulnerability and a strength, presenting a fictional character and also their true self, or at least a version of it. It’s hard to look away and even harder not to feel something.

… i read that this project took six years to accomplish… i admire the discipline of a woman in her 20’s… i imagine they have fierce ambition and incredible focus…

Inside Nadia Lee Cohen’s New Book of Chameleonic Self-Portraits, Ted Stansfield, AnOther Magazine… not a unique idea, but a unique execution of the idea…

Place: Ikea Parking Lot, Anelise Chen, Believer Magazine… i plunge in to reading the article and immediately like it… as i am reading, i get the strong impression that i am inhabiting the thoughts of a woman… i knew, without having seen who the author was, that it was a woman…

For me, extended time in parking lots has always signified an emergency, precise moments of narrative dissolution: one version of the good life has come apart irretrievably, and you must, humbly, construct another. Outside hospitals and motels, breakups and breakdowns. I paced because pacing feels like the good, primal thing to do when a body is penned in. It’s what lions and tigers do in their zoo enclosures. Back and forth, up and around, prowl, prowl, repeat. I organized my movements by row: up and down the parking rows toward the now-dim signs for exchanges, returns, exit, enter. The circularity of the movements, plus the weird, abstract commands, felt cosmic. I was in an undetermined space of pure matter, performing a ritual of eternal reincarnation, living many lives.

… didn’t love the way this piece ended, but i love the idea of pacing in super large parking lots to clear one’s head, and then, beginning to pay attention to what is in that lot, which is way more than one would think…

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: Rickie Lee Jones, Emma Dabiri, and More, Nick Hornby, Believer Magazine… a set of well written and compelling impressions of the books in question… impressions seems the right word, because i don’t read these as critical reviews, just an accounting of a book enjoyed thoroughly… also, in the course of reading these impressions i encounter the author referring to themselves as ‘he’ again… it happened in the article above, which led me to search for information on the author and confirm that they present as female and refer to themselves as ‘she’… so now i am wondering what is going on… is being gender confusing a thing and i am out of the loop? Hmmm…

… and now i discover that Summer Thomad is not the author of the articles i am reading, but for some reason comes up with the byline when the articles feed through to Feedbin… i circle back and follow the links through to the Believer Mag website and find the actual authors and switch credit accordingly and the pronoun mystery continues because it turns out i am right about the parking lot article, written by a (Asian) woman… her bio on Wikipedia refers to them as ‘her’ and ‘she’ while she self-refers as male in the body of the article… hmmm some more…

… by the way, i really like The Believer Magazine…

Nietzsche on Walking and Creativity, Maria Popova, The Marginalian… i am a walker… i walk every day… my daily goal is at least 10K steps… right now, my weekly average is close to 15K steps… i walk, i think, i make pictures… this has gotten me through the pandemic in good shape… it turns out that Maria Popova is a walker too…

Almost everything I write, I “write” in the notebook of the mind, with the foot in motion — what happens at the keyboard upon returning from the long daily walks that sustain me is mostly the work of transcription.

Maria Popova’s recommendations on reading are always compelling… i have found so much of what i read through her…

Senator Blumenthal Delivered Speech at Communist Party Awards, Brittany Bernstein, National Review… red bating is a time honored tradition of conservatives… this reads like a political hit job… is there something wrong with what Blumenthal did?… why should his wealth-by-wife be any more of an issue than Mitch McConnel’s?… i am fine with socialist policies… not so much with communism… i also believe in freedom of association and speech…

Gone Too Far, Brendan Dougherty, The National Review… refreshing for this substantially right of center magazine to publish an article stating that:

But the riot at the Capitol happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied. On that very day he lied about what the vice president’s powers were. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” he told the crowd.

The Journals of Denton Welch

… DW says not to worry what people will think about his journal writing, time will eradicate what it needs to and embrace the rest… he thinks people will blush reading the journal, not in 200 years time, maybe a little in 100 years time… well, it is not quite 80 years time that i am reading it… no blushing here… i suppose he might have been referring to some of his remarks about people he met… he sometimes wasn’t kind… people who knew the people might blush…

… DW is more and more often sick… all of this flows from the accident he had when 20… i wonder what got so messed up the it should become a slow but steady decline until he dies in his early 30’s… what the cosmos serves up to people… it’s a crap shoot really… by any measure, the cosmic forces that be have smiled on me… i wish i felt better about it all… i still want to find that fundamental truth that makes it all ok…

Life, A User’s Manual, Georges Perec

… a very curious book describing in minute detail characters that the world might generally pass by, but who are exceptional and deeply contoured in their own obscure ways… it reminds me of the realm of true outsider artists, not the posers, but the people who make art just to make… that there might be a market for their creations in the art world is not of consequence to them… they just make… this seems a great deal like the characters in Perec’s novel… they come and go… they contribute what they contribute which is ignored by most of the world…

… in this passage Perec anticipates the ability to tag items digitally, which came with the age of personal computing:

What he would have liked would be to link each label to the next, but each time in respect of something else: for example, they could have some detail in common, a mountain, or volcano, an illuminated bay, some particular flower, the same red and gold edging, the beaming face of a groom, or the same dimensions, or the same typeface or similar slogans (“Pearl oof the Ocean”, “Diamond of the Coast”), or a relationship based not on similarity but on opposition or a fragile, almost arbitrary association: a minute village bay an Italian lake followed by the skyscrapers of Manhattan, skiers followed by swimmers, fireworks by candlelit dinner, railway by aeroplane, baccarat table by chemin de fer, etc. It’s not just hard, Winckler added, above all it’s useless: if you leave the labels unsorted and take two at random, you can be sure they’ll have at least three things in common.¹

… and here i consider the extensive tagging system that i am developing for my journal…

Kitchen and Coffee Cafe

… cold this morning… i decide to stop at K&C at opening, 7 AM, it’s a bit of a madhouse… the Thanksgiving orders in the final stages of assembly… the tables all covered with bags of gluten-free baked goods… much busier than i expected…

… i open up Shifting the Silence by Etel Adnan… she writes about Barrett Watten, Plan B…

… i finish Shifting the Silence, read about Etel Adnan… she studied philosophy, became a painter, became a poet, became a novelist, a journalist… very accomplished…

The Journals of Denton Welch

… DW was continually meeting strangers, having extended conversations with them and often being invited into their homes… he seems to have met people easily… more easily than i do… was it an easier time for people meeting?…

… DW has incorporated the people he knew into his fictional work without much disguise, often changing their last names while retaining the first… i have a feeling that i should read at least one of the fictional works, but i am anxious to move on to the so-many-other books i have waiting… to dive further down the rabbit hole or not, that is the question…

… after 10 years, Evie leaves him to work for some ladies in Cornwall though it seems it didn’t last more than a month and it seems Eric and DW didn’t expect it to last long…

… this:

_ I know tonight it is best for me to be alone most of the time — near people who wish me well and like to see me, but alone; for in loneness everything seems to grow into its proper place and there’s hardly any waste of spirit. What little there is does not offend, it’s is one’s own fault, one lets it pass._¹

… how well i relate to this sentiment… precisely the way i like my world to operate…

… and this:

_ yet it is most important to have people near one that one need hardly see. Without this consciousness of other human beings I think almost all of us are liable to be swamped by the power of matter. One’s strength is not enough to bear this with no other help near._²

… this makes me remember the countless hours i have spent in coffee shops and lunch shops, just to be near people but not, generally, to talk with them, unless they were attractive young women…

… i miss pre-covid life… i felt comfortable with more people around me then… i have chosen Trax on 52 as my winter “headquarters,” precisely because so few people go there in the morning… i would rather go to Big Mouth or even Kitchen and Coffee (despite it’s plain vanilla decor and music)… there are more people there as the hour gets later… i like to start with a place virtually empty, then watch the regulars and newcomers come and go… i like to observe and write about them in this journal… the pandemic has not been easy, but i have been well suited to what it requires of us for safety… my habits didn’t change much at all…

… DW has an old doll house he got from a friend… he lovingly restored it… he mentions it in his journals when he finds something suitable to add to its interior… at this moment he mentions a little pin cushion in the shape of a stool that is so much more the stool than the pin cushion that he buys it immediately for the doll house… it is interesting to be furnishing one’s full scale living quarters simultaneously with a doll house… a house within a house, like the nested Russian dolls… one imagines that he wears the full-scale house and decor, as most of us do, as an extension of his psyche, but also, this miniature house… do they engage different aspects of the nesting instinct?… one could build a short story around this…

Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

… Kevin Killian and elements is metioned… KK is a poet, playwright and more… he died in 2019… elements refers to The Elements, a book of poems only published in French right now…

Life is daily, death is eternal; it means that eternity is useless. We live as if we knew that: we hang on details, keep searching, to keep the illusion alive, the illusion that things matter. But is that mere illusion? I don’t always think so.¹

… we all hope there is more to things than this daily life, many of us even accept there is not… but not quite…

Too much of a past, too little ahead, but wait a minute, we always lived day to day, so where’s the difference?²

Etel Adnan, Shifting the Silence, rejoiced by Maria Popova

Painting by Etel Adnan from Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure, Guggenheim Museum, 2021. (Photograph: Maria Popova)

… no secret, i am a big fan of Maria Popova… this post on Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence is a wonderful read… and now, i have added yet another book to my reading list… i need to carve out more reading time… i am having such fun with it…

The Journals of Denton Welch

… i am passing through a stretch where journal entries are long and very detailed… the kind of details that flesh out a scene, make it more than matter of fact circumstance, people and objects described as if DW wants to take firm possession of them in his memory…

… i think about the Perec book, with the minimal detail of unremarkable things, only finding the barest representation of what the thing or person or animal is and leaving it at that… i begin to realize there are many ways to report out on the quotidian…

… DW seems to be most concerned with the objects that accompany his and other’s lives, the way that people impact him, noting his feelings about them…

… i am trying to put my finger on something… the way these journals unfold… they are tellings of daily happenings and impressions and you know that there won’t be a dramatic climax, but rather a series of smaller climaxes along with their attendant valleys… the rhythm of a life… none of it terribly important but all of it necessary…

An Attempt At Exhausting A Place, Georges Perec

… i decide it is ok to jump Perec to the front of the reading line… it is a journal of what passes through his vision as he sits at various cafes watching the movement (a favorite pastime of the French i was told when i visited many, many years ago)… nothing is described in any depth, just the for the moment notable details… on the back jacket of the book is written:

One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the “intraordinary”: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—“what happens,” as he put it, “when nothing happens.”

… it is interesting… he builds up an impression of place, its rhythms, inhabitants, just noted as passing through and impinging on his senses… little details, a priest back from a trip (there is an airline tag still fixed to his bag)…

… i do a similar thing with images… when i sit down to write i select some of the various non-events to write about in more depth… he writes just the apparent facts, never speculating without reason what this individual or that individual might be about…

… i imagine the book staged as a play… a solo performance… a man sits on a chair, center stage, and recites the book to the audience… the impressions build in the audience… the non-events surface memories of experiences that have more depth in each individual… to the quotidian surface details the audience adds their individual depths… would anyone come see it?…

… the thought that when i make pictures, edit them, and put them together for viewing that i make non-events events…

The Journals of Denton Welch

… the war injects itself more and more… deaths on the front… V-1 (doodle-bug) rocket bombs starting to fall…

_On Thursday last I went towards the river and I saw truck after truck with a huge red cross on it winding slowly along the road — quite 50 of them. And I thought of the soldiers inside — their wounds and torn bodies.

I picnic by the river in the boiling sun, in only my shorts; then I bicycled right along the banks until I felt the sun burning into the dip between my shoulder blades.¹

… these two paragraphs together are surprising… DW observes the war from a distance, getting on with the pleasures of his life… it’s quite the juxtaposition…

… DW talks about Italian prisoners of war roaming the countryside and going for swims in the streams… no POW camps?…

… DW picnics all the time… the war seems of little consequence and concern, impinging on him daily and sometimes dangerously close, but his reporting of it is like the reporting of a minimal nuisance, like a mosquito… he sees it but it seems to have little impact… one wonders if he ever thought of volunteering his time?… if so, he never mentions it… overall, he seems very self involved… on the other hand, aren’t journals the place where we get to be self involved?…

_ in the past through the barley field by East Peckham sluice gates I found a little flat red stone or piece of glass with a masonic symbol on it; and I have put it in my pocket for my fortune. Up above, the doodle bugs are whizzing up to London with the guns banging black puffs in the sky.

Just in the river was a vicious plop, which is a spiked finger of shrapnel diving.²

… there is something surreal about the way he recounts all this… as if he is narrating a film, not actually threatened with death and dismemberment…