julie jean's bookshelf

July 7, 2009

2009-07-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

Read:
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Medium is the Massage An Inventory of Effects- Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
Durham: A Bull City Story by Jim Wise
Detroit's Michigan Central Station by Kelli B. Kavanaugh

Reading:
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
The Book by Alan Watts
Josef Albers: To Open Eyes
and some others

Books read April- June-ish (at least what I can remember)

2009-06-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson- still so relevant! and unbelievable!

Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics by Rebecca Solnit- one of my favorite writers- "The Walmart Biennial" essay is brilliant, if not so sad.

The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa by Michael Kimmelman- an interesting angle on art and life that includes Ray J and also introduced me to Hugh Francis Hicks's Mt. Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting.

Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to those Who Dare to Teach by Paulo Freire- Freire is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!!! and a much needed voice! His book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is next in line.

Relational Aesthetics- Nicolas Bourriaud

(almost finished with) Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin- an interesting angle on how one pursues a path of making a difference in the world. AND it resulted from a failure.

I also started (but didn't finish and had to return it to the library)
Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma

March books finished so far

2009-03-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

To the Lighthouse- Virginia Woolf
Made from Scratch Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life- Jenna Woginrich
A New Eath Awakening to Your Life's Purpose- Eckhart Tolle

December to February Reading

2009-02-15T11:33:00.001-08:00

This project is shifting but how I'm not totally sure. I found that its structure was actually causing me not to read at times though the process was quite helpful to my memory and digesting of ideas. Perhaps a place in between will be found.

In the meantime some books I've read lately are:
The Pirates! In An Adventure with Napoleon by Gideon Defoe
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde

November 14 - December 17, 2008

2008-12-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
1957, paperback

Until now I've never read any of Virginia Woolf's books, but luckily the exhibition A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections is changing that. Woolf is an amazing writer and what she wrote in first part of the 20th century bears just as much relevance and importance in the 21st. Woolf's thinking aloud through her writing allows the reader to gain from the path she walks. I find her to be an exemplary companion, I just need to find more quiet corners to spend with her writing so I don't become the skimmer of surfaces she mentions.

Some excerpts:
4- "a woman must have money and a room of her own is she is to write fiction"
13-14- "It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs more in time to it along the road."
-"But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment."
15- "My heart is gladder than all these Because my love is come to me?"
18- "a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
24- "I pondered this and that, as one does at the end of the day's work."
35- "What effect had poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?"
27- "Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
30- (footnote 1- Dr. Johnson) "Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves."
31-32- "Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
34- "When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself."
36- "mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action"
53- "...to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it...Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world's notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them...Naturally it will not pay for what it does not want."
54- "If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived."
57- "The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."
68-69- "For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."
70- (Mrs. Nightingale) "Women never had a half hour...that they can call their own."
79- "Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
80- "Moreover, a book is not made of sentences laid end to end but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes."
83- "She may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression. Among these new novels one might find an answer to several such questions."
93- "Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the every changing and turning world of gloves and shows and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists' bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudomarble."
94-95- "Be truthful, one would say, and the result if bound the be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched."
97- "that she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but had looked beneath into the depths."
101- "Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives."
110 - "so long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters..."
115- "...much more important to be oneself than anything else. Do not dream of influencing other people...Think of things in themselves."
117- "A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have."
-"...for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh"
118- "...to work, even in poverty and obscurity is worth while"

November 25 - December 6, 2008

2008-12-23T20:23:00.000-08:00

Reena Spaulings
A novel by Bernadette Corporation
paperback, 2004

I have wanted to read this book from the moment I learned of it (you can read the 1st three chapters here). Somehow I never ordered online, but finally it found me. The last copy at the MoCAD bookstore, it was in stock due to the Bernadette Corporation being in the intelligent and captivating exhibition Business as Usual. Reena Spaulings is a fictional character in her 20s (but isn't she all of us), a museum guard, a fashion model, a novel, and subsequently an art gallery and an art dealer. She's not one thing, she's many. And she's rarely still, though despite the fast pace the reader still is able to get inside her head. sometimes.

Some excerpts:
Preface- "If you look at a city, there's no way to see it. One person can never see a city."
-"It has to be informed, imagined, by many people at a time. It's an everyday group hallucination."
-author
3- Reena
4- "She is not happy, not sad, not nothing."
-secrets
-Nobody ever talks in the way it would blow her brains out. Plus she has no desire to interfere with the flows that brought these streams of people, words."
-bangs
7- "Reena could be a Manet, one of these thinking pictures you can't see through, no matter how long you stare at them."
12- "I am often surprised, not to say a little embarrassed, at how blown-away I can be by the street's beauty after a day in the museum."
15- "A body is a living, breathing image that thinks while exposing itself to others."
16- "What if nothing belonged to anybody?"
31- Manet, Young Lady in 1866
34- "The illusion unravels like in a Warhol, leaving something that's not an illusion."
-"Here is observing for those who can no longer see. Or, for those who can't really look into another person's eyes."
53
55- "We move through a city that produces boys and girls and extends itself through them."
57- "...thinking of how the sky is shoved to the periphery of the stage by our monuments and monumental buildings."
61- "I think how can we make a beautiful brushstroke with our existence?"
63- "an economy of essences"
65- "his shirts were always blank"
73- (war) "Anyway, there's no point in discussing such things if we can't find a way of talking about them that's as outrageous as the things themselves."
-dandy- "existence consists in the wearing of clothes"
-abstract painting- "opening a blank space in the texture of institutionally recognized meaning. Few artists leave that void empty for long."
76- hands
78- "It's as if an envelop is falling over this place, sealing us up inside."
-"I feel loads of unspoken words showering down on me. Shooting star sentences that will never be translated."
79- "She's an open book but every turned page presents another cover."
82- "New York is an entire library of books about everything and everybody. Reading here is work, and behind every book-filled room is another room of books and the reading never ends."
-"The city is an open structure that works by calibrating every relationship to its programmed expansion and destruction."
-"The city needs Reena and folds her into its architectures..."
-(NYC) 12 million reader-authors
-"There is no New York story, only an endless effort to make us forget that narration is war..."
-Reena's lighting system
84- "Bedrooms are the site of intimacy. What is more intimate, when shared, than boredom."
85- "Boredom like stupidity contains its own treasures."
93-94- "Was Reena pursuing her desires, or was she inventing them anew with each ring of the cash register."
94- "Its exclusivity lay entirely in the mis-relationship between what it had cost and what it actually was. The price here stood in for any and ever other quality."
95-96- 99 cent store
98- "Shopping together is like traveling: an elaborate way of making the couple visible to itself."
99- "'I'm surprised how much birds sing.'"
133- Voltaire- "That which needs an explanation is not worth an explanation!"
136- "...Capitalism, Empire, whatever...there's a general context that not only controls each situation but, even worse, also tries to ensure that, most of the time, there is no situation."
-"That the desert of these times isn't perceived is only one more proof of the desert."
137- "To live in the world means: to begin with the situation, not to deny it. To give consistency to a situation. To make it real, tangible. Reality is not capitalist."
143- Zizek
154- "Funny how individuality makes you generic."
154-155- "Here is an intellectual body of pure capability, but one that is also open, looking to be determined from outside, ready to re-write everything, to co-write, to be written on..."
158- "Better to eat candy like Andy."
165- "People want to be someone. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one."
174- "Everything emblematic of a being-alive that once was, is not available in a variety of prices and quality."
188- "I wanted to go out and see people and talk about everything I saw."
190- "Nothing ever ends until you let it go."
-"Only the impossible is worth the effort."
200- "because in New York we were sweating the evil they would be photocopying in three years time."
201- "You see? Your love is circular. There is nothing like it. It makes us forget how to change."
202- "I'm trying to wangle my way out of obligations because I need long hours to do nothing, which I consider to be a big part of my work now."
-back cover

November 3 - 19, 2008

2008-12-23T20:02:00.001-08:00

A Coney Island of the Mind
Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
New Directions Paperback

While I've been to City Lights I've never read any of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. I came across this volume since it was the selection for the reading group accompanying the complex and marvelous exhibition Circa 1958. I didn't make it to the discussion group, but I'm glad to have spent some time with Ferlinghetti's fantastically visual and stunning poems.

Some excerpts/phrases:
9- "under cement skies"
-"bland billboards illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness"
10- "...more maimed citizens in painted cards and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America"
11- "...elephants in bathtubs floated past us out to sea strumming bent mandolins..."
14- "And lost teacups full of our ashes floated by"
17- "where no birds sang"
33- "Frightened by the sound of my own voice and by the sound of birds singing on hot wires"
35- "The pennycandy store beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality"
36- "At a certain age her heart put about searching the lost shores And heard the green birds singing from the other side of silence."
38- "painting moustaches on statues"
44- Proust
49- "and I am waiting for someone to really discover America"
49-50
52- "and I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence"
57- "I'm going where turtles win"
58- "Lost the war without killing anybody."
-"The end has just begun. I want to announce it. Run don't walk to the nearest exit."
62- "Home is where one starts from."
63- "and noted the close identification of the United States and the Promise Land where every coin is marked In God We Trust but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves."
64- "I have ridden superhighways and believes the billboard's promises"
-"I am in line for a top job. I may be moving on to Detroit."
66- "I have seen giraffes in jungle jims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world."
82- "#6 Truth is not the secret of a few"
-museums, constipated
83- "Fortune has its cookies to give out"
85- "'We think differently at night' she told me once"
90- El- third story world
91- "and of that lost book I had with its blue cover and its white inside where a pencilhand had written HORSEMAN, PASS BY!"

How to give a book and so much more

2008-12-20T06:57:00.000-08:00

Recently I was thinking about sewing re-usable book wrapping bags since I always give people books for holidays. Lisa Anne Auerbach has an even better idea- The Hanukah Book Club- going through your bookshelf and giving some of the books you have to your loved ones since the books will be new to them! This idea developed out of a conversation between her mom and grandmother. As Auerbach writes, "She wrapped up eight used books for everyone and that was that. We loved it. No consumer frenzy. Better, more thoughtful presents. Super fun and no shopping."

Here's the tract the she wrote about The Hanukah Book Club too.
It begins: "Down with Christian Capitalist Consumer Christmas! Enough already with the gifts.
We call an unceremonious end to toasters, flatscreens, cashmere, ice buckets and the like. We giggle and gloat at the funeral of Christmas shopping, and we dance on the grave of unrepentant consumerism. It’s boring and wasteful. The mall is a desperate place. It’s loud and unfulfilling. We have to shake ourselves so we don’t turn into zombies...."
and continues:
"The decision between extravagant and practical is over. Cereal bowls or spa treatment? Socks or gold-tipped knitting needles? A year’s supply of garbage bags or a counter-hogging espresso machine? Are gifts about us or about them? Do we think we’re a better person if we’re spending more money? Or do we think our family will love us more if we show up with eight more useless offerings? ... We might not know what our purpose is as human beings on this planet, but certainly it is not to keep corporate America afloat in our dollars."

Absolutely brilliant.

Buy Books from Bookstores

2008-12-06T21:15:00.000-08:00

"Literacy is the cornerstone of any great society. When we stop reading -- and by extension, buying books, discussing art, participating in the life of the mind -- everything else crumbles."

by diana abu jaber on Book Industry Enters Shaky Chapter

Full story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97873655

October 19 - November 1, 2008

2008-11-11T17:19:00.000-08:00

The Wordy Shipmates
Sarah Vowell
2008, hardcover
14 cards

This is a book about the Puritans, the Separatists and the Non-Separatists, but since it is written by Sarah Vowell it is so much more than that. Vowell positions what took place in the early days of the United States alongside the current wars the United States wages. With her humor and cynicism and wading through history to dredge up the good stuff, her approach also demonstrates how one can fuse one's practice, with one's beliefs in ways that inform the current state of affairs rather than just recount. And the book starts with a drawing by Marcel Dzama. With the recent election we might not be Ronald Regan anymore (p. 62), but we'll see.

Since it is the month of the holiday known as Thanksgiving I point your attention to the following statement: "Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by US calendars calling for a holiday...What if we didn't deserve it?" (p. 198) Maybe this year it should have been November 5.

Some excerpts:
1- "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief. I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed."
6- Middle East
-"Answer: Because Henry VIII had a crush on a woman who was not his wife."
-"(Martin) Luther's point was that, according to scripture, salvation is not a bake sale..."
7- "Luther translated the Bible into German so Germans could read it for themselves."
9- "hot Protestants" (Puritans)
11- The Humble Request, 1630- "Nothing uppity about us, Your Majesty, we're just hobos in the woods."
-Winthrop: "We shall be as a city upon a hill."
12- wrote their own books
-Ralph Waldo Emerson- "The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man."
13- "The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary."
14- Reverend Thomas Shepard Jr. to his son: "So I say to you read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it."
15- John Adams- "Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties..."
16- David McCullough
20- "check out those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system, locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death. Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago."
21- General Cornwallis [so that's why that road name near me comes from]
23- the Great Migration 1629-40
24-25- Massachusetts Bay Colony's official seal [Dzama's drawing]- "Indian says, 'Come over and help us!'"
-"The worldview behind that motto- we're here to help, whether you want our help or not- is the Massachusetts Puritans' most enduring bequest to the future United States. And like everything the Puritans believes, it is derived from scripture."
26- 1801 inaugural address by Thomas Jefferson argues for "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations- entangling alliances with none."
30- germs- "The kingdom of death extended from Chile to Newfoundland..."- map at the National Museum of the American Indian
-Squanto- "spoke English because he had learned it in Europe after he was kidnapped by sailors. By the time he made his way back to America, everyone he knew was dead."
34- text at the museum next to the map- "That initial explosion of death is one of the greatest tragedies in human history because it was unintended and unavoidable, and even inevitable. But what happened in its wake was not."
45- MLK Jr. 1957- "So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you 'I love you. I would rather die than hate you.'"
54- John Adams- "The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed for the common good."
56- surveillance
59- Dolly Parton
-Winthrop's sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with."
-"And looking into the ways the sermon, or at least that one phrase in it [city on a hill] was used, throws open the American divide between action and words, between what we say we believe versus what we actually do."
62- "In the USA, we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues."
-"City on a hill, though- that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that's why the citizen of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that's why we are Ronald Regan."
65- Reagan: "...and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here..."
69- Abu Ghraib
74- regularly scheduled voting
81- blank pages
82- ferkins- kilderkin
86- state house, Boston- "one of the oldest upholstered chairs made in New England."
91- plaques in Boston
108- "A cross, to a Puritan, is not a symbol of Christ- it is a symbol of the pope."
112- pamphlet fight!
118- Vacation Bible school- "It was like arts-and-crafts camp, only churchier..."
119- lessons "be true to yourself, be not afraid to defy authority, be willing to die for what you believe in..."
127- "Williams's greatness lies in his refusal to keep his head down in a society that prizes nothing more than harmony and groupthink. He cares more about truth than popularity or respect or personal safety."
128- "...Winthrop is Peter Seeger...Williams is Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport..."
129- Williams "a man who devotes his life to keeping government out of the church- not the other way around."
148- "...Rhode Island was purchased by love."
150- "Williams, like Melville, is a tad too excited, too lonely, too longwinded, too strange."
-Melville- paper mill- "endless supply of paper on which 'I should write a thousand-a million-billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you!"
157- "I'm an indoorsy urban woman..."
159- "most useful, or at least the most telling" Algonquin phrases Williams translates: "We understand no each other." "You trouble me."
171- pirate
196- Foxwoods
197- dioramas
198- "When's Thanksgiving?"
-"might be June 15, 1637"
-"Days of thanksgiving were earned. They would be appalled by US calendars calling for a holiday...What is we didn't deserve it?"
236-237- (magazine subscription card) "she is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss) or man hating harpy (Ms.)."
238- plaque text
239- "To get to his city you see her name."
248- JFK: "For of those to whom much is given, much is required."

My own private Alexandria

2008-11-11T17:18:00.000-08:00

Paul Chan reads texts to you.

2008-11-01T07:50:00.001-07:00

How to Read Like a President
NY Times, November 2, 2008

October 11 - 18, 2008

2008-10-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

Murmur
by J. Nimi
33 1/3 books, 2007, paperback
14 cards

When I met Peter Buck I thanked him for R.E.M.'s introducing me to the music of The Soft Boys and the Velvet Underground. My friend Joel was shocked that I failed to express my love for R.E.M. to Peter Buck. It just seemed a given, I do hope he knew that. R.E.M. for me was like those friends who introduce you to things that help you figure out what you're about as well as share things that they know you will love. J. Nimi does just that in this book on Murmur. I also realize now I don't really know that much about Murmur and, while this book fills in some of that, his discussion of Walker Percy's The Message in the Bottle is his gift, as well as this thoughtful text about Murmur.

A few selections:
xi- "But isn't that how we feel about records we love- that without us, they wouldn't exist? That they continue to mediate your existence, even after you shut off the stereo, shelve the records, "outgrow" the band?
-Francisco Varela: "Every act of knowing brings forth a world."
xii- Richard Brilliant's My Laocoon- "how a personal experience of a work of art can become tainted by what history has to say about it."
xiii- restrain the imagination
-"Murmur is part object...part text...and part performance."
xiv- "Murmur was and is about not understanding things too quickly or too assuredly. An artist wants his or her work to be "understood," but by a particular means also inscribed as a part of that work."
1- recorded in Charlotte, NC
2- Carrboro
-donuts
12 (being in a band) "is not so much about freedom as it is about the giving up of one kind of burden for another."
43- "the common fear of not being heard"
50- Marat's death
52- "tell now what is dreaming"
55- Lionel Trilling: "The poet...may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather."
56- Thoreau: "each railroad tie was a soul- the passing of a freight train was a night requiem to the railroad ties..."
61-62- Kudzu- James Dickey- "unkillable ghosts"
62- kudzu to a Midwesterner
63- Gerhard Richter
68- Edmund Burke
-sublime
74- 1st demo tape- sticker, "do not open"
76- David Rothenberg: "The Phenomenology of Reverb" quoting Edmund Husserl: "...once a sound happens, it immediately goes away; and the moment it's over, we begin to forget it. That's what memory, in fact, is: the history of forgetting."
79- Irving Howe: "the Reaganites have largely succeeded in restoring popular confidence in the virtues of capitalism, the mystical beneficence of "the free market," and the attractiveness of a "minimalist state" even though that state, faithfully attending to corporate needs, has never been close to being minimalist."
80- "Coca-Cola didn't sell soda pop; they sold corn, in the form of corn syrup, a product that greatly offset the economic gap created in the wake of the gasoline crisis of the later 1970s."
89- Michael Stipe: "We want our records to be like doors to other worlds."
90- Walker Percy's "Metaphor as Mistake"
90-91- naming
93- Robert Frost, "poetry is what gets lost in translation"
-Eli Khamarov: "poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition."
93-94- MS: lyrics "a blank chalkboard for people to pick up and scribble over"
98- "Murmur is a record that needs to be completed by the listener, but she has written herself out of the picture altogether, not to mention the music."
101- "When you illuminate the sublime, you get a sharper darkness."
108- "For most of history, up until very recently, music was heard only when it was performed."
114- Magritte
125- "But part of projecting yourself into a pop song is the tacit notion that you're able to momentarily leave behind the real narrative that you normally inhabit."
126- strategy

October 8 - 12, 2008

2008-10-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

Chicken with Plums
Marjane Satrapi
2006, hardcover
1 card

7- "As someone once said, 'To live, it's not enough to be alive.'"
63- Rumi- The Story of the Elephant
64- "Each one had given his interpretation of the animal according to what he had touched. Life is the same. We give meaning to life based on our point of view."
-"The key to wisdom is doubt."

October 1 - 10, 2008

2008-10-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

Fargo Rock City
Chuck Klosterman
2001, hardcover
9 cards

8- "As a writer, there is nothing more flattering than having someone invest their thoughts into something your wrote."
18- "Whenever people look back on their grammar school days, they inevitably insist that they remember feeling 'safe' or 'pure' or 'hungry for discovery.' Of course, the people who say those things are lying (or stupid or both). It's revisionist history..."
25- Brian Eno, "Only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them became a musician."
55- "Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love."
58- metal and interpretation
71- "What music 'means' is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations."
72- "Glam is a struggle against normalcy."
73- who has listened to the New York Dolls
105- "The only thing important about art is how it affects people. It only needs to affect one person to be interesting, but it had to affect many to be important."
118- males, loyalty to bands
138- "Life makes art."
221- Americanphile
225- "Hating (and sometimes mocking) music is just as important as loving (and embracing) music."
272- Stone Temple Pilots, Interstate Love Song

August 27 - October 5, 2008

2008-10-20T15:09:00.000-07:00

Looking Up Rachel Whiteread's Water Tower
Public Art Fund
Hardcover, 1998
10 cards

Many people who have walked with me in a city know about my interest in water towers. I have given some thought as to why these structures interest me. Partly it's because they signify city to me, there were no such water towers in town I was from. It seems as if they're a tangible expression of time- particularly in Detroit, they're a sign of earlier life and vitality, the towers haunting the sky to some degree. They have a presence in the sky and they also have a function. I try to capture as many as I can in snapshots since each feels unique. Rachel Whiteread also took an interest in water towers and explored, researched and created a project inspired by the water towers of New York. I've had my eye on this book for a while but the truly wonderful Strand Bookstore had it for $5 or so, and thus I found my copy.

Whiteread's tower now seems to be on MoMA's roof. Whiteread chose a trasnslucent material to cast her water tower unlike the dense materials of her casting of house interiors (I saw Ghost this summer at the National Gallery) prevent one from entering the former interior. What is it about water towers that lets us in? I'm still not sure but perhaps in continuing to return to such a question there the answers will become as interesting as the question. I just started thinking about the way water towers are part of networks, relationship which I realize more and more each day underlie many projects and interests of mine.

Some excerpts:
13- Joan Didion, The White Album, "Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of power."
-arid climates, water- "liquid capital"
15- "The skyline of old New York is the engineering consequence of the reserves of water held in upstate regions."
-1998- 17,000 rooftop water tanks in NYC
16- "Human habitations must be protected from their own effects."
17- "In present-day New York City, the politics of land values can be read in the architecture of the skyline. Water, like any other system, is political: power that can be channeled, streamed, diverted and stored."
18- "To look at Whiteread's Water Tower is not only to be reminded of the origins of what we take for granted but also to delve into the functioning of a larger system of which wooden water towers are merely the visible pinnacles."
20-Ilya Kabakov, Monument to the Lost Glove
22- David Hammons
-"the projects in their city locations are 'open texts' which invite many possible readings and individual perceptions."
23- Gordon Matta- Clark
24- 1st research trip- walking
25- Bernd and Hilla Becher
-"The water tower is part of the complex system by which water is collected and distributed. Consisting of a water tank and a tower-like substructure, it fulfills 2 purposes at the same time: storage and the maintenance of pressure."
27- almost disappearing, invisible
-"part of the sky itself"
28- "those who seek it out will find it"
45- Foxwoods
47- "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Cabin the Sky, Luc Sante
89- "Although omnipresent, and comforting, in their omnipresence, water towers have nevertheless managed to avoid dull familarity. You never quite cease to see them..."
-"strictly functional idea"
92- Bechers- "It is the Bechers's mission to document with scientific rigor the architectural remnants of the age of industry."
-"They were never intended to be any more than strictly utilitarian."
-"their abject and uncompromising simplicity."
The Immigrant- Molly Nesbit
99- Gerhard Richter- city of New York
100- Rem Koolhaus- "count the rabbits"
-"to make something not there"
-"she would retreat from the skyline to return to it."
101- J. G. Ballard's Crash
102- Nietzsche
105-106 "She gave peace an urban shape in her inverted tower of water"
106- country moment "When there are no birds singing, and there's no wind, you just get this silence that is absolute concrete, it completely smothers you."
-"But New York is not itself capable of this kind of silence."
-"What is an artist? Neither tourist nor traveler exactly."
-107- "For a large work of art like Water Tower is in effect asking to be held only by the world."
108- "No city on earth, no life on earth, has the scale of sky."
-"Clouds are notoriously silent."
163- Moondance Diner (now closed)
166- RW: "I really wanted to make something that was more like an intake of breath."
170- Robert Leonard: "It reflects the idea of a monument without marking a site that a monument would normally mark as being significant. It is an empty form waiting for meaning to attach itself to it."
171- Trisha Brown: "people didn't look up; artists probably did"
173- Trisha Brown, Roof Piece, Soho, 1972
176- Dan Graham- Two Way Mirror Inside Cube
183- Ingrid Schaffner- "this city's particular capacity to inspire whomever is simply prepared to look."
188- David Zwirner: "Looking for it is almost just as satisfying as finding it."
195- Diane Lewis: "The city is a text...But an existential description of the city as a history is that history has no objective, the art is to give it one, by reading of the city not as a history but as une histoire, a story."

2008-10-08T18:11:00.000-07:00

"Books are places of identification, receptacles of collected insight. Even if you only read a book once in your lifetime, as it stands on your bookshelf it symbolizes a storehouse of experience on which you repeatedly draw in the process of remembering. A subjective selection of ten favorite books, therefore, represents an intellectual spiritual storehouse in and through which individuals rediscover, nourish and redefine themselves. Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are."

-Bernhart Schwenk writing about the artist the work of Peter Wuthrich

September 16 - 29, 2008

2008-10-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

2005, hardcover

27 cards

I've been meaning to read one of Haruki Murakami's books for a few years now. A couple of years ago a co-worker recommended The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and, more recently, his memoir that overlaps with running sounds interesting. But it was when Jen recommended Kafka on the Shore and sent me the New Yorker review of the book (Jen reads New Yorkers cover to cover in order, I think she may be up to June right now but I could be wrong) that I decided this was the one to start with.

A meditation on life, Chances are you the reader has not become involved in a murder like part of the storyline, there are moments that may reflect your own grappling with a life lived, or at least that's what this book offered me. Thoughtful insights abound resulting from ordinary life moments as well as a few of the extraordinary variety. And Chip Kidd designed the cover.

Selections:

4- "Distance might not solve anything."

11- map

15- "You know how it is. When kids start playing together and get completely absorbed by whatever they're doing, they don't care about things like that anymore."

18- clouds- angle

21- "In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion."

-"'I think it means,' I say, 'that chance encounters are what keep us going."

30- map

31- diner

31- "Like the clouds floating across the sky, I'm all by myself, totally free."

32- libraries

36- odor of books

-"This is exactly the place I've been looking for forever."

37- "people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half."

-"my point is that it's really hard for people to live their lives alone."

-diner

44- cat and name- "I had one, I know I did, but somewhere along the line I didn't need it anymore. So it slipped my mind."

46- cats- creatures of habit

54- (Kafka) "I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machines in the story...that's his own device for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine."

68- (apartment) "Seedy, all right, but at least it had the feel of real people living real lives."

83- (no kids) "But it's not a good ideas to make decisions so soon. There's no such thing as absolutes."

94- "Was the sound of birds I was hearing real?"

99- clinging to something- Goethe- "Everything's a metaphor"

102-103- (Schubert) "...works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason- or at least they appeal to certain types of people....You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart- or maybe we should say the work discovers you."

104- "...People soon get tired of things that aren't boring, but not of what is boring."

105- "But solitude comes in different varieties..."

122- (pencilled note, Eichmann bio)- "It's all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It's just like Yeats said: IN dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that when there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see with Eichmann."

127- "...silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear."

141- "...whatever is it you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."

174- "People who look normal and live a normal life- they're the ones you have to watch out for."

175- "The more connections, the deeper the meaning."

-"What matters is that you see things with your own eyes."

-"If you try to use your head to think about things, people don't want to have anything to do with you."

176- "Boundaries between things are disappearing all the time."

182- labyrinth

189- "A theory is a battlefield in your head."

191- diner

203- record player and record- "If possible I'd like to listen to the record to hear how it originally sounded."

-"All like the ruins of some not-so-distant past."

210- (song) "One by one the words find a home in my heart."

225- pirate

-"Artists are those who can evade the verbose."

-"If the words can't create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem."

232- Bob Dylan

235- "My grandpa always said asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime."

236- pickles

238- diner

240- Colonel Sanders

248- bird- branch- wind- "vision shifts"

253- Bergson- "The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."

255- "A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need is to move from reason that observes to reason that acts."

265- "God only exists in people's minds."

-"If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, he isn't."

276- "Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover."

276- painting

278- "All of us are dreaming."

284- "Nakata's like a library without a single book."

292- "People actually prefer not being free."

-Australian Aborigines, fenceless civilization until 17th century

294- "Or maybe I just wanted to keep myself busy, so I set a goal that kept me running around and my mind occupied."

-"If it wasn't for that project, I probably would've withdrawn even further from reality and ended up completely isolated."

299- "the post rain scent in the air"

302- "The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody's got to keep watch, take care of business..."

326- "So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you're stepping into the labyrinth inside."

327- "The longer people live, the more they learn to distinguish what's important from what's not."

-"You're in the middle of something wonderful, something so tremendous you may never experience it again. But you can't really understand how wonderful it is. That makes you impatient. And that, in turn, leads you to despair."

332- pickles

334- map- diner

334- "'But what the heck are you looking for?' Hoshino asked after they'd eaten. 'I don't know. But I think-' 'that you'll know it when you see it. And until you see it, you won't know what it is.'"

349- "Believing that art itself, and the proper expression of emotions, was the most sublimed thing in the world, he though political power and wealth only served one purpose: to make art possible."

359-360- "War breeds war."

365- "The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless."

365- painting

370- letter- secret

373- "Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone? Why the hell does it have to be like that?"

377- "Can nothingness increase?"

379- "You changed my life...things look different to me now. ... I've started to see the world through your eyes."

382- pickles

390- Truffant- 400 Blows

392- names- "There's no need to call me, she says. If you need me, I'll be here."

405- hold a book

427 (quiet, power) "People that don't get it never will."

432- "Every one of us is losing something precious to us...Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads- at least that's where I imagine it- there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in the library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while..."

-"People need a place they can belong."

435- time

September 11 - 14, 2008

2008-09-14T18:33:00.000-07:00

Vacation

Deb Olin Unferth

2008, hardcover, McSweeney's

10 cards

Sometimes McSweeney's Book Club's books come in the mail just when you need them, sometimes they accumulate before you get to them. Luckily this one just came in time; a time where I can't go on a vacation, this book's title immediately grabbed my attention. Next I realized I'd read a book by Deb Olin Unferth before and enjoyed it immensely. Hers was one of three books that made up . A perfect solution to the weekend.

Unferth's use of language is amazing. AMAZING I tell you! Sometimes so simply written, but within a few words a web of issues, observations, life, emotion, etc. are captured. This book is told by a number of characters and voices, sometimes identified, sometimes blurring into the others' stories. I've written about truisms in books before and Unferth provides some of those here too, but she also takes on the unanswerable elements of life, acutely observes them, and while offering no answers necessarily, the space she provides for them to rumble around in your own head can offer respite to life's ongoing puzzle and its missing pieces.

Selections:

18- "Strings of parked cars receded away into a dense thicket of lots."

-"So Gray hasn't come home. The lesson learned her was to not ever, ever look forward to anything. ever. Crush expectation. Count on nothing but your own grave."

-"His own smallness, his solitude, the cul-de-sac of his mind."

-"He'd asked her to marry him almost immediately on meeting her. He knew right away he would love her."

19- "No one should spend their life going through places like this. One's mind and soul may look like this, but to have to see it outside oneself was really just too much."

20- "You never take vacations."

-index and lists

21- "Being in a hotel room does not mean you're on vacation."

23- "The day was invading through the windows and under the doors."

27- "There were also the mirrors, and other inaccurate reflections."

28- barrette

40- "She could be searching, not for something lost but for something not yet seen."

49- "The sun soaped the clouds."

50- "...gathered papers instead of writing them..."

60- "She did not heap up his heart in any way at all."

-familiarish

61-62- (I love you)

62- "You never saw so many normal people sitting around and calmly looking and not looking at each other."

75- "A sickening dream of water."

85- map

88- Esperanto

90- whistle

101- "He was already dying when he arrived."

104- "They walked back to the apartment and took up their lives."

111- "...one cannot care for every stone on the path."

113- "He felt like a verb..."

115- "But he disliked the city comprehensively..."

122- life story- book- time- "A man could spend a life telling stories."

123- untraining

-"I walk along my own line of footprints, following myself there and back."

125- "I'm a solo show."

-"You know how it is to want something. Desire builds like a little house in your head and it sits there, half-constructed in your mind. Women who want children are this way. Artists are this way about pictures. It doesn't go away. You may forget for a few months but then it's back, the unfinished pieces of what you want. I don't want anything. I'm fine."

130- no big loves- parents' marriage

131- "I had never been close to anyone, not really, and I wanted to try."

133- "Every man has a weakness, she said. Every man has a past."

134- jumping- Becauses

136- "The insane sound of the cicada."

138- "Where do you go when you leave?"

-"Nowhere, it turned out."

140- "There may have been things wrong with him from the start...his unrealized potential, what he hadn't done..."

142- "It's amazing how unobservant people are, how focused they are on themselves and their own crusades."

143- "A man with a book like that is a man with a place to be."

144- Corn Island- the map

146- "People do things like this, they do, and if it doesn't make them happy, at least it keeps them alive."

147- "I remained. Because that, it turns out, is who I am."

-"Leaving, staying, it's all to hard. I'm still walking around these same places. I am itinerant but steadfast. It takes bravery to care for someone....The risk involved is enormous."

-"Maybe everyone goes back. We chase the thing we flee."

154- giraffe

155- "the whole point of marriage being the guarantee that there exists one citizen on earth who is under contract to deal honestly with you."

161- "a papery existence"

167- "A man leaves a place..."

-"stubborn stuck nails that humans are..."

168- office of stamps

172- pirate ship

175- "Have you ever asked her anything at all?"

178- "A vacation is simply, you know, to vacate. The vacationer leaves the homes (leaves the mind), leaves the home empty (except for what he left behind (her)), that's all. No, no, that's not a vacation, if you simply move to a different spot. That's just looking at stuff, familiar stuff."

179- Coney Island

-vacation- writing postcards

182- Aquarium

190- "Sometimes in large churches, people are crushed beneath them and can't pull themselves out. Sometimes people tumble into the sea and are drowned."

202- "You don't surrender what's yours

204- cloud

206 (briefcase) "the rectangular prison of her husband's soul"

208- "There are many ways to see the world."

212- "All life is urgent."

213- bravest walk

July 10 - September 10, 2008

2008-09-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

A Mythic Obsession: The World of Dr. Evermor
Tom Kupsh
2008, hardcover
7 cards

If you've been to Baraboo, Wisconsin chances are you've visited The Forevertron (or the Circus World Museum). On my second
trip to Baraboo I visited The Forevertron with Amanda. That day

Eleanor Every invited us into a trailer where we met Tom Kupsh,

the author of this book, Tom Every and Eleanor Every. At the time Kupsh was working on this book, but after our visit to the amazing House on the Rock, this was just one of many serendipitous encounters on that trip. Every and Kupsh, as Kupsh
writes about in the book, worked together on Alex Jordan's sprawling House on the Rock, this book brought the two men together again years after their initial work. While visiting the American Visionary Museum this summer, with Amanda also,
we saw one of Tom Every's birds on the museum's grounds, and
then I found this new book in the bookstore.

A Mythic Obsession documents one man's individual vision and ideas, adding details to the stories that are already out there. Kupsh begins the book with a very apt quote from Rumi, "Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you." Though in Tom Every's case, we think highly. An important reminder that what we should strive for is living an "uncommon life".

Selections:
1- related to pirates
6- (Dad patching buildings with old signs) "...always trying to figure out how to do something with what you've got."
-Alex Jordan- boxer- fight
-"disease of all"
10- not attending the prom
15- (date with Eleanor) "We're going to go to the House on the Rock..."
16- "After you tear something down, what do you have to look at? Nothing..."
18- The House on the Rock
22- The Inferno
27- collecting and Alex Jordan and House on the Rock
29-30- Dr. Evermor and the Forevertron story
35- Tom: "I have to make a decision- whether to do this or not."
44- Edison bipolar dynamos
-"He is very proud of his collection, which documents the early history of motors and the generation of electricity; all of these silently play their part in the Forevertron myth."
47- "highball it to heaven"
50- "So they had to have somebody report back in to the rest of the nonbelievers. That's where the telescope comes in."
54- Magnetic Laser Love Guns
66- "fascinated by what he calls the 'spirit' of the tools and machines that he salvages, and he wants us to see them as alive with the spirit of those who made or used them."
-"...I like you, it's just fine the way you are."
-"...his work is not only a new work but also a preservation of the past."
67- "Tom believes that you have to lose yourself in your work to find yourself in your life."
-different time periods- time and place, malleable
-Tom the "Time-Binder"
72- "The Forevertron is all built on hopelessness."
-"He built this piece to heal himself- to take [and use] all the treasures that he found that no one else was going to do anything with- so it was healing."
75- "...Tom set about saying in metal what words and actions had failed to express."
76- birds- fantasies
91- Eagle's Head- Tom: "It's a piece that really brings home the message that everything is in the way that you look at it."
115- "dreams have two components- one is the time scale and the other is the spatial scale"
118- neighborhood- "a time when everything was within walking distance..."
125- "Just as his work is made by joining together a wide variety of components, so too his wide circle of friends seems joined together with him as glue."
126- Happy Hatter- tin foil hats
127- producing artist
128- (Tom) "welcomes everyone and accepts them just as they are
131- Joel la Troll
139- intuitive process
178- handwritten letters
182- "In its best moments, Tom's work invites us to join with him in our common struggle to be free, to excel, to rise above our own frail human condition, and to live an uncommon life."

August 31 - September 2, 2008

2008-09-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

Horses

by Philip Shaw

33 1/3 Books, 2008, paperback

19 cards

The first time I saw Patti Smith was on R.E.M.'s Monster tour in 1995. I was in high school. I didn't know much about her yet but I knew that she was someone to find out more about, much like R.E.M. pointed me towards The Velvet Underground. I don't remember the quote exactly but I recall Michael Stipe saying once how when he heard Horses he realized anyone could sing, that he could sing. R.E.M.'s music and interests gave me a perspective beyond the one-traffic light town I lived in. Because of Horses significance to Stipe, the bits I know about Patti Smith, and the concerts of hers I've seen since, I was excited to see that the 33 1/3 book about her focused on Horses.

Philip Shaw's story of musical discovery and research bears some similarities to mine, though his was guided by Ian Curtis and Joy Division and Patti Smith, who he knew first through the Horses cover. The format and approach for 33 1/3 books varies with the author. Shaw writes about Horses as a fan, as well as the necessary invocation of Rimbaud while also discussing it through other texts. As he says, "...Horses is about what happens when we listen as well as read."

Selections:

3- "...but from Patti Smith I learned that the loss of control, a key word for Ian Curtis, need not lead to a suicidal walk 'upon the edge of escape' (She's Lost Control Again) As Land taught me, the loss of control could lead, equally, to the sea of possibilities."

7- Velvet Underground and Warhol

8- Bob Dylan

9- Robert Mapplethorpe

13- rigor and taking music seriously

-"Elvis Costello line (the attribution is disputed) 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'"

15- "unlike other cultural forms, music is where we are most likely to encounter ourselves"

16- "What music offers is the promise of release from the restrictions of everyday life. But such a release is, of course, illusory, and just as ideology works to convince its subjects that they are, in fact, outside ideology, thus rendering itself immune to critique and to the potential for revolt, so music, by concealing its origins in commerce, and by providing a sense of escape from the workaday world, operates as a lure to critical consciousness. To be lost in music, released form the nine to five, is to feel alive, but also, as Sister Sledge adds, to be 'Caught in a trap': for who, once they have experience such freedom, would wish to reflect on it? Might the act of close critical engagement ruin the illusion?"

19- "nothing is more heady in the sense of intoxicating, than the champagne froth of a radical new idea."

22- Benjamin

23- the Situationists

24- "With each song, Smith presents a sort of photographic negative, her characters inhabiting a shadow version of the land of the free."

28- Lacan: "A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject."

-"Patti Smith always distrusted the idea that human beings possess a fixed or stable identity."

29- "Yes, she is a poet, and she is a poem that is written."

-eye patch

30- Rimbaud- self-fashioning

33- Alice in Wonderland

37- Philadelphia Museum of Art

41- Illuminations

44- Piss Factory

-that photograph

49- drawings

52- "death by water"

-"how many tears on your pillow. crocodile or real. watershed."

52- T.S. Eliot

54- "the night stretched like a cloud"

55- (questions) "Perhaps all of these or none of these things."

56- PS: "I had to go to Paris to find myself as an artist, but I came back to New York filled with words and rhythms."

56- close alliance with Lenny Kaye

60- Sam Shepard- PS: Shepard's "whole life moves on rhythms. He's a drummer."

61- street angel

62- "her stress on the act of reading"

63- words, language

66- longing

67- Rimbaud quote- women

70- Artaud

72- Richard Hell: "The art-form of the future is celebrityhood."

76- Gross: "She was a woman who dared to get up on stage and not smile- not aim to please."

77-78- silences

86- Patty Hearst- "I am nobody's million dollar baby."

97- John Cale- mirror quote

98- Horses read as artifact

102- "Again, who is singing here, and to whom?"

106- Lacan, Zizek

121- album "form of memento mori, an artistic meditation on the limits of mortality."

122- Jim Morrison- the task

128- Voltaire- back to England- Louis XV- said to have asked him: 'What did you learn over there?' 'To think, sire.' (penser- to think), to which the King replied, 'Horses?' (panser- to groom horses)"

129- "Horses, then, is about thinking; or rather, it is about allowing oneself to be thought..."

131- Barthes

132- Lacan- child- mirror

August 22 - 30, 2008

2008-09-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America

The Pill versus the Springhill Mind Disaster

and In Watermelon Sugar

1967, paperback

14 cards

One thing that has surprised me this year is the number of books, amazing books, that people have recommended to me this year. The thing is though that these recommendations come about much more casually than I anticipate. This book was suggested by Patrick, who a few years ago led me to reading Patricia Bostworth's biography about Diane Arbus, even though it too was mentioned casually. Have you read any of Brautigan's books? If the answer is no, you should. I'd never heard of Brautigan until now, but once I have of course he pops up in the most unexpected places (the book is in the corner of a photograph of The Kills in the New Yorker supplement Fashion Rocks).

Brautigan is not merely a symbol of hipness or rock 'n' roll, he's a writer who commands language, leading it to new heights and possibilities: "glass whiskers of the houses", "a tattered revolution of old blankets", and the way he describes things (the map drawn with dull pencil). Brautigan's writing also resembles life in the way that the little details add up to make the life lived.

Trout Fishing in America is a book title but also a person, a place, and maybe other things I'm forgetting. This multiplicity reminded me of Reena Spaulings- a book, an artist, a gallery owner and a gallery.

The Pill is a collection of poems. My favorites include: Karma Repair Kit, Xerox Candy Bar, Hey Bacon!, It's Raining in Love, To England, The Postman, A Mid-February Sky Dance, December 24 and The Harbor. In Watermelon Sugar could be described as a love story.

Some excerpts:

Trout Fishing in America

-cover photograph and the back cover

2- "It's sandwich time for the poor."

-"Was it Kafka who learned about America by reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin..."

4- "glass whiskers of the houses"

8- The Kool-Aid wino- "He looked up at me from underneath a tattered revolution of old blankets."

9- "'The dishes can wait'"

14- map

19- Tom Martin Creek- "It's good to name creeks after people and then later to follow them for a while seeing what they have to offer, what they know and have made of themselves."

22- (bookstore) "I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end."

27- "The last thin in the world he had any use for were children."

31- "'Giraffe races at Kilimanjaro!' he shouted"

38- writing on the back of 1st graders

43- (boards over creek)- "...and the creek flowed over the top of the boards, invited like a postcard to the ocean a thousand miles away."

65- (baby and minnows) "We didn't want her to kill any of them because she was too young."

66- (bed leaning against wall) "It stays there for a month. You get used to seeing it and then you go by one day and it is gone. You wonder where it went."

68 and 70- 208 the cat- last cat in the world

104- "'How much are the birds?' I asked."

111- "The Eskimos live among ice all their lives but have no single word for ice."- M.F. Ashley Montagu, Man: His First Million Years

111 and 112- mayonnaise

The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster

8- Items 1-4

11- Xerox Candy Bar- "Ah, you're just a copy of all the candy bars I've ever eaten."

29- map

30- postcard

46- Hey Bacon!

49- "...I wander around the house like a sewing machine..."

53- being drunk, dinosaurs

58- Detroit Tigers

61- It's Raining in Love

78- "There are doors that want to be free from their hinges to fly with perfect clouds."

80- The Postman

81- A Mid-February Sky Dance

94- "God, I hate eating dinner alone. It's like being dead."

98- December 24

105- The Harbor

In Watermelon Sugar

4- "Just call me whatever is in your mind."

3- the tigers

4- that statue of mirrors

27- "'The heard is something else. Nobody knows what is going to happen,' I said."

28- "We who do not have regular names spend a lot of time by ourselves. It suits us."

33- watermelon sugar

40- hands

57- (note) "...and I threw it away, so not even time could find it."

69- "The Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. you get the picture. It's a big place, much bigger than we are."

83- "I was so sleepy now that my eyes refused to close. The lids would not budge down. They were statues of eyes."

107- book

110- "'Have you ever read a book?' I said. 'No,' Fred said. 'I haven't but I don't think I'd want to start by reading one about clouds.'"

112- "Everything is reflected in the Statue of Mirrors if you stand there long enough and empty your mind of everything else but the mirrors, and you must be careful not to want anything from the mirrors. They just have to happen."

118- "'Nobody's to blame. She had a broken heart.'"

August 27, 2008

2008-09-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

"Circles"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

4 cards

Writers in the previous post's n+1 pamphlet mentioned wishing they had read Emerson earlier and hold him up alongside Nietzche, if not above. As I make my way through Emerson this year it seemed like the time to read "Circles" since it was mentioned by them. Emerson, of course, offers all one could hope and more in his reflection on and about circles.

Brief excerpts:

252- the eye

-"Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning..."

-"Permanence is but a word of degrees."

253- "The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet..."

-"New arts destroy the old."

-"Everything looks permanent until its secret is known."

255- "Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations."

256- "Conversation is a game of circles."

257- "Good as is discourse, silence is better."

-"The field cannot be well seen from within the field."

-"Therefore we value the poet."

259- "'The worse things are, the better they are.'"

260- "I am only an experimenter."

261- "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

-"Life is a series of surprises."

-"The simplest words- we do not know what they mean expect when we love and aspire."

262- "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."

-"'A man,' said Oliver Cromwell, 'never rises so high as when he knows now wither he is going.'"

August 26-27, 2008

2008-08-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

n+1 Pamphlet Series #2

What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions

2007, paperback

14 cards

I was looking for another book when this and other treasures found me. Six books and three days later I found the book I was looking for in a place I never would have visited otherwise, but that's how the best living comes about. I've always held n+1 the magazine in high regard, but the quality and ideas shared within these two discussions are to be appreciated by any reader or anyone who teaches college students. The initial impetus for the conversations was reflection upon what writers and professors in their 30s mostly wish they would have read as undergraduates, as well as what they wish they hadn't and what they read too late. College freshmen can even get a free copy of this pamphlet by writing the email address on the back cover. It includes lists as well as discussions. Some of my reading this year was reflected in these discussions. I fully agree with the importance of reading Emerson, whom I have just begun to read this year. This is one of many of exquisite statements made, "No book is for you, until it is." Adding to the discussion on page 79, luckily I discovered the Velvet Underground when I was 17, if not 16.

Some selections:

-3- "Books we should have read earlier"- "For me, one thinker I should have read earlier is Foucault."

5- forming a self from reading

7- "books as enthusiasms"- "books that you are lucky enough to find when you are ready to find them."

11- "And what you can't do is ask a school to schedule your enthusiasms, exactly."

12-13- (students) "They pick up teachers and fall in love with them and then abandon them, throw them away like bits of trash or crumpled up paper. But this is what you have to do as a student....And the process is similar when you fall in love, and you want to read the books that the person you fall in love with most likes."

-"reading fiction is all about the tension between the book and you, and the book has to make you want to keep going. If it's assigned to you on a reading list, that tension disappears. So you're not really understanding the book, you're just reading it."

14- "poetry was the most important thing to happen to me in college"

15- periodicals club

18- "What I found that I couldn't very easily do was to sit at home and read Kant's Critique of Judgment, though I tried, and also I had no one to talk to about it."

20- "So books can speak to the world around you, but how are you going to get them to do this for you?"

21- "C.A. Bayly's Birth of the Modern World, which I don't agree with, but at least he'll give you a map. And hopefully then you'll start questioning that map..."

23- "The landscape of the future is completely blank."

27- "Because you're learning, you're being exposed to great things and discovering some sort of enthusiasm in yourself."

28- "...because time is limited in our lives...books that were read instead of other books"

32- "No book is for you, until it is."

-"I'm glad that I didn't encounter the Frankfurt School earlier because I know that I would have been doomed to be a Frankfurt School epigone."

60-61- Kierkegaard's Either/Or

63- "I went to graduate school to make up for undergrad."

64- "Nobody can get a proper undergraduate education. You'll never know in advance what that education should be. Regret is the feeling you have when you finally realize what the education is that you want. Right? And you're always going to come to that after it's too late."

66- Proust

67- "You move through your mistakes toward the absolute...Proust is another great author for regret- the purpose of all this retrospection is to redeem your regrets in whatever ways are possible."

68- "The world is not a text!"

71-72- "The books that one reads tend to take on a sort of naturalness within one's life, so they seem to come to you when you want them, and when you're ready for them. And so for me, the fact that we're on the verge of total civilizational collapse...next 50 or 60 or 70 at most years- makes me regret the lateness with which I've figured that out."

73- (being dazzled by a boy) "...part of what dazzled me was certainly my sense the he knew about things that I did not."

-"I didn't know at the time that you could have a crush on someone who seemed to embody things that you wanted to be yourself."

76- "...almost everyone in academia feels like an outsider, nobody knows what's going on. Academia's an empty vessel, but the ones who don't realize it end up going all the way and end up in charge."

78- "I could have discovered the Velvet Underground when I was 16, as opposed to 26, and you might say this is a minor matter, but it's a matter of style."

79- "What would have changed?"

-"I wouldn't have been such a stupid idiot, I think, and such a romantic and such a moralist. And maybe I wouldn't have married so early."

81- VU song "Sunday Morning"- theme of this symposium- "You wake up, it's Sunday, what have you done with your life, or week."

-"...Sunday's for doing nothing. But actually you know, Sunday is the day to move on from your regrets."

86- reading in a vacuum- useful framework

87- "your education shifts from this sheer accumulation of stuff, to a posing to yourself of certain fundamental questions, and then in certain ways life becomes very easy thereafter."

89- "many of our ideas about the world still seem to come from the field of classical economics- earth's resources are finite (not seemingly abundant as in classical times)

90- "Emerson instead of Nietzsche"

101- Emerson's Circles

114- advice to young people- keep a journal- read seriously- think about everything that happens

118- courage- remain open to things and serious about them

May 17 - August 22, 2008

2008-08-30T22:58:00.001-07:00

The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language

Michel Foucault

1972, paperback

18 cards

150- "Contradiction is the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness and unconsciousness, though and the text, the ideality and the contingent body of expression. In any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can. At the end of this work, only residual contradictions remains- accidents, defects, mistakes."

151- "contradiction, then, functions throughout discourse, as the principle of its historicity."

-"Discourse is the path from one contradiction to another."

July 25 - August 14, 2008

2008-08-17T18:54:00.000-07:00

Michel Foucault

This Is Not a Pipe

25th Anniversary edition, 1982, paperback

11 cards

While I'm just starting this summer to read books by Foucault I was surprised that I had not heard about this one before discovering it on a shelf in a DC bookstore. Foucault takes as his subject Magritte's infamous painting as his subject, discussing it with the complexity that it deserves but in a way that doesn't overwhelm. Foucault discusses two pipes (a 1926 drawing, and a 1966 painting) that both contain the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," however there seem to be even more. It was surprising to me that he didn't mention the 1964 painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (part of the Bergman collection) also containing this phrase but titled "L'Air et la Chanson." It makes me wonder how many additional paintings with this phrase were made by Magritte and their titles. Foucault's comments on Klee and Kandinsky broadens my understanding of elements of both artists' work.

Selected notes:

Translator's Introduction:

2- de Chirico's "The Song of Love"- Magritte claimed to have realized "the ascendancy of poetry of painting.

4- Borges

9- Magritte: "it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say."

Foucault:

15- handwritten script

20- "what misleads us is the inevitability of connecting the text to the drawing"

-calligram

21- "As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things."

24- "The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates."

25- "They very things that is both seen and read is hushed in the vision, hidden in the reading."

-"Magritte redistributed the text and the image in space."

33- Klee

34- "The essential point is that resemblance and affirmation cannot be dissociated."

-"the colors that Kandinsky called 'things.'"

36- Magritte: "The titles are chosen in such a way as to keep anyone from assigning my paintings to the familiar region that habitual thought appeals to in order to escape perplexity."

37- "Magritte secretly mines a space he seems to maintain in the old arrangement. But he excavates it with words..."

38- Magritte: "Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life."

40- "the sort of things that cannot be names and that in fact 'name' themselves bear an exact and familiar name. The painting is the converse of a rebus, that chain of shapes so easily recognized as to be immediately identifiable..."

41- "In order to deploy his plastic signs, Klee wove a new space. Magritte allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface...beneath, nothing."

43- resemblance and affirmation

44- "To me it appears that Magritte dissociated similitude from resemblance, and brought the former into play against the latter."

-"Resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes."

-"Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it."

46- (resemblance)- "...reveals the clearly visible; similitude reveals what recognizable objects, familiar silhouettes hide, prevent from being seen, render invisible."

-"Resemblance makes a unique assertions, always the same: This thing, that thing, yet another thing

46-47- Magritte: "Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

-"Thought resembles without similitude...."

47- "Magritte's painting doubtless rests here, where thought in the mode of resemblance and things in relations of similitude have just vertically intersected.

-networks

48- "Who speaks in the statement?"

49- infinite games

51- mirror- Les Liaisons dangereuses

54 "...Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell."

57-58- letters from Magritte to Foucault

57- "Las Meninas is the visible image of Velazquez's invisible thought. Then is the invisible sometimes visible?"

August 10 - 13, 2008

2008-08-13T18:58:00.001-07:00

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs*

*A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman

2003, hardcover

15 cards

Lately I've been mentioning to people that I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's books. Everyone seems to have read this book, if not his others. I was wondering why I missed out on this slice of pop culture. I think I know now. By the time it came out in paperback, every weekend I was driving to Detroit and sleeping on the couches of friends and going to shows; at the time I was the only person living in East Lansing in their mid-twenties who was not married or not enamoured with sports bars. It would be amazing if I ever lived in the same city as my friends. While I bought a lot of books I didn't read too many of them. I think it's good I didn't read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs because I might not have read the other two Klosterman books I read before this. I might have, but I might not have. He's great at discussing the minute details that form the core existence of people my age (most of us watched Saved by the Bell, have some conscious of Sims, listened to bands like R.E.M. and Billy Joel and the Dixie Chicks, saw Reality Bites, etc.) but as he's written more, he's gotten better at it. The track on cereal is first rate and full of acute observations (that's right- all those creatures wanted to steal cereal- what is up with that?) The front pages includes a CD and the stories song titles and play times. Klosterman draws a distinction between a mix tape and a mix cd, placing the mix tape in a higher category. This book is an enjoyable mix cd, the other two are mix tapes.

Selections:

-(life)- "...nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even it we don't realize it..."

-"...I am alone. And that everyone is alone. I guess I am not a morning person."

-"an evening book"

-"The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer" (low culture vs. Kant or Wittgenstein)

1- "No woman will ever satisfy me....But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either."

3- (movies) "We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love."

-assessment of Coldplay

4- "...perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy."

-"They think everything will work out perfectly in the end..."

-"The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy."

6- footnote- Jordan Catalano from MSCL not being able to read

9- (When Harry Met Sally) "it gave a lot of desperate people hope."

-"Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives."

13- (SIMS) "There is no way to win, except to keep yourself from becoming depressed."

15- "Seinfeld was about nothing, but its underlying message was that nothingness still has a weight and a mass and a conflict."

16- quotes Talking Heads lyrics

-"video technology cages imagination"

19- "I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What the Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive."

36- definition of postmodern

41- (Big Brother not having music) "...without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

44- (Billy Joel, important songs, loneliness) "And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's "lonely lonely," like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder."

-"Black Sabbath is the most underrated band in rock history."

45- "Cheap Trick was good at being cool for everybody."

65- Black Sabbath

70- humorousity

70- Rivers Cuomo- "the Cubism didactic-hobo-core three-piece"

102- "This is why men need to become obsessed with things: It's an extroverted way to pursue solipsism. We are able to study something that defines who we are; therefore, we are able to study ourselves. Do you know people who insist they like 'all kinds of music'? That actually means they like no kinds of music."

104- (cars- the IROC and Chevy Cavalier make their first appearance- because of my car it seems I fall into the Celtics fan category but it does have 2 doors, not 4)

119- Sylvester Graham!!!! [former resident of the building that houses Sylvester's in Northampton]

120- "Saturday morning commercials for all the best cereals are teaching kids how to figure out what's cool."

121- "They're the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters: cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary."

-"premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it."

122- corduroy

124- "The desire to be cool is- ultimately- the desire to be rescued. It's the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society."

125- 3 questions [#1- No, #2 No, #3A]

127- mix tapes vs. mix cds

128- Saved by the Bell- "people born between 1970 and 1977 [you're wrong here- 1978 factors in too]

130- "I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program."

-"universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation..." [yes!]

131- diner

133- "Important things are inevitably cliche."

138- Angela, My So Called Life- "But Angela was so much an individual that she wasn't like anyone but herself; she didn't reflect any archetype. She was real enough to be interesting, but too real to be important." [but this is why she was so great]

140- "Life is chock full of lies, but the biggest lie is math."

-50-50

147- Reality Bites- Gen Xers- cynical optimists [I owned this soundtrack on tape]

-"This is why Ryder has to pick Hawke."

-"She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence."

156- (films) "What is Reality?"

161- forgetting stuff- "The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality."

167- "...The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.'"

167- but not "old country"

173- "Tastee Freezes are iconic structures in the rural Midwest, because they say something about your hometown; they irrefutably prove your community does not have enough of a population to sustain a Dairy Queen." [Williamston did have a Dairy Queen when I lived there]

175- "lyrics do matter"

176-177- Bob Dylan and Liz Phair cds

178- Johnny Cash- coffee

183- Esprit t-shirts

185- Gacy and mail

194- (list of people who died in the Oklahoma City bombing] "...that virtually everyone's life is only remembered for one thing."

-"I think this is what motivates people to have children...."

211- acquaintance" "'There's one thing worse than talking to a person who knows about nothing,'" he said, 'an that's talking to someone who knows about nothing except music.'"

219- "dying is always original"

229- "As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven't done anything terrible yet."

230- Kierkegaardian leap

July 29 - August 10, 2008

2008-08-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

Chuck Klosterman IV

A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Chuck Klosterman

2006, hardcover

17 cards

I think this may be my favorite Chuck Klosterman book. If you're following this you might say, but you've only read one other one and you haven't even read the one everyone in the world seems to have read (Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). I am reading said book now, and while I am enjoying it, I think Klosterman excels at the essay. Killing Yourself to Live was a well threaded story of stories, but the essay lets Klosterman engage an idea and then beat it around for a while before declaring victory over the topic. This collection of essays also touches on so many great topics, where in a book there are only a few main ideas he weaves together. Klosterman is also saving the footnote by making hilarious asides and revisions when gathering essays like this together with hindsight.

Three comments/thoughts: Klosterman mentions Black Sabbath a lot. I guess maybe it was just twice in this book but it seemed like more. His Chicken McNuggets diet also makes me think of a button Joel told me about seeing in a bar. It read, "Or will it be Chicken McNuggets?" I always look for this button in treasure shops. If I found it I might not give it to Joel (he found a sweet Chin Tiki ashtray that he kept) but I might give it to Chuck Klosterman. Maybe. His comments about the Olympics are also perfect to read right now.

Some selections:

1- "Can I tell you something weird?" he asked..."Always."

14- Britney Spears- "She is not so much a person as she is an idea, and that idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing."

24- "...is Bono's entire life a performance?"

28- Bono: "I write feelings not thoughts..."

37- Val Kilmer is nice.

43- OED and Webster's Second

45- Bob Dylan

50- (Morrissey) 30-year old ex-wallflowers "reminiscing about how The Queen is Dead convinced them not to hang themselves while everyone else was at the prom."

58- (McNuggets diet) "We are a nation obsessed."

59- orange drink

-"Does life make more sense if you're homeless? Perhaps."

60- (McDonald's) "It's the last universal place in America."

61- pirates, scurvy!

63- "Staying alive is complicated."

76- "...we were more like relationship spectators." (mentions Raymond Carver here and many times)

84- "If you're a true fan of a band, it doesn't matter where that band plays- you just go."

94- (Robert Plant) "...you cannot classify anything anywhere. Classification is a killer."

108- arrested development

109- Post traumatic stress disorder

110- Lars Ulrich from Metallica owned a Basquiat, but he sold it.

115- White Stripes- "Everything will be raw and unrehearsed and imperfect. And that's why it's so f***ing good."

116- formed on Bastille Day in 1997

117- "Detroit people"

119- "People in Detroit know their records."

120- "Record collectors are collecting. They're not really listening to music."

126- (Goths, Disneyland) "What makes someone a normal?"

-"The are not us...They wear polo shirts."

131- Radiohead- "All the wanted to talk about were books."

132- Radiohead's music- "smart on purpose"

138- exhibits Colin told him to check out

-"Everyone in this band probably reads more than you do..."

140- picking words for how they sound

149- footnote- hobo

155- Akron- at the time- "home to the Professional Bowlers Association Hall of Fame"

156- "Is life akin to bowling, or is bowling akin to life."

-"In bowling, your score is not only dependent on what you've done, but also on what you will do."

169- Billy Joel- "...he expresses absolute conviction in moments of wholly misguided affection"

181 and 194- Black Sabbath

200- (Ramones vs. Ratt) "what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are."

201- "The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people"

208- "Choice makes us depressed."

209- loss of shared experience

211- "...these shared experiences are how we connect with other people, and it's how we understand our own identity."

211-212-"...they are only pockets of a shared existence. They are things individual people choose to understand and finding others who understand them equally are products of coincidence."

226- "what you need is a) one quality nemesis and b) one archenemy."

235- (Advancement) "For example, Michael Stipe's lyrics don't really mean anything so any 16-year-old can convince himself that those words can mean whatever they want."

237- "'How can you hate the Olympics?' they ask me."

238- "I do not hate the Olympics. I just don't like they at all..."

-"...the Olympics are designed for people who want to care about something without considering why."

-"In order to enjoy the Olympics, you can't think critically about anything..."

240- "Life is f***ing confusing. I don't know anything and neither do you. But this is not what the Olympics want you to believe."

244- "I feel like a mannequin."

253- The Wonder Year- "the only tv program that allowed me to be nostalgic at the age of 17"

254- Kevin- "Did these girls 'like him' or did they 'like him like him'"

-Do we need to be liked, or do we merely want to be liked."

255- human rights, China

256- Bush- "Over 57 million people voted against him."

257- "At some point people confused being liked with being good."

259- "suspect that the most widespread problem we have is the ever-growing sentiment of anti-intellectualism that seems to infiltrate everything..."

-"guilty pleasures"

262- "It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it."

263- "These things that give us pleasure- they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we.:

268- "If you feel betrayed by culture, it's not because you're right and the universe is f***ed; it's only because you're not like most other people. But this should make you happy, because- in all likelihood- you hate those other people, anyway. You are being betrayed by a culture that has no relationship to who you are or how you live."

277- talking about music too much- 2 words- "overrated and underrated"

283- pirate renaissance

287- "pro-pirate" vs. "pro-chump"

292- if it was 1904 "you wouldn't be reading this essay. Your life would be horrible, but your life would have purpose."

-"Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety."

313- CNN Classic

322- "Pants are on my horizon..."

-"I might feel like putting my hands in my pockets later this afternoon..."

324- "Driving.

Driving.

Driving."

325- "Like all geniuses, I don't work before noon."

326- "Tonya is the kind of person who goes shopping the day after Thanksgiving."

332- "'Here's what's been on my mind,' I began, since intelligent people have no need for salutations."

333- "Part of the reason I have managed to thrive as the smartest man alive is because I'm still willing to keep learning. I totally enjoy evolving."

341- girlie girl [i always though it was spelled girly girl but how would I know]

August 10, 2008

2008-08-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia's Magic Gardens

The Art of Isaiah Zagar

Text by Betsy Augustine

2004, paperback

2 cards

Someone wants me to know about Isaiah Zagar and I appreciate their persistence and multiple channels. Though I just realized it, my path first crossed with Zagar this spring when Full Frame showed the documentary about Zagar by his son. I wanted to go but it didn't work out. I didn't pay attention to the details of the film at the time so I didn't realize until today that the film was about Zagar who I have since encountered in other ways. When I was in Philadelphia this summer Joel, Amanda and I noticed a few of his mosaics and became intrigued by them and wondered who made these? Luckily the day after at the American Visionary Museum I found this book which provided the answer. Chances are if you've been in Philadelphia you've seen at least one of his mosaics since in 2004 he had made 64. This proves to be yet another of Philadelphia's many fabulous treasures and I can't wait to see more of his mosaics when visiting the city again. Poems, dreams, mirrors. Brilliant.

A few excerpts:

8-When Zagar visited Clarence Schmidt's garden of mirrors he "called it the singled most important day of his life."

13- "relief he experienced when he began making mosaics"

14- mirrors and dyslexia- qualities of reversal- printmaking

-"I never get tired of working. The mirrors is endless energy reflecting everything."

18- doesn't know WHY, MUST make them

-"process of sharing dreams"

-calls them "poems"

-in his neighborhood- "which he says has made him what he is"

21- grotto basement

22- "His goal, he says, is to live in an expanding world of his own creation"

-mirror- "Yes, it's YOU. YOU'RE here. YOUR dreams matter too."

August 4 - 5, 2008

2008-08-07T17:53:00.000-07:00

Maps and Legends Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
Michael Chabon
2008, hardcover
13 cards

Michael Chabon stop spying on me. I realize there's no way he was spying on me because this book came out before I encountered some of these things, BUT in this book there were a number of overlaps with things I'm interested in or have encountered recently. I love this convergence factor, but the ones that came up in this book were unexpected and just random. I received the book as one of the McSweeney's Book Club releases.

Many people have mentioned to me that they've enjoyed reading Chabon's other books but I haven't gotten around to reading any of them. The sticker on the back says its Chabon's first nonfiction book. It took me a few essays to realize, oh there are essays about maps and then there are some about legends and then there are others about writing. The phrase maps and legends makes me think of the R.E.M. song but that didn't come up anywhere.

Some selections:
14- proposes- "expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature." [Maybe we need a new word. I think he's right about the magic of books but when there are magazines called Entertainment Weekly can you really use the same word to refer to literature?]
15- pirates and Proust [in the same sentence but as a list, not next to each other]
16- "Pleasure is unreliable and transient."
17- nurse romances [this made me think of Richard Prince's Nurse paintings]
20- "'Science fiction' therefore, becomes any book sold in the section of the bookstore so designated.'" [I tend to steer clear of science fiction but Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower made me think that I might be misguided in my impulse.]
23- Benjamin name dropping
25- Borges [I just bought Borges's Labyrinths in DC]
-Kelly Link [whose book I read in July]
30- map [maps were the theme for my zine]
-street names
-"To me the remarkable thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them referred to locations that did not exist."
31 -"It was a powerful demonstration to me of the incantatory power of names and naming."
33- "...just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie. Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure...a setting- forth into trackless lands that might have come into existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them."
35- Sherlock Holmes [the title of a song I've been listening to]
37- "Like most writers Conan Doyle wrote for money. His misfortune as an artist was to make piles of it, and become famous around the world by writing stories he did not consider worthy of his talent, while receiving less credit or pay for works that meant more to him..."
38- secret sharers
43- inspired guessing
45- titles- The Adventure of...
46- Bentham's panopticon [Just learned about this a few months ago]
49- "Empires are built, however, by laying the groundwork for their own destruction." [Reminds me of current events but also Jared Diamond's book Collapse]
52-53- People who have written letters to Sherlock Holmes
56- Tolkien- end paper maps- "never visited or even referred to by the characters in The Lord of the Rings. All enduring popular literature had this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure." [brought to my attention with the maps zine]
51- "All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."
59- D'Aularire's Book of Greek Myths [learned about this at work this fall]
63- "Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous world itself." [this is one of the found cats' who came with this name at my parent's house]
79- De Chirico streets [he uses this phrase at least 3 times, but it is a good one]
84- Harriet the Spy [one of my favorite books that made me excited about reading when I was younger]
88- "A quest is often, among other things, an extended bout of inspired madness."
91- comics abandoning children [This exhibition allowed me to discover the wonderful power of comics.]
93- "We should tell stories that we would have liked as kids. ...stories that, over time, build up an intricate, involved, involving mythology that is also accessible and comprehensible at any point of entry."
-"retell the same stories with endless embellishment...The key, as in baroque music, is repetition with variation. [I've been learning about Baroque art all summer.]
-"Let's blow their little minds."
93-94- "...but a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true...that everything you know is wrong..."
98- pop artisan incorporates "all the aesthetic moments her or she have ever fallen in love with in other movies or songs or novels..."
-"...a record of consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place."
100- Bladerunner [saw this on the big screen this spring]
115- "In order to destroy the world it becomes necessary to save it."
120- "...testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with."
124- King's College Cambridge [I stayed here a few nights while studying abroad]
125- H. P. Lovecraft [read about him recently in The Believer magazine]
132- "Perhaps all short stories can be understood as ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past."
133- Lawrence Weschler [just read one of his books]
137- Julius Knipel's regrets
139- "In the end it isn't nostalgia but loneliness of an impossible beauty and profundity that is the great theme of Knipl."
-clubs- "'Fellowship,' as a loyal member of the Holey Pocket League tells Mr. Knipl, 'is the only thing we crave.'" [I'm a big fan of clubs and fellowship- well when they're for the right things like pickles and corduroy.]
146- "I missed Pittsburgh."
151- "this time The Great Gatsby read me."

153- Bruce Springsteen [see last post]

154- dirigible [word bandied about this spring]

167- "Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed."

170- "One search, with a sole objective: a home, a world to call me own." [parallels here including the D.H. Lawrence book I read by Geoff Dyer earlier this year.]

205- "a baby chick of a man" [baby chicks!!!!]

August 3, 2008

2008-08-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

Bye-bye Natalia
Michel Faber

While I don't usually post short stories (well ones not in books) or magazines I can't resist mentioning this one since it fits into this theme of writing about music I've become immersed in once again. My friend Megan passed along this is a story of a Ukrainian woman who needs to get out of the Ukraine- needs to get out. Her favorite band is Inward Path, a "dark metal" band. Natalia corresponds with a man through a mail-order bride service, Montana Bob. They start talking about music and it turns out he likes Bruce Springsteen. I'll let you read the story before giving it all away. Let's just say it matters that he likes Bruce Springsteen. Natalia is fabulous.

A few bits:
257- "she isn't much of a smiler"
267- (gloomy poster images) "...they make her happy, these things. Or, to be more precise, they don't make her unhappiness any worse."
-"Explaining what makes great music great is impossible, especially in a foreign tongue, but she can at least give him a flavor of Inward Path's poetry."
275- "What does it matter what music anyone likes?"

July 30 - August 2, 2008

2008-08-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

Killing Yourself to Live 85% of a True Story

Chuck Klosterman

2005, hardcover

16 cards

Chuck Palahniuk and Chuck Klosterman are different people. I now know that. Even better, Chuck Klosterman's books are about music and they are interesting and they are well written. Klosterman writes about music as a listener but his gift is talking about it as it fits into a person's life, how it infiltrates thinking and understanding and relationships. While the larger subject of the book is an assignment about how rock stars have died, the personal epiphanies and thoughts of Klosterman loom larger than any discoveries that could be made (and rarely were) when say, standing on the spot of the plane crash of the Big Bopper Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. The observations Klosterman offers appear true to life he lives and there's a sense of honesty in the way he writes about them (even though that might factor into the 85%, 15% ratio). While he's wrong about a few things (no one needs to own Brittney Spears releases p. 16- thinking like this is why there are so many Jethro Tull records where used records are sold), that's ok, no one is perfect and if they were, that would probably be boring.

Some excerpts [with my comments in brackets]:

1- "Ohio. I was qualified to live in Ohio."

4- "We are all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of."

9- Chelsea Hotel- Stanley Beard, "The kind of person who wants to stay in Room 100 is just a cultic follower. These are people who have nothing to do....You will see that they are not serious-minded people. You will see that they are not trying to understand anything about death."

11- "I have no idea how people travel."

-"Death is part of life."

-"However, this is not necessarily true for rock stars; sometimes rock stars don't start living until they die." [The NYTimes recently had an article related to this- artists and death]

13- "Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility. And I want to figure out why that is."

14- missing Car Rock

15- not owning vinyl or a turntable [hmmmmm]

18- diners [not that he really goes to many- chain restaurants instead]

19-compares a woman to the one in "Jolene" by Dolly Parton [How is this the first book I've read this year that mentions Dolly Parton????]

29- Honesty Room

-"...and one day I was structuring my entire life around spending time with her."

33- Springfield, Mass. Basketball Hall of Fame

-"Springfield is a poorly organized town." [So true!]

-"Like all museums, it's a rip-off." [not always true, but understood. Hall of Fames are always a rip-off.]

-"In theory, the Basketball Hall of Fame should simply serve as a pleasant distraction from the road and an opportunity to buy a t-shirt."

34- (Great White concert fire)- "In West Warwick, what used to be a tavern is now an ad hoc cemetery- which is the same role taverns play in most small towns, but not as obviously as this."

42- "Half the people who attend concerts only go so that they can tell other people that (a) certain shows were amazing, and (b) other shows sucked."

42-43- "I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it."

- Chevy Cavaliers [a friend, when I told her about his mentioning of Cavaliers as a working class car alongside IROCS, said that he probably meant Cavaliers from the 90s. And if he's not, Jettas and other non-working class cars are for suckers.]

45- Synchronicity by The Police

46- "Like all modern people, I had no relationship with anyone in my building."

53- (Washington monument) "but what is this 500-foot masonry structure supposed to tell me? What is it supposed to make me understand? ... I'll never understand why people need to see things just so they can say they saw them."

57- Petula Clark Downtown list

58- "Artists who believe they have any control over the interpretation of their work are completely fooling themselves."

61- "Every summer, Hollywood movie studios convince millions of people to see blockbuster movies they know they're going to hate."

-"Who really cares who Lindsay Lohan is dating? Almost no one."

-"But it's still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they're worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something they're missing." [v. true]

63- North Carolina

64- "...I must run: Running keeps me alive." [also in agreement here]

64- "This NC oxygen is delicious..." (mentions Superchunk) [yes except when it is above 90]

67- "At their core, the final outcome to every football game (including the Super Bowl) is wholly meaningless.

70- Mary Beth- dreams and media

79- The Standard Hotel

84- (people talking about dreams) "It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth."

86- Wilco- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- 9/11 [The thing he missed with this is that the album was streaming on the internet when 9/11 happened. That was the really eerie part of the album and 9/11.]

87- "...what can you say when skyscrapers collapse?"

91- "Right now, most rock journalism is just mild criticism with a Q & A attached. Nobody learns anything (usually) and nothing new is created (ever).

92- "...the pursuit of intellect and the so-called 'life-of-the-mind' makes people broaden their classification for what can be reasonably classified as important."

112-113- "We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little."

141- Rumors Fleetwood Mac [which I discovered is a fabulous album only this year]

143- Jeff Tweedy- transcendent moments, unintentional

-CK mentions guitar strong at the beginning of Fleetwood Mac's "I Don't Want to Know" [my favorite song on the album]- "we loved hearing the inside of a song."

164- "Nothing is going to happen tonight."

166- "...reading was a kind of neutral, reactive way to spend an evening."

171- (3 import stores) "I will never understand what people want out of life."

173- "...the things I write are often things I would never say."

195- Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark- seeing mastodons

196- westerly

198- Led Zeppelin and guys

201- talk radio- though Dick Cheney dead

202- "Right now it would be easier to find uranium than college kids."

205- "I don't miss high school at all."

-"I have nothing to say, but I can't stop myself from talking."

216- "That's the history of KISS and those are the contents of my heart."

217- "I love KISS because the world makes sense when I think about them. Art and love are the same thing. It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. It's understanding the unreasonable."

224- Kurt Cobain's death- people unconnected to Kurt, Seattle or grunge- "...suddenly chose to remember themselves in a completely different way."

227- "...his death changed the history of the living."

-"Kurt Cobain was that popular-yet-unpopular kid who dies for the sings of your personality."

230- (people needing to believe he lived under the bridge) "...Maybe it's something they need to believe, because if they don't, they will be stuck with the mildly depressing revelation that dead people are simply dead."

-"...everything else has nothing to do with the individual who died and everything to do with the people who are left behind..."

231- checking email

232- "We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy."

-"But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like....4 or 5 of these people."

-"the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real and the feelings are real- but you create the context."

233- Lucy Chance- "The bar misses you."

235- "I am ready to be alone."

July 10 - August 2, 2008

2008-08-03T13:50:00.000-07:00

Everything That Rises A Book of Convergences
Lawrence Weschler
2006 Hardcover
10 cards

I was aware of this book when McSweeney's released it, but at the time I didn't have time to read it. This fall I had time to listen to Weschler's talk from U of M's Penny Stamps lecture series and now by August I've finally finished reading the book. There are four very different sections of this book. I found the first two the most interesting in the connections the essays explore between works of art and other things. One of my favorites is a photo of the moon that Weschler compares to a late Mark Rothko painting. I also appreciate that he also puts forward such observations without trying to tie them up into perfect explanations or lines of influence.

Before this book I've experience synchronicities with material I've read and things in daily life, but this book led to a great one. On page 99 there's a reproduction of Velazquez's Aesop. Unfamiliar with this painting until encountering it here, while reading this book I saw a copy of Aesop's face by John Singer Sargent (a copy of the original Velazquez) at the Ackland Museum of Art. (I also have some photos from when I was younger that look somewhat similar to the photo on page 79 which is just creepy.)

Some excerpts:

15- "What's interesting to me is that history repeats itself, not only in how people arrange themselves but in how the portraits of them stands in relation to them."

22- Joel Meyerowitz: "...one is always carrying a chapbook of images around. ...For a street photographer like myself, randomness is everything, because that's one thin the world has in abundance and I am just passing through it with my share."

33- "The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world."
-James Agee: "how deep and deft creative intelligence must be to recognize, foresee and make permanent [that world's] best moments."
42- Benjamin: "...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
47- Rothko: "The people who weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."
-Rothko "If you are moved by the color relationships then you miss the point."
-"it draws you out and gives nothing back. Its presence, like that of a black hole, is of such density that you might lose your self there."
-"For those Rothkos do not make a statement; rather, they raise a demand, or more precisely maybe, a question."
-"There is a moment in looking at those paintings when we stop looking at them and they start looking at us- and if we are not careful, if there is not enough of us there, straight through us."
-"Rothko keeps bleeding out of aesthetical categories and into ethical ones. Not, is it beautiful? But rather, how should one lead one's life?"
-p. 46 and p. 49
-"And yet on the moon, there was nothing there...A vast interminable emptiness: a howling airless silence. A vacuum of meaning: absolute silence."
-W.H. Auden: "Out apparatniks will continue making/the usual squalid mess they call History:/all we can pray for is that artists,/chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it."
51- Eisenstein
-footnote- Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove) (forefathers) "What they dreamed, we live and what they lived we dream."
53- "Funny the way mirrors (time or otherwise, canvas or crystal) are constantly doubling and redoubling possible significations in a vertiginous regress."
-Magritte, La reproduction interdite, 1937
54- Diebenkorn- solitary women
-"Abstraction: to be lost in thought, lost to thought transported out of oneself. But out of oneself toward what?"
57- trains- standard time
-Einstein- theory of relativity- trains- "one of the principal motifs in the exploration of simultaneity"
58- Einstein- day job- Swiss patent office- "mindless drudge work, something to help pay the bills while the real work of genius transpired late at night and around the margins."
-Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, 1900
-GS: "The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away."
59- "As a tangible item, money is the most ephemeral thing in the external practical world; yet its content is the most stable since it stands as the point of indifference and balance between all other phenomena in the world..."
69- (Edward Snow- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring) LW- "Has she just turned toward us, Snow asks, by way of entry into the image, or is she just about to turn away?"
-"Capture and release. A punctum."
80- poster tribute to Bruno Schulz
89- (Herb) "He'd be my best reader and I was writing for him."
93 (Vermeer's Lacemaker) "...how everything in it is slightly out of focus, either too close or too far, except for the very thing the girl herself is focusing upon..."
133- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Midnight clock [currently it's 5 minutes to midnight]
159- (heart bumper stickers in 1981) "The phenomenon seemed at once naive and a bit hopeless- another American effort to single yourself out, to differentiate yourself (and your car) from the hordes of apparently identical beings and things. At the same time, it seemed like an attempt to reach out across the asphalt to signal your humanity (through what you hearted) to other souls..."
169- Persian proverb- "Fear those who fear you."
182- Rhonda Roland Shearer wrote in 1999 about Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.- "Duchamp had subtly superimposed a photo of his own strangely feminine face onto Da Vinci's portrait, before pencilling in the wicked little moustache and goatee."
-decades speculation about Da Vinci superimposing his face on the Mona Lisa
218- Proust
220- every cell in our bodies replaced every 7 years
223- W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn- "The greater the distance, the clearer the view..."
232- Lao-Tzu- "...We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want..."

July 28 - 30, 2008

2008-07-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

The Importance of Music to Girls

Lavinia Greenlaw

2007, hardcover

10 cards

The music issue of The Believer came the other day and in it was an essay by Lavinia Greenlaw. In the essay she deals with issues of relationships, music and being, merging them all into a beautiful telling of life lived. I rushed to the library to find her book which sounded equally wonderful in title, The Importance of Music to Girls (!), and started reading fast and furiously.

It's a good book, it is, but somehow the magic in this essay doesn't carry through the whole book, though some moments are priceless and perfectly captured. It's always odd to me that people who love music, those who listen rather than make it, don't write as universally about its appeal as it seems one could. I haven't figured out the mystery myself by any means. Perhaps by trying to put into words those moments when you listen to music by yourself lets too many other people into the room. I believe someone can do it, and I thought it might be this book, but not so much.

Some excerpts:

14- "For the first time I understood that belonging was a way of escaping myself and of finding a place in the world..."

15- "I could keep up, but I did not belong because I had not learned to contain myself within the figure I was making."

26- records, starting with what's at hand- your parent's collection- Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water

-"I read the titles and listened to the lyrics as if deciphering hieroglyphics."

28- "On this album, Dylan is feeling out the big words in particular and letting them go only when the edges have been worn down."

38- corduroy

46- (Donny Osmond) "...decided he would be my favorite pop star. Somehow I knew I needed one and as I'd never heard of him, I assumed no one else had either. I was looking for my first musical discovery and wanted it to be as private and singular as my feelings about the boy at school."

48- "I began to understand pop as a construction."

-"Marooned among them were bands I was beginning to classify. Like a child filling a stamp album or collecting eggs, I needed to create order and name names."

49- categories

52- "The waiting of childhood, the waiting to be told what was happening, was replace by waiting for something to happen- the arrival of a bus, the appearance of a friend."

84- "I was becoming a girl as instructed by girls but I knew I wasn't a real girl, at least not of this kind."

100- Eddie and the Hot Rods

101- The Damned

110- "...I realized that I was in a room with boys and music but nothing was meant to happen."

111- "As a rule of thumb, rock was for boys and disco was for girls, but soul was a place where we might meet."

112- "The interesting boys did not sing along, they discussed..."

114- "(Why did girls never play air guitar? Did we sing along because singing was what girls did or was it that girls only sand because they didn't play air guitar?)"
118- Punk- collaging images from NME

122- "God Save the Queen"- #1, blank spot on the charts

-"Jamie Reid's cover was more disturbing than the song itself."

127- Quote from Johann Wolfgag von Goethe, A Theory of Colors: "...color...exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union by augmentation and neutralization, by communication and dissolution."

128- "The colors of punk, like its rumor, set off a vibration and cracks began to appear- orange socks, blue hair, lime-green nails, pink trousers."

-"In punk, color combinations were dishwater and vomit. It was a form of aesthetic resistance, a spectrum chosen to remind the world of all that was unnatural or decayed: pink like rubber rather than roses, green like snot rather than leaves."

132- "...while the boys were serious about music, they didn't expect me to be so too."

135- "The strongest impulse I had was toward freedom."

170- Barthes quote (though not an amazing one)

-"The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone."

-"An LP was something of substance and vision."

172- "I bought two Velvet Underground LPs as soon as I found them..."

-"I declared allegiance, took a position and always had a view."

173- Joseph Beuys

-Pompidou Centre- "but I had never before come across a building (or song, or person...?) that did not hide how it was put together."

181- NME- "Serious music criticism was then very serious indeed. Records were assessed not only musically but also according to their cultural context and philosophical connotations."

-"I liked the way these critics wrote and feel under the rhetorical spell of their semicolons, qualifications and parentheses."

183- "These journalists used a cultural vocabulary that we deployed with the same thoughtlessness as teenage slang: postmodern (good), semiotic (?), eclectic (usually good), esoteric (v. good), moderne (trying too hard), postindustrial (interesting), decadent (usually bad)."

-"Irony protected you from accusations of sincerity- so much for being serious."

190- "Daniel and I discussed the world, but only in theory- Barthes and Foucault."

194- "Was it, after all, that men wanted to tell women things and not be told?"

200- t-shirt in a window- "Fuck Art, Let's Dance. I copied it onto the back of a postcard and sent it to Daniel. It was the first love letter I'd ever written."

July 15 - 27, 2008

2008-07-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

Magic for Beginners

Kelly Link

2005, Paperback

7 cards

Kelly Link, the book's back cover says, lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where I used to live. It would have been wonderful to meet her and talk about wonderful things like Faery Handbags. But then again maybe it's better to read about Faery Handbags, because as she writes, "Meeting writers is usually disappointing at best."

Faery Handbags is the title of the first short story in this captivating book and while it stands out as the shiniest gem in the bunch, the others are enjoyable too in their descriptions and tales told about zombies and the people who wear cat skins. I am always drawn to writers who notice the minor things that make up life, and sometimes the things that make it seem worth living. Link notices Cadbury Creme eggs, Moon Pies and (perhaps invents) squeezeble pork (which, while not something I would enjoy others might), with the best of them (I remember first noticing such slight mentions of everyday things that fill our lives in Douglas Coupland's books). Link arrives at truisms in her stories with moments in thrift stores and with friends and families, truisms that we all need to be reminded of sometimes, and truisms we hope are indeed true.

Some excerpts:

1- "I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. ... Everything is arranged by color, somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful."

2- "But the point is, if you're looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard."

4- Scrabble

-zippery

5- faery handbag

7- "purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people..."

8- "Even nightmares have to sleep now and then."

9- "He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough to figure out how to fit in."

11- "It's better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up."

12- "I also know how to say I love you, but I'm not going to ever say it to anyone again, except Jake, when I find him.

14- Cadbury Creme egg

20- "Remember when you don't know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble."

37- squeezable pork, Moon Pies

39- "The customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole."

52- "'Nobody ever really knows what they want,' Charley said. 'Why should that change after you die?'"

65- "Summer is the time of ghosts. In winter, ghosts are easy to spot."

-"There is no word for war or travel."

77- donuts

119- "her mother has painted a little door. It isn't a real door, except when Tilly goes over to look at it, it is real."

129- "The witch vomits up...love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read)..."

137- "And when you have children you need houses to put them in."

161- "'Do you like museums?' Will says. She looks like a girl who goes to museums."

166- postcard

168- lemurs

170- "Modern art is a wast of time. When the zombies show up you can't worry about art. Art is for people who aren't worried about zombies."

170-171- things Soap has been thinking about

171- Busby Berkeley

176- "Everyone has a zombie contingency plan."

178- olives

179- "He doesn't belong anywhere."

181- shopleaving

206- orange-juice colored corduroy couch

207- "What kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch."

-"She's an enigma wrapped in a mysterious t-shirt."

208- "When the woman who invented Hello Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, 'Because she has no mouth.'"

-pirate-magicians

212- Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich

218- "Can I ask you a question?"

220- Meeting writers...

235- "It would be easier if I had a brother ...Or a sister. I'm tired of being good all the time. If I had a sibling, then we could take turns being good...but it sucks having to figure out everything all by myself."

236- (calls to the phone booth) J. "complains about all the things there are to complain about, and the silent person on the other end listens and listens."

243- (Talis) "Somebody has to be the person who doesn't [talk]. The person who listens."

244- "Except secrets can't have secrets, they just are."

249- maps

-corn mosaic

250- "Bob Dylan is singing about monkeys."

251- "He writes in his blog about what he's reading."

256- "...I didn't get any postcards."

262- "Imaginary houses are sexy. Real houses are work."

274- records

278- "Tell me a story so that I'll remember you."

287- kazoo

292- giraffes

297- "I love you, but it's not about love, Ed, it's about timing."

June 29 - July 14, 2008

2008-07-20T18:48:00.000-07:00

The Annotated Hunting of the Snark

The Definitive Edition

Lewis Carroll

edited by Martin Gardner

introduction by Adam Gopnik

hardcover

Well of course Adam Gopnik wrote the introduction to this edition of The Hunting of the Snark. That's why he's so great. He studied art history, curated one of the best exhibitions ever (High & Low at MoMA with Kirk Varnedoe) and now writes brilliant essays about children, families and books. With each new volume I read Lewis Carroll continues to amaze. While this is a short tome (despite all of the extras added to this version) of 8 fits, it covers a lot of ground. What are you searching for? How will you find it? Where will you go? The answers are only gained through life itself. The Hunting of the Snark also offers one of the most ingenious maps ever created.

A few excerpts

-xviii- Adam Gopnik- "The poem defeats any of these attempts to restrict it to a single reading... We all go out on our quests with a blank maps..."

-xxxii- Lewis Carroll in 1896, "Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant."

3- "Inscribed to a dear child: in memory of golden summer hours and whispers of a summer sea."

15- "What I tell you three times is true."

21- "And his enemies 'Toasted-cheese.'"

-"But his courage is perfect! And that, after all, Is the thing that one needs with a Snark."

28- "A map they [the crew] could all understand. ... 'What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?' So the Bellman would cry and the crew would reply, 'They are merely conventional signs!'"

-"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank' (so the crew would protest) 'that he's brought us the best- A perfect and absolute blank!'"

42- saying it in other languages- "But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!"

- (seek the Snark) "To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care; To pursue it with forks and hope; To threaten its life with a railway share; To charm it with smiles and soap!"

-"For the Snark's a peculiar creature, that won't Be caught in a Commonplace way. Do all that you know, and try all that you don't: Not a chance must be wasted to-day!"

45- galumphing

-Jubjub

55- (Butcher to the beaver) "It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books would have taught it in seventy years."

70- "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."

July 17 - 20, 2008

2008-07-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris

2008, hardcover

9 cards

You might think the painting on the cover of David Seadaris's new book is intriguing. (The jacket was designed by the fabulous Chip Kidd.) Perhaps you even looked to see who it was by. That Vincent van Gogh might have painted it as a joke in art school is great. When I've mentioned I was reading this book to people lately, they've mentioned they heard it isn't as good as some of his other books. While maybe the crazy tales of his childhood have been told and stack up differently in terms of a life lived when middle aged, Sedaris's stories still entertain and make note of the minor things in life with acute precision. Living now where I do, references to Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Durham ring true in new ways. Many of these stories have been published in The New Yorker, but even those still entertain with second reads.

A few selections

3- germs

4- cocktail at a supermarket

9- "every year 5,000 children are startled to death"

10- "No surprises, no practical jokes, nothing unexpected, but a parent can't control everything and there's still the outside world to contend with, a world of backfiring cars and their human equivalents."

15- "I also didn't want to go alone, and this was where our problem started."

21- "...what was a vacation but a chance to be someone different?"

36 Chapel Hill

39- "The idea was that we were different, not like the rest of America..."

40- old-timey, malarkey

46- sweat angel

-"it was hard to live in a college town and not go to college."

48- "Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive."

49- "velveteen for everybody"

-"It was only at Halloween that we were allowed to choose our own outfits."

-pirate

-hobo- "It's a word you don't often hear anymore."

50- "the hobo roughed it by choice"

51- (sweater) "Having been destroyed, it is now indestructible, meaning I can wear it without worry."

-"...if I have one fashion rule, it's this: never change."

52- "What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion."

61- "It's a pretty sorry world when wearing a bow tie amounts to being 'out there.' I'm just not sure which is worse, the people who consider it out there that someone's wearing a bow tie, or the person who thinks he's out there for wearing it."

62- "Grown or not. I still feel best- more true to myself- when dressed like a hobo."

89- (Chicago) "Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, thought I'm not exactly sure why."

107- "her hair, like her face, was the color of old cement."

113- "Never live alone"

135- North Carolina Museum of Art

136- postcards

141- "The idea of matching artwork to decor was, to me, an abomination..."

148- doughnut

152- "the sorts of things that are not for everyone"

153- "It's the things you don't buy that stay with you the longest."

154- (washer and dryer) "they remind me that I'm doing fairly well"

-(skeleton) "You are going to die."

159- "What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone's guess."

176- Kate Bush

182- "magpies are constantly searching for a way out"

196- "a single flaming mouse"

213- "Why is it you never see a baby squirrel?"
234- "At a nearby table there's always a couple in their late seventies, holding their menus with trembling, spotted hands..."

243- 4th grade field trip- American Tobacco plant- Durham

244- "My room was clean and orderly, and if I'd had my way it would have smelled like an album jacket the moment you removed the plastic. That is to say, it would have smelled like anticipation."

263- index cards

289- "Japanese is a listener's language. 'What's not being mentioned is usually more important that what is.'"

290- the mass-produced mistakes

293- "But nobody's afraid of moths." "I am."

301- "...and you're not going anywhere until you finish your pickles."

303-(sheet of rules written in Japanese, symbols) "either 'not eating candy hearts' or 'no falling in love.'"

May 29 - July 9, 2008

2008-07-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan The Essential Interviews

edited by Jonathan Cott

2006, hardcover

35 cards

Quotes from Bob Dylan's interviews reminded me of Andy Warhol's approach to the interview, playing with it and making it into something greater than it started. While there are a lot of interviews to read here one sees how true Dylan stays to his approach to meaning what he says and saying what he means both with interviewers who get it and those who do not.

Select lines:

ix- "To live is to be slowly born." Antonine de saint- Exupery, Flight to Arras

23- "I looked around and saw all the people pointing fingers at the bomb. But the bomb is getting boring, because what's wrong goes much deeper than the bomb. What's wrong is how few people are free. Most people walking around are tied down to something that doesn't let them really speak."

24- "All I can do it be myself. I can't tell them how to change things, because there's only one way to change things, and that's to cut yourself off from all the chains. That's hard for most people to do."

25- "Just because you're free to move doesn't mean you're free."

38- "songs are songs...I don't believe in expecting too much out of any one thing."

44- "There aren't any answers, man. Or any questions..."

45- French guy, unpaginated book in a box

48- "Most people who don't like rock and roll can't relate to other people."

49- "You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist."

51- collecting

53- "You gotta listen to the Staples Sisters, Smokey and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas. That's scary to a lot of people. It's sex that's involved. It's not hidden. It's real."

54- "Great paintings shouldn't be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men's rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out."

-"Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner."

58- "If it happens, it happens. Whatever my hopes, it never turns out."

84- "Happiness is a kind of cheap word."

86- "Despite everybody who has been born and has died, the world had just gone on."

"I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet."

96- "Art, if there is such a thing, is in the bathrooms, everybody knows that."

101- "My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing- only as seen inside a bigger thing."

104- "You can't lost what you never had."

106- "People have one great blessing- obscurity- and not really too many people are thankful for it."

108- "There doesn't seem to be any tomorrow. Every time I wake up, not matter in what position, it's always been today."

116- "No, I think it was Ben Franklin. He said (I'm not quoting it right) something like, 'For a man to be (something or other)- at east, he must not tell all he knows, nor say all he sees.'"

128- "You know, you might sometimes be with someone who's got no song to sing, and I believe you can help someone out..."

175- "The highest purpose of art is to inspire."

206- "But, you know, sometimes you get too close to something and you got to get away from it to be able to see it."

215 "...I see beauty where other people don't."

218 (truths) "One is that if you try to be anyone but yourself, you will fail; if you are not true to your own heart, you will fail. Then again, there's no success like failure."

220- "Art is supposed to take you out of your chair. It's supposed to move you from one space to another."

228- "People are people to me."

229- hearts beating in the same rhythm

232- "The only true mirrors are puddles of water."

235- "Uncompromising, that's what makes a good artist."

248- "The simple things which are true usually astound people."

259- "Everybody sees in the mirror what he sees- no two people see the same thing."

262- (soul mates existing) "Sure they do, but sometimes you never meet them."

-"Your real feelings come out when you're free to be alone."

298- "Protest is anything that goes against the ordinary and the established."

299- "I never really like The Basement Tapes..."

300- "People need a leader more than a leader needs people, really."

306- "I'm always in love." (Jeff Tweedy read this interview)

312- "So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cause nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing."

336- "Never give 100 percent"

400- "It's anything you want it to be."

June 21 - 28, 2008

2008-07-12T10:49:00.000-07:00

Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

The Pennyroyal Edition

Designed and illustrated by Barry Moser

10 cards

Anytime is probably a perfect time to read Carroll's books but with the notions that surround summer and this edition's quote by James Kincaid, "dreaming as summers die" and the beautiful lines that complete the text, summer indeed seems to be a "frabjous" time to pick this volume up. Such a book, filled with of secrets, which, when whispered or discussed in the summer, could intoxicate many a mind.

Alice's encounter with the Jabberwocky poem reminds me of my own experience reading Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange in high school. The words were unlike any I had encountered before, but somehow but continuing to read, some sort of sense and meaning took shape, and like Alice, my head filled with ideas even though I wasn't exactly sure of anything. The secret is to keep going forward. While I still need to learn more about chess, I love Carroll's questions posed about language, words and meaning, "Callooh! Callay!"

Some excerpts:

xi- "For Alice, the story is a magic potion to ward off the storm-wind of adulthood and death; for Carroll, it is a holding and freezing action. Words are a cabalistic stay against loss, growth, forgetting and betraying."

xi-xii-"The hope to hold and contain is counteracted by a recognition that such a hope is futile."

xii- "The gain is really a loss, the advance a decline"

xiii- "names are 'useful' to the namers."

xiv- "words mean more than we mean to express when we use them"

-Carroll; "Poesta fit non nascitur"

-"Next when you are describing

A shape or a sound or tint,

Don't state the matter plainly.

But put it in a hint:

And learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint."

-James Kincaid, 1982- "dreaming as the summers die"

4- Footnote- Alice's birthday is May 4th (3 days before mine!)

5- (snow against the window panes) "Just as if someone was kidding the window all over outside."

6- "Let's pretend"

10- "Imperials fiddlestick!"

11- "Mind the volcano!"

13- Jabberwocky

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

14- "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas- only I don't know exactly what they are!"

15- "We can talk," said the Tiger-lily, "when there's anybody worth talking to."

22- "It's a great game of chess that's being played- all over the world- if this is the world at all, you know."

23- "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

24- "Speak in French when you ca'n't think of the English for a thing- turn out your toes as you walk- and remember who you are!"

27- "Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!"

30- "What's the use of their having names," the Gnat said, "if they won't answer to them, "said Alice; "but it's useful to the people that name them, I supposed. If not, why do things have names at all?"

32- "'I suppose you don't want to lose your name?' 'No, indeed,' Alice said."

34- "...And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it."

38- contrariwise

44- (Alice) "If I wasn't real...I shouldn't be able to cry."

52- (Queen, living backwards) "...but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

54- (Alice lonely) Queen: "consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!"

-Alice, "one ca'n't believe impossible things."

-Queen, "...Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

62- "'Must a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully. 'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: 'my name means the shape I am...'"

-Alice, "'Why do you sit out here all alone?' Humpty Dumpty, 'Why, because there's nobody with me!'"

64- Alice, "'...one ca'n't help growing older.' said Humpty Dumpty, 'but two can.'"

65- un-birthday present

66- ''When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.'"

-"'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean different things."

-"'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master- that's all.'"

67- asks Humpty Dumpty the meaning of Jabberwocky

-"You see its like a portmanteau- there are two meanings packed up into one word"

-toves- live on cheese

68- "In winter, when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight-

In spring, when woods are getting green, I'll try and tell you what I mean.

In summer, when the days are long, perhaps you'll understand the song:"

69- "In autumn, when the leaves are brown, Take pen and ink, and write it down."

-"I sent a message to the fish..."

79- (Unicorn to Alice) "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?"

82- Looking-glass cakes

83- Alice- "'So I wasn't dreaming, after all,' she said to herself, 'unless-unless we're all part of the same dream.'"

84- Punch and Judy

-Alice, "I don't want to be anybody's prisoner. I want to be a Queen."

88- "It's as strong as soup"

100- (Red Queen) "Always speak the truth- think before you speak- and write it down afterwards."

102- (White Queen) "What is the cause of lightning?"

-(Alice) "It's exactly like a riddle with no answer."

103- hippopotamus

116 "In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?"

June 25 - 28, 2008

2008-06-29T18:13:00.000-07:00

A Series of Small Boxes

Thomas Devaney

2007, paperback

3 cards

Thomas Devaney is a brilliant poet. He writes of life and life lived in such precise ways while not forgetting stamps and refrigerator boxes from childhood. I discovered his poetry also through the June issue of the Believer. The review offered a few lines of the title poem, A Series of Small Boxes (which you can read in full here). After reading those lines I knew I needed this book. While the title poem is still my favorite many gems and brilliant lines linger throughout the entire book. He even writes about Nothing in a well-informed wrestling with John Cage. The fabulous photographer Zoe Strauss, whose work I saw at the Whitney a few years ago, even took his photograph for the back jacket.

Selections:

1- "Which I also love in a way one can love

A City one has loved and been loved in

Because it enters you, in a way, as you walk,

Buy stamps, tell time..."

3- "Does silence have to mean a lack of silence?"

4- eyes, saying hello

6- "Is this what 'half' looks like?"

8- "all those times we never kept meeting"

10-12- A Series of Small Boxes

12- "corrugated magic"

13- "Clouds replace the clouds."

18- donuts

22- WE STILL REFOLD MAPS

23- "New Jersey is the greatest poem never written."

35- "Birdwatchers had nothing on what the birds saw."

39- "The most remarkable love poems in the world have nothing to do with it."

-"The calm, late-night companionship of a book.

Assured in words not to be reassured in words.

No promises past the page only all the moment can hold."

41- One Hour, October

-skyscraper

43- "Like records when they were records and letters letters."

46- Rimbaud

54- "Everything I had to say I didn't need to say."

55- John Cage

-"the Wallace Stevens line: 'Nothing that is not there and nothing that is"

-"Nothing + Nothing = Something, that is 'Nothing' which is really something," I said not knowing where that came from.

-"Here is a line for not talking, which isn't silence"

56- "I am only describing, as words are one way, and walking is another."

-"new John Cages get added"

June 21 - 27, 2008

2008-06-29T17:51:00.001-07:00

The Age of Dreaming

A Novel

Nina Revoyr

Paperback, 2008

4 cards

This book has an amazing title, one which grabbed me as I read one of the Believer Magazine's wonderful reviews. I enjoyed reading this book though it would fall more into an interesting summer read than one that took my breath away. The story weaves between past and present in a way similar to Water for Elephants. An interesting, well-crafted character drives the story and it carries a great sense of place (Los Angeles) throughout.

Selections:

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." Nietzsche

14- "And the stranger's phone call yesterday morning was akin to a chance meeting with a friend from one's youth, who reminds one of how much has changed in the intervening years, and how far one's strayed from the course one first embarked upon."

15- "There is no one else who remembers what we did or who we were."

16- Alzheimer's

20- "It is a tragedy when a man's great contributions to the world, once heralded by all, simply vanish beneath the rollings waves of time."

22- "...with each turn, more of the city disappears."

30- "There was no future, only the present, and the project of the moment was everything."

61- "'You will always be the standard against which I measure myself. May I always fall just short of your mark.'"

62- Green Lantern- coffee shop

-(Los Angeles) "people seldom gather to engage in substantive conversation"

77 (father's words) "'Live where you are, no only where you think you should be. Otherwise, you will end up living nowhere.'"

81- "For silent movies are a singular forms, one that viewers cannot appreciate without a basis for understanding what they see."

-"lost too has been the language to discuss them."

107- "Almost always, I undertake these excursions alone. There is something to be said for experiencing great art, or nature, but oneself; the absence of other people makes the enjoyment more pure, and one's perceptions grow acute and discerning."

-"Nonetheless I cannot deny that it is pleasant to occasionally partake in the company of others."

-diners- Silver Spoon on Hollywood Blvd.

134- Book Haven

136

141- "I wanted to ask her a million questions, but did not know where to begin."

188- "'he's interested in my mind.'"

240- audience- supply the absent connections

254- diner

262- speaking one's heart

326- "We understood that moving images are the catalysts of dreams- more eloquent when undisturbed by voices."

June 21 - 22, 2008

2008-06-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Hardcover, Peter Pauper Press, Mt. Vernon

5 cards

The cover of this book offers the sense that this is a true, classic library book and the pages, with their black text and red page numbers and illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, further emphasizes its classic nature. There are also lots of great stamps from the library all over the copy I read and, according to one stamp, I think it may have been acquired by the library on February 10, 1959. Does any of this matter? Perhaps not, but all of this made me wonder about all of the people who have read this copy of Alice in Wonderland. While familiar with the story, I realized my knowledge had been filtered through the Disney. The original book is, of course, unparalleled. Carroll masterfully integrates into the story issues of questions and answers that resonate in Duchampian ways. Alice deals with issues of identity, knowing who one is and where one is going. Carroll also plays with language and meaning and related issues of différance. A story worth reading and any and many ages since as one acquires more knowledge the lens through which one reads will continue to shift, revealing additional treasures within the story's sentences.

Selections

5- Proem- "Our wanderings to guide."

10- "In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again."

11- maps

19- "...but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way."

20- "Curiouser and curiouser!"

-"Good-bye feet!"

23- "Who in the world am I? Ah that's the great puzzle!"

27 hippopotamus

33- "Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words and what's more I don't believe you do either!"

34- "But who had won?"

78- "'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?'

'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

'I don't much care where-' said Alice.

'Then it doesn't matter which way you walk,' said the Cat."

-"'-so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation. 'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.'"

85- "'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied: 'at least I mean what I say- that's the same thing, you know.'

'Not the same thing a bit,' said the Hatter."

87- Alice, "'I think you might do something better with the time,' she said, 'than wasting it in asking riddle that have no answers.'

'If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, 'you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'"

91- Hatter "'it's very easy to take more than nothing.'"

93- drawing everything that begins with an M

94- drawing of muchness

-Alice, "'I don't think-' 'Then you shouldn't talk,' said the Hatter."

114-115- Duchess, "'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them otherwise.'"

-Duchess, "'I make you a present of everything I've said as yet.'"

117- Gryphon, picture

128- "'Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?'"

131- porpoise, purpose- "'I mean what I say.'"

-Alice, "'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'"

-Gryphon- adventures first

134- "'What is the use of repeating all that stuff,' the Mock Turtle interrupted, 'if you don't explain it as you go on?...'"

145- guinea pig cheered

153- letter

155- "'If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, 'that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know,' he went on, spreading out the verses on his knee and looking at them with one eye; 'I seem to see some meaning in them, after all.'"

March ? - June 17, 2008

2008-06-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

Against Fashion

Clothing as Art 1850-1930

Radu Stern

Hardcover, 2003

27 cards

I learned about the Deutscher Werkbund and the Dress Reform movement in Germany last year and this book offered the perfect next step in reading about fashion and dress reform ideas from that period as well as my current thoughts about clothing and clothing production. While artists today like Andrea Zittel are exploring changing clothing habits with the Smock Shop, reading essays from 1850-1930 allow one some space from which to consider what she is doing, and form one's own ideas about fashion, clothing and the forces surrounding it all. While this book covers a period on the brink and within the Industrial Revolution, today from the other side it seems we're in need of another dose of dress reform and rebellion against fashion, particularly when companies like the GAP use child slaves to make clothes today still.

Selections from the cards:

2- "...fashion appears to be not just a consequence of capitalism, but one of the factors that contributed to its rise."

3- "The historical avant-garde would appropriate dress design as a privileged field in which the artist could overstep the limits of 'pure' art and act directly on daily life."

4- Romanticism- first important reaction against fashion

-Louis Magron on the true Romantic, "...He does not acquiesce to an accepted fashion, he creates his own. Instead of resembling everyone else, he aspires to be himself."

5- William Morris, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

8- Greek dress- hanging of garments from the shoulders

19- Kandinsky, dress for Gabrielle Munter

44- giberna portatutto- bag attached to a belt

45- Productivists- "utility the only valid criterion that could give legitimacy to artistic activity"

-"'pure' art- no social utility, considered unacceptable"

-1921, Nokolai Tarabukin, "The last painting has been painted."

-Rodchenko- "constructive life is the art of the future. Art that fails to become a part of life will be catalogued in the museum of archaeological antiquities."

-Varvara Stepanova "our task is to find ourselves a place in life"

46- Aleksei Filippov, "artists in varying ways have merely depicted the world but their task is to change it."

48- Tatlin- constructed dress

49- color- chosen for the ability to conceal dirt

50- modular concept for clothes

61- Suprematist dress

67- Ramon Gomez de la Serna- poem on dresses

94- archaeology

96- George H. Darwin's Development in Dress

100- pockets

102- "why do we black and polish our boots?"

103- "patent-leather is an imitation of common blacking"

111- Oscar Wilde- Slaves of Fashion

113- Oscar Wilde- Woman's Dress

-(high heels) "...but what I object to is that the height should be given to the heel only and not to the sole of the foot also."

-warmth, material made of

116- "Ruins, again, may be picturesque, but beautiful they never can be, because their lives are meaningless."

118- "There is a divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and no more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant..."

119- "...every right article of apparel belongs equally to both sexes, and there is absolutely no such things as a definitely feminine garment."

122- Josef Hoffman- original vs. en masse

123- "One can recognize someone from far away by their personal way of walking or by their movements...In the same way, we would like an element of dress and the way in which dress is worn to be as familiar as the elements mentioned above so that we can recognize it as being in accord with the wearer's character."

131- Henry Van De Velde- visible seams

-"Everything we do to express our personality will strengthen the units of force that we represent, which will then converge to elevate the level of community life as a result of our individual efforts."

144- Friedrich Deneken- seams "make use of them as natural decorative elements"

152- Lilly Reich "Clothes are utilitarian objects and not works of art."

155- Giacomo Balla- Male Futurist Dress A Manifesto

158- no black and yellow

170- Futurist Italian tie- metal

184- Sonia Delaunay- Cezanne- "In an attempt to create volume, he enlarged his strokes of color and destroyed the outline of the object, the drawing. He began to destroy outlines, just as that the Impressionists had destroyed color and it is through him that dependence on academic rules finally disappeared."

-Matisse- inspiration

185- Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay- "Geometric patterns will never become old-fashioned, simply because they have never been fashionable."

186- Sonia Delaunay, "Rather than adapting dresses to the way we walk, we have had to adapt our gait to the dresses, which is absurd."

-"ideas shouldn't be taken from the past"

June 3-18, 2008

2008-06-21T19:51:00.000-07:00

Ed Ruscha and Photography
Sylvia Wolf
hardcover
10 cards

I saw Ed Ruscha 8 years ago at the Hirshorn where he gave a performance talk. I was intrigued by this man who spoke of Os and he definitely made me go, "huh?" The Believer interview a few years ago prompted me think about his use of words in new terms. Then luckily a series of his parking lots photographs this winter propelled me headlong into my new found fascination with his work and online talks (here and here) and serendipitously an exhibition of his photographs and books at the Art Institute. This is the catalogue for the exhibition, and a publication that explores a definitive and fascinating part of the artist's career. Sylvia Wolf takes great care in exploring this aspect of Ruscha's work. Ed Ruscha early on was interested in collage, adding yet one more layer to his brilliance.

Selections from the cards:
14- stamp collection
18 and 19- 2 early photographs
21- collage

25-Kurt Schwitters

24- Ross the rooster

25- "Distressing the print gave it added presence, as did pairing it with another like image."

45- photograph with the word WAR

48 and 49- wigs in windows

53- refrigerator photo

55- Yashica camera- "with a twin-lens reflex camera, there is an element of distance that makes taking pictures a private experience- detached from direct eye contact with a subject."

60- (office sign- Zurich) "The names of individuals and businesses etched in metal suggested a permanence of information, unlike the ever-changing plastic signage he knew from Los Angeles."

69- ER on not speaking a foreign language- "...tried to figure out what they meant, based on pure visual analysis."

-French affichistes

70- Cannes

78- The Artist's Shoes

79- "I was making observations but occasionally I got something beyond observation, where I might have uncovered something that I could use later on."

85- El Greco, View and Plan of Toledo, c. 1610

"I had this notion that maybe I could take some pictures of Toledo and somehow, at some point in the future, I could look back and say, 'Look at this. It's the same as it was in El Greco's time."

87- R. A. Bertilli, Continuous Profile of Mussolini, 1933

89- "[Europe] added the weight of history to the whole picture...When I got back, I had more inspiration for American culture."

95- "...art springs directly from life, with all its anguish.."

110

111- Duchamp's retrospective

115- Wallace Berman's Semina

-Rejected ad

122- reaction from gas station attendants

128- California- ER: "...it has to do with a collage in your mind of what this place is all about."

129- Some Los Angeles Apartments- "not the ideal home ownership that was the American dream"

144- Thirty four parking lots ER: "Those patterns and their abstract design quality mean nothing to me. I'll tell you what is more interesting: the oil droppings on the ground."

-"sociological approach to the urban landscape"

163- "The affluence and decay, opportunity and waste reflected in some of Ruscha's books and photographic worlds of the mid- to late 60s is characteristic of a volatile time in American history."

-"By singling out a word in his art, Ruscha makes its meaning ambiguous and invites a broad range of interpretations."

164- Records

-his collection of records- ER: "I wanted to chop a little piece of of my life and put it in a book."

169- Bernd and Hilla Becher

180- Mason Williams, "Creativity was a lifestyle, not something that was a separate activity, linked to any institution or movement."

184- 1970, installation Venice Biennale, Chocolate Room

187- (his books becoming familiar by 1972) "with the first one, people did not know what I was up to. There was genuine doubt in their minds. I liked that, the idea of the question mark..."

190- 5 Girlfriends ER: "going back and retracing steps that you went through as a person...part of a mapping idea."

194- materials

204- ER: "Excuses are what create art for me. I sometimes pick a random subject to make art. It doesn't have to be riveted to my soul as some valuable things. Sometimes it can be something ridiculous, and a lot of time it is."

240- collecting aerial photographs of LA

241- 5 photographs, edges of books, 2001

-"Photography is the medium best-suited to record the present, which, in the end, may be its allure for Ruscha."

-"Ruscha's curiosity about everything, "not just the interesting parts" is what drives him to seek inspiration in both high and low culture"

June 3-6, 2008

2008-06-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Existential/Activist Painter

The Example of Leon Golub

Donald Kuspit

1986, paperback

3 cards (due to underlining in my own copy)

The moment I saw this book at Book Trader in New Haven I knew I needed it. There had been a session at CAA about Golub and I had seen a Golub painting at the MFA in Boston (that made me recoil but also rejoice in that recoiling) and the book seemed to offer the perfect next step. A year or so later I finally picked it up again and despite the pretentious sounding title and the at times dense phrasing, Kuspit succeeds in identifying and tracing the ways in which Golub's paintings operate. He reveals but does not oversimplify. With all that continues in the world today in terms of abuse of power and human rights violations the world needs more painters in the vein of Golub and more people need to see Golub's paintings.

Smattering of notes/underlining

-opening Adorno quotes from Aesthetic Theory

4- "the brilliance of Golub's art is that it makes them horrifically explicitly, overwhelming, until they seem to touch us so directly that we violently react"

-physical surface- necessarily brutal

7- Barthes

18- "when it is realistic to think that man may end his own history"

20- "But in Golub's usage the classical image of man proclaims the tragic nature of modern man"

41- "I tend to think that the most important thing about ancient art for Golub is that it has to be excavated, and once unburied exists only in devastated form- physically wrecked as well as spiritually meaningless in the contemporary world."

46- "Golub's man is especially tragic because he knows his failure"

60- skulls and Chicago artists

104- Photography has made such appearances far from novel, indeed all too commonplace, and one of Golub's artistic problems is to get rid of this sense of the banality of evil. He attacks the issue by showing the power principle behind evil."

June 13 - 16, 2008

2008-06-17T19:48:00.001-07:00

Rock My World
Recent Art and the Memory of Rock 'n' Roll

Exhibition catalogue, CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

2002, hardcover

9 cards

Finding this book was almost as good as any rock 'n' roll song about relationships. It's what you know but it takes someone else's words to understand the situation or see your thoughts from another angle. Memory and rock 'n' roll, what a brilliant topic for an exhibition! It also included works by Jeremy Deller, Mungo Thomson and Dario Robleto, all artists whose work I've been fascinated by in the past year. Hurrah for used book stores and treasures like this that you only find through browsing.

Select passages from cards:

Untimely Meditations by Ralph Rugoff

10- discusses these works by artists being "work produced at a moment when rock itself has become historical."

-Jon Savage, current pop music is swimming "in the loop of serial pasts."

-"any rock record from the last 50 years can sound as contemporary as one produced last week. ... To some extent, contemporary art finds itself in a similar situation."

12 -perspective of the fan

-"As a historical witness, of course, the fan is suspect..."

19- Dario Robleto, Your Moonlight is in Danger of Shining For No One- use of glass from the first nuclear test explosion.

22-23 Mungo Thomson

26- (discussing Even Holloway's work) Nietzche, "When you look into an abyss the abyss also looks into you."

27- "How do we proceed when faced with a history that refuses to move forward?"

-"How can we assess the meaning of rock 'n' roll at a moment when cultural rebellion is instantly commodified..."

-"when challenging alternative rock now frequently breaks not on commercial radio, but on television commercials." [this was written in 2002! so, unfortunately, prophetic for today!]

-"these artists remind us why the meaning of a rock song cannot be found in its lyrics or in an analysis of its musical forms. Instead its meanings lies in a constellation of circumstances: the situation in which it appears, its associations with the past and also the ways it is used and transformed by its audiences and then returned to the world in different forms."

[this is totally why the 33 1/3 books can be so great.]

28- "It unearths meanings buried or hidden beneath the ruins of prior interpretations. In the process, it asks us how we can approach the past without either dismissing it or idealizing it- without reiterating the myths that can make the present seem meaningless by comparison."

-"only through creative encounter with the past that we can arrive at an accounting of the unrealized possibilities of the present."

Time Out of Mind by Ann Powers

34- (The Strokes) "Rock like this reminds us that the young can repeat the past without getting stuck; history is just a thrift store bargain to them."

-"Davis defines nostalgia as memory without pain"

-radical nostalgia

35- "It's basically what happens at every concert. ... What makes a fan sing along at top volume with a song that meant the world to her at 17..."

"-"Music's original meaning comes from its movement through time without narrative, a movement that seems to defy the linear unfolding of normal events."

36- "...the nostalgia of rock 'n' roll is more like the loss of memory that afflicts the elderly. Except that rock's dementia is voluntary, as least as first. It's not a form of preserving, it's a way of losing your mind."

-"Art that takes on the subject of rock 'n' roll faces a predicament similar to rock culture's own attempt to preserve the unpreservable, to defeat time."

37- "Listening to rock entails both reaching out and reaching in..."

Mutations by Matthew Higgs

"It makes us believe, once again, that rock 'n' roll can never die, because it never stops long enough to be done."

June 7, 2008

2008-06-15T18:36:00.001-07:00

Art

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Library collection of essays, paperback

3 cards

Emerson covers a lot of ground and in this essay he discusses art and published in 1841. Here too he writes with wide-reaching impact. Even the last lines I've included capture what Pop art exposed.

Select lines:

275- "But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old."

-"Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision."

276- "The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and unhappiness and unproductive."

-"The power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet."

-"The power depends on the depth of the artist's insight of the object he contemplates."

277- "Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs."

278- "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not."

-(visiting the Vatican one can forget) "they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his own breast"

279- (Naples) "There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place...made all that traveling ridiculous as a treadmill."

-"All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are."

280- "But true art is never fixed, but always flowing."

282- "...instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and the road-side, in the shop and mill..."

June 5, 2008

2008-06-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

Friendship

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Modern Library essays edition, paperback

5 cards

This is the next essay for my reading group. Emerson of course has brilliant insights into friendship even though in a sense he seems to unravel them a bit on page 212. For those in search of dreams and fables, armed with sublime hope.

Select lines:

201- "The world uncertain comes and goes, the lover rooted stays."

-"We have a great deal more kindness that is ever spoken."

202-203- "Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend and it would be content and cheerful along for a thousand years."

203- "My friends have come to me unsought."

"A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep."

204- "Shall I not be as real as the things I see?"

205- "Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love..."

207- truth and thinking aloud

209- "It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery."

-"Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort."

-"an absolute running of two souls into one."

210- "Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue."

-"Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness..."

-"Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo."

-"Are you the friend of your friend's buttons, or of his thought?"

211- "The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter."

-"We must be our own before we can be another's"

-"... the only way to have a friend is to be one."

212- "We walk along in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart....souls are not acting, enduring and daring, which can love us an we can love."

-"By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great."

213- "I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can fine them, but I seldom use them."

-"I will receive from them not what they have but what they are."

-"We will meet as though we met not and part as though we parted not."

214- "It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. but the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited."

"The essence of friendship is entireness..."

May 31 - June 6, 2008

2008-06-08T08:18:00.000-07:00

Out of Sheer Rage Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer

1997, hardcover

25 cards

The first book I read by Geoff Dyer was Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. While the title sold me immediately I loved his discussion and reflection upon the train station in Detroit as a ruin. Next I read The Ongoing Moment about photography (which I should probably re-read) where Dyer makes interesting connections in photography. Photography is actually part of Out of Sheer Rage and perhaps it shows how Dyer wrote this later book about photography as much as he shares the process of writing (and not writing) this unique and brilliant book about (and not about) D. H. Lawrence. Out of Sheer Rage came to my attention through the blog, with hidden noise through two posts, this one and this one. It was this quote from Dyer's discussion of islands via Lawrence compelled me to track down this book: "Me neither. All you can think of when you are on a small island is the impossibility of leaving when you want to, either because the island you are on is too big and you want to go to a smaller one or because the island is too small and you want to go to a bigger one.”

A few selected notes (there are many, many more treasures within these covers):

-"It must all be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel." Roland Barthes

1- "Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself."

2- "the writer who had made me want to become a writer. ... I wanted to read him with a purpose."

-"All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for."

4- "...books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment."

5- "I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose but it was impossible to choose- because I could live anywhere. There were no constraints on me and because of this it was impossible to choose."

12- D. H. Lawrence, "Where does one want to live?"

14- "I love the idea of speaking foreign languages. I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort."

16- The Complete Poems

18-19- that fabulous island quote

19- Rilke's letters

23- "Even writing a postcard required more concentration than I could muster."

28- "...which, on reflection, is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head."

31- Campidoglio- "It's a perfect square. And do you know why it's a perfect square?" "No. Why?" "Because it's not."

33- Nietzsche

34- "I was more interested in photographs of Lawrence than in the books he wrote."

-Michelet and Barthes

35- album and captions idea

-"I did not know what Lawrence looked like."

-Lawrence: "I hate photographs and things of myself, which are never me, and I wonder all the time who it can be."

38- Lawrence: "What do I care for first or last editions? To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding."

40- getting a camera

-"I am a camera"

41- "An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs."

45- "To travel is to eat."

-"The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun."

47- the sea

52- handshake origins

53- "Anything not overlooking something is to be looked down on."

55- people telling you will like something

57- "Opera begins in the market...stall holders have to convey the colour and taste of fruit in their voices."

-"His job was not to sell oregano but to fill the air with the sound of the scent."

59- "A common point of literary pilgrimage is that you often don't know which house you're meant to be visiting. In a sense it doesn't make any difference because it's very difficult to return home unless you have absolute proof that you've been to the right place. Hence the need, I conclude, for a plaque on the wall: to free us from doubt."

72- "Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes."

76- "Museum installations always have a touch of death about them. Houses have to live; they cannot be embalmed."

77- Lawrence hating the town, the town honoring him

81- community and neighborhood

89- Rilke on Rodin

90- Rilke: "For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation."

94- Goya

-early photograph portraits "people focused their lives 'in the moment rather than hurrying past it.'"

97- photographs and captions

100- corduroy

102- "The best readings of art are art," said George Steiner

104- trace of the self- re-reading a book

107- "...because however much you are enjoying a book, however much you want it never to end, you are always eager for it to end."

109, 111- poems, letters

111- getting nearer to the person

122- "the novelists I like best are...not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscincki, Thomas Bernhard..."

126- "Life for people with children is crammed with obligations and duties to be fulfilled. Nothing is done for pleasure."

-"Most people don't want what they want: people want to be prevented, restricted."

129-130- hatred of England

133- "The trajectory of Lawrence's life was not to leave his origins behind but to go beyond them."

134-135-Nietzsche- Human All Too Human- "...in a book written for 'free spirits' who do not yet exist, whose path he is hoping to ease into the world, it is as if he is describing Lawrence's feelings; conversely, Lawrence, at this moment, is, as it were, reading Nietzsche.

-"But when do you return?"

136- Neruda- "He who returns has never left."

-Lawrence- "I feel I shall wander for the rest of my days. But I don't care."

137- Lawrence- last letter: "This place no good!"

-films and books and life

138- "there is no escaping the everyday. What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free."

-"freedom requires tenaciousness...Freedom is always precarious."

-Lawrence- "Freedom is a gift inside one's soul. You can't have it if it isn't in you."

139- "Catherine Carswell applauded Lawrence for the way 'he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did.'"

140- Lawrence- "It is my destiny to wander."

-"A destiny is not something that awaits us, it is something we have to achieve in the midst of innumerable circumstantial impediments and detours."

-The Question of Geography by John Berger and Nella Bielski- "Each one of us comes into the world with her or his unique possibility which is like an aim, if you wish, almost like a law. The job of our lives is to become- day by day, year by year, more conscious of that aim so that it can at last be realised."

141- Rilke- "Basically it's none of our business how somebody manages to grow if only he does grow, if only we're on the trail of our own growth."

142- detour as a straight line

151- writers and painting

-Lawrence's paintings

152- "He knew how to do nothing. He could just sit and be perfectly content."

153- "That's what I'm doing, shaking my fist at the world."

154- doughnuts

156- Lawrence's temper

157- Lawrence: "Damn the world anyhow. And I hate 'understanding' people and I hate more still to be understood. ..."

161- typewriter ribbon

168- "there is no love or life without despair of life"

170- regret, breakdowns

204- "Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it."

205- "To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf."

207- "Lawrence said that one sheds one's sickness in books..."

208- driving vs. flying

211- revisiting a place

222- "Clouds were stampeding across the sky."

225- Lawrence- travel- "What is it, makes one want to go anyway? Why can't one sit still? Why does one create such discomfort from oneself!"

226- Had we not seen and done all these things we would not be the people are are."

-"My greatest urge in life is to do nothing."

230- "Should anyone flatter us by asking what we are looking for, what we are searching for, then we think immediately, almost instinctively in vase terms- God, fulfillment, love- but our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches..."

231- "Add them together and these little things make up an epic quest, more than enough for one lifetime."

231-232-"One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable records of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence."

May 26 - 31, 2008

2008-06-08T07:43:00.001-07:00

Famous for Fifteen Minutes
My Years with Andy Warhol
By Ultra Violet
1998, hardcover
9 cards

I picked up this book about Warhol, written by one of his Superstars Ultra Violet. Partly about Warhol and partly about Ultra Violet's own life an experiences, a quote at the beginning points out that all conversations are reconstructed, warning one to not take some of the quotations at their word. While interesting in parts, Ultra Violet was out for publicity, in fast pursuit of the media, and the name dropping gets a bit overwhelming at times. She knew (and dated) lots of people including Dali and Ed Ruscha and while she has some great insights, at other times it seems like she's trying to hard to make sweeping statements about the time.

1- "In death, as in life, Warhol deals in contradictions."
3- "I met the King of Pop years ago. His name was Marcel Duchamp. To me, Andy was the Queen of Pop."
5- (Warhol) "He changed the way we look at the world, arguably the way we look at ourselves."
6- "The primary creation of Warhol was Andy Warhol himself."
7- "Magic was a word Andy gargled with for hours."
8- gimlet eye
-"There is no taking of Polaroids in heaven: the ineffable light precludes it."
11- "Here in the Factory the mirrors have come out of their frames and merged into a total environment of silvery reflections and refractions."
12- "...a wonderland where you step in and out of yourself, where memory and fantasy race into each other at full tilt."
-"Maybe what you're creating is artifact not art."
13- "Mirrors- they have the most memories. I am quoting John Graham."
18- Billy Name- "trained in the spirit of Black Mountain. 'All of us carried Rimbaud under our arms.'"
28- doughnuts
31-33- screening of Blow Job
42- worked in a five and dime store
89- luncheonette
90- "In the Factory, Andy always works with loud rock music on. In rock, repetition is the leitmotif. ... the drum, a replica of the heartbeat."
92- "But for Warhol, photography is not just a helping hand. It is a replacement of the chosen object. The photograph becomes the painting. ... no original painting; from the start, there are multiples."
95- "It amazes me that a country as liberal as the United States allows itself to take on the burden of capital punishment."
96- Red Race Riot- "the repetition produces an action painting."
97- subliminal art- "takes objects people are fascinated by and turns them into art."
98- quadruple impact
-"John Cage uses graffiti sounds in his pieces and Merce Cunningham uses everyday noise in his dances."
102- "The Velvet Underground plays so loud you never hear the music."
103- Nico- "She looks like a girl- but when she sings, it's hard to be sure of her sex."
-"The decibels are so deafening that talking is out of the question. That's why Andy loves it so much."
104- "The Velvet Underground is going with music what Andy is doing with images. They repeat and repeat and repeat the same word or phrase until someone screams out, 'Shut up!'"
105- "Minimal music echoes minimal art."
110- Empire "It is a picture postcard of the building transferred to the screen."
125- Duchamp
John Chamberlain- orange corduroy pants

142- Max's Kansas City

144- Brasserie in the Seagram Building

198- "The moon is no cheap date."

205- "Since the sixties people workshop the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone starts at the beaming energy of Edie..."

214- Ed Ruscha

216

221- Polaroid camera

254- "And his camera is still an integral part of his clothing."

273- Fiesta ware

May 26 2008

2008-06-06T21:19:00.001-07:00

A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol

Text by David Dalton

Photographs by Dave McCabe

2003, hardcover

4 cards

This book seemed interesting when I first encountered it a few years ago. In spending more time with it this time around I realized the photographs it contains were orginally commissioned by Andy Warhol. Dave McCabe took these photographs, to document Warhol's life for a year. Warhol never published these photos but, as Dalton deftly explains, these photographs seem to have played an important role in Warhol's formation of his public personality in the 1960s. This is a fascinating book which seems to contain some secrets within it still.

Some excerpts:

7 "By 1964 he was developing his new! improved! Andy."

-"I think he studies these photographs and used them to form the image he wanted the world to see."

14- Andy and the Glass House

18-21- Andy in the guest house with David Whitney- Richard Lippold sculpture

39- Andy and Dali- Andy petrified

49- movies- social climbing

-Soap Opera

63- Andy and Bob Rauschenberg playing Monopoly

101-102

108- Jim Rosenquist's F-111

109- JR: "I think art is about identifying a condition"

138- "To walk down the street with Andy was an exhilarating experience. It was as if you'd just been handed a pair of special glasses that allowed you to see a secret and compelling world..."

-"Reality in the USA was truly hallucinatory."

-"Everything ins the USA was designed to be looked at..."

-"...Andy let you see the world through eyes you'd not used yet."

139-143- diner!

150- "The Supremes were there chaperoned by their mothers."

174- dancing at openings

182- Jonas Mekas

188- Happenings

152- silkscreen never made

206- "The famous were America's royalty."

217- Billy Name- dj- Motown

May 25 - 26, 2008

2008-06-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes

1981, paperback

15 cards

Roland Barthes is a genuine voice who contributed amazing tracts about life and things living produces. Here he discusses photography, though delving deep, into how it means through a personal photograph where he knows his mother. The best part is this photograph is never reproduced, in part, because it would not mean in the same way for other viewers. This is a landmark book that I needed to reread and probably could read 100 more times, finding something new and valuable with each reading.

Selected notes/passages:

Reproduction of a Polaroid photograph at the beginning

3- "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor."

4- "what the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially."

6- "photographs are signs which don't take, which turn"

-"the referent adheres"

9- "to do, to undergo, to look"

-"(Polaroid? Fun, but disappointing, except when a great photographer is involved.)"

15- death

-"cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing"

26- studium

27- punctum

30- "Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography."

-"the ghost of paintings"

38- "when it is pensive, when it thinks."

40- Baudelaire

42- a detail

45- "less Proustian"

47- "The photographer's 'second sight' does not consist in "seeing" but in being there"

51- "The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance."

53- remembering the punctum

-Kafka: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."

63- Proust

64- history

65- "History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it- and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it."

70- Proust

71- Mallarme

73- Nietzsche

76- "Painting can feign reality without having seen it."

-"in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there"

-"That-has-been"

80- Sontag

81- "A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze..."

- "For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic"

84- co-presence

85- "what has been"

87- "language is, by nature, fictional"

89- time

91- "actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory"

-Rilke

-violent

-monument

-"A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography."

94- "love-as-treasure"

97- private reading

100- "Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see."

102- "no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental"

-"Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents."

103- "the photograph makes appear what we never see in the real face"

110- provincial photographer

115

118

May 14 - 24, 2008

2008-05-28T19:47:00.000-07:00

Fischli and Weiss The Way Things Go

Jeremy Millar

2007, hardcover

Part of Afterall's One Work series

18 cards

Fischli and Weiss are amazing. Joel and Amanda told me all about them this past summer after they say an exhibition of their work in Europe. Then MoCAD had their work Questions in the brilliant Words Fail Me exhibition. Their Manifesto is also a great addition to any wall and life. This spring Joel and Amanda saw Fischli and Weiss's The Way Things Go again at the Hirshorn and picked up the DVD version of it (available on Netflix even now). This book focuses on The Way Things Go exploring why and how is fascinates in a way that expands this work in exciting directions. The book starts from observation and experience of the work in museum and people's reactions, a rich terrain upon which to build while never reducing the work's "purposeless purposiveness".

Some brief notes from my cards and reading:

-Opens with a Wittgenstein quote

-Der Lauf der Dinge (The Ways Things Go)

2- clapping

-"Even in our ignorance...it was clear that we had watched something great."

3- "...It was a little frightening, being moved like this..."

4- "what makes it popular also makes it good"

-Laurence Sterne, Tristam Shandy, 1759

-connection to Fischli and Weiss's 1984 Equilibres

8- "Our traditional means of formal analysis seems unable to deal with works, such as those, that are less concerned with external appearance than with 'internal' conceptual coherence."

9- gravity

10- procede- Raymond Roussel

-Roussel, near-neighbor of the Prousts

11- Duchamp- Roussel- The Large Glass

-Robbe-Grillet

-Foucault

12- "As with Fischli and Weiss, a rigorous play is fundamental to Roussel's practice."

-Parmi Les Noirs, 1935- identical phrases- single letter- different meanings

15- Kierkegaard "Boredom is the root of all evil."

17- change

20- anticipation

-"Everywhere things are transformed into actions, nouns become verbs."

21- illustrations by Wiliam Heath Robinson

-Frederick Winslow Taylor

23- Esperanto

24- Futurists

27- "...it seems to be both an anticipation of the birth of time and memory of its end. But where does that place us?"

28- Archytas of Tarentum- 4th c. BCE- treatise on place

29- Focillon- "'a work of art treats space according to its own needs, defines space and even creates such space as may be necessary to it.'"

32- Henri Bergson- Creative Evolution

-the concrete solution

33- Bergson, time

34- waiting- humor

- Creative Evolution- influence on Marcel Proust

36- interventions

37-38- epic and anti-epic

55- "It becomes a part of time not apart from it."

-Bruno Schulz- "Our creators will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gestures, for one word along, we shall make the effort to bring them to life."

57- Bakhtin- laughter and the epic

59- the Incongruity Tradition

-1981 film, The Least Resistance, rat and bear costumes

60- 1979 sausage series

61- At the Carpet Shop- gherkins

66- Peter Fischli, "Operating on two planes at once is part of our practice."

-Koestler- impersonator

67- Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 1968

-machines and perfection

70- The Way Things Go- "...objects do no more than they need to, no more than they are able."

-simple object, technology

-familiar and unexpected

-Bergson, Le Rire, 1900

71- automatism and life

73- "Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses."

75- rigidity

-hesitate

76- pause

-timing, comedy

77-78- Kant- "laughter as 'an affection arising from the strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.'"

80- "purposeless purposiveness"

81- seeing how it was made

82- "of the smile rather than the laugh"

-"smile of wonder"

83- "This smile is not ours alone, but sits with quiet benevolence on the faces of the artists too... Just as one can hear the smile in the voice of someone talking over the phone, so one can see it in Fischli and Weiss's artworks."

-"one can produce wonder only if one succeeds"

-place of wonder in their practice

84- St. Augustine

107- Fragen (Questions), relationship to Daston and Park Questiones naturals of Adelard of Bath

87- David Weiss, "There is a reason why the Pyramids are famous. When you go there, no matter how many photographs you've seen of them before, you realize that the Pyramids are unique and that you don't understand them..."

-Heidegger

89- the sublime

-"wondrous"

May 15 - 23, 2008

2008-05-25T21:27:00.000-07:00

Master of Reality

John Darnielle

2008, paperback

4 cards

This is another fabulous book in the 33 1/3 series. While the Patti Smith book would have been the next title I purchased I bought this one about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. This was the first time I've never heard the album one of these books covers, but now I'm ready to hear it. John Danielle (from the Mountain Goats) lives in my town so he gave a book reading at our wonderful independent bookstore. This is perhaps one of the best books to ever hear an author read aloud, particularly because of pages 1, 2 and 3. Now I have my own copy!

Excerpts/Notes:

10- covers of albums

11 "my favorite tape which is also my favorite LP"

12- "But there were barely any stories."

14- anti-social workers

17- "drew a picture of the cover of Master of Reality, 'What is reality?'"

30- "So I want to tell you what the song means TO ME. This is different from what the song is really about. There is so much more to it!"

39- "But when something is secret, or half secret, or hidden in some, it becomes cooler for me."

40- "I wish I had somebody to talk to about it who could understand."

42- "I have to say you are not really even alive unless you have done that. Sat in the dark with a tape you love and other people do not understand and just kicked back with it."

46- FTW

47- Halloween

-not forgetting

54-55- talking to each other without knowing it

74- "You circle around a song trying to find out why it's bothering you, why the feelings that come out of you are what they are instead of something else. Or why sometimes there aren't any feelings just a numbness."

80- "I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't."

81- "we can see people like us"

83- "it's like listening to the inside of your mind"

-"when they try to write a love song it always ends up being about getting rejected before anything really got started"

"They are just rags. All they have is themselves, but that's turned out to be enough. For them."

90- The Who- dancing at parties

95- 8 vs. 12

97- "It was like I'd found the part of the album that had never been taken away from me because there was no way anybody could really possess it."

99- sewing their clothes

101- "That's why I loved those people who couldn't help me."

May 13 - 22, 2008

2008-05-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

embryoyo

dean young

paperback, 2007

7 cards

This book arrived as one of the titles in the McSweeney's Book Club. I was in grad school when it arrived and then I moved, but finally I picked this brilliant volume of poetry up. Dean Young twists words into amazing, vivid, fabulous phrases and ideas. From robot monkeys to the pround, this collection is truly wonderful. Don't delay in reading it like me.

Excerpts:

15- "Dachshunds!"

"What am I but the intersection of these loves?"

-"Mexican animal crackers!"

17- "my nightmares are your confetti"

20- "I want to get as close as possible to rain without actually being in it"

"I would rather spend an hour with a dying squirrel than tour a cathedral."

22- "Erik Satie's birthday comes and goes and barely a notice on public radio."

-"Hours in front of the mirror, still the mirror forgets. Hours in front of the mirror, now you're all reflection."

24- tambourines

25- "The immortals torn from the grooves like cancelled stamps from envelopes, the message carried within no longer known."

28- "primarily by zigzags like a poem, bunny moves"

29- "...the doubleness of being one place but feeling you are another is solely a human blessing/curse..."

30- "a twice-met person"

31- "Mallarme...his poems seem not so much written as evaporated."

33- "There must be a point where a broken thing can be broken no more. Probably, we need protection from each other."

34- "...and my dreams remain attached to me by silver thumbtacks..."

36- "The sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes, beaches dotted with debris. Unto each is given a finite number of addresses, ditties to dart the heart to its moments of sorrow and swoon."

-tuna melt and waiting

37- "Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it"

40- giraffe

-"some things can't be bought, they can only be paid for"

42- "There is a time for tinsel, and it is not now.:

43- "So much life we cannot have or find or repeat yet so much we had and found."

44- "mark permanent on the heart"

47- "One attempts to be significant on a grand scale in the knockdown battle of life but settles"

-clams

63- Basquiat

65- "Why am I so afraid of nothingness?"

66- "The second CD only the witlessly bored watch."

69- "For a while I was in danger of becoming someone who gets up in the middle of the night to make sure the flashlight in the drawer is off then I found the giraffe!"

71- babies

73- middle

75- "Yellow pencils composing odes to birdlife, mostly wrens"

76- "Every bird knows only two notes constantly rearranged"

"We make paper hats of headlines and float them away."

-"my favorite poem is cinder scratched into a sidewalk"

81- Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch

89- "The nighttime is no time to undertake a search yet that is when we begin and sometimes must end..."

92- "Hurdy gurdy, says the world feeling a wee cranky"

-"the people who haven't found out won't a while longer"

96- "smaller and smaller the sea bashes everything until viola: sand"

"even though everyone already knows is death a secret that must be told and told?"

"Every sunset is a crease"

100- Jean Tinguely

101- "Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. You want happy endings, read cookbooks."

"We go to art to learn the unlearnable, experience the unexperienceable."

-"Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur, Breton said that"

103- "So while in Italy, see as many Caravaggios as you can and I will look here in my bushes and grocery store."

105- shoe prints

"no cloud without tears, how it smells like iron then it rains and rains and rains"

May 16, 2008

2008-05-25T20:50:00.001-07:00

All Tomorrow's Parties Billy Names' Photographs of Andy Warhol's Factory

Hardcover, 1997

3 cards

Billy Name is someone you might not know by name, but it was he who covered Warhol's first factory in silver, and he who took many of the iconic photographs. While his black and white photographs are well known (one of a tattoo was the cover for the Velvet Underground album White Light, White Heat is just one of many) this book presents his color photographs.

Naming the Colours essay by Dave Hickey

10- (Name's black and white photographs)- "instant classics"- "they have subsequently become exactly what Warhol intended them to be: official icons in the public imagination, ravishingly seductive advertisements for the corporate culture of the factory...these photographs get it exactly wrong themselves, as advertisements."

12- (end of 1968)- "the self-conscious sense of living in the midst of history and very near the end of it"

-Max's, speed freaks scribbling in notebooks

13 "Because colour is vision's amphetamine...the attribute of seeing that kills history, abolishes its aura and delivers us into the embodied present."

"Thus, in an image, it can deliver us, insofar as an image can, not into the grisaille tissue of the past, but into the flash and differentiation of an alternative present/"

14- "Because colours gives us more than characters in a setting, it gives us people with spaces between them."

A Talk with Billy Name, Collier Schorr

17- Meeting Andy

18- "It was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera- you'd walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself."

19- "The Factory was a very functional place- the only qualifications were that you had some specialty, some beauty or some talent."

20- "We never bought anything. The funny thing is, you didn't need money then."

21- "I'm very much interested in portraiture, not only of people but of space, or people in spaces. I was interested in using angles to make the structure evident."

21- listening to Motown music at the Factory

24- "Film began to turn into art and that's what Andy became fascinated with."

26- Velvet Underground cover

May 6, 2008

2008-05-25T20:28:00.000-07:00

Self-Reliance

in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Paperback, Modern Library edition, 2000

4 cards

This is the first time I have read anything by Ralph Waldo Emerson. While this is just one essay of many it might be a while before I finish the whole book so I thought I would post my cards about this essay since it had a great effect on me. An Emerson reading group is trying to form where I live so I figured I would give it a try. I haven't yet made it to a meeting but I feel like I've benefited already just by reading this essay. Emerson makes many excellent points about the need to think one's own thoughts and to write. While one could take his notion of Self-Reliance too far these days, the points he raises are particularly interesting in light of the global world in which we live.

Excerpts:

132- "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

133- "...envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide"

"none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he had tried."

-"Trust thyself."

134- "These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."

-conformity

-"Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs."

135- "Your goodness must have some edge to it- else it is none."

136- to live

-"My life is for itself and not for a spectacle."

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."

-"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

-"But do your work, and I shall know you."

138- "...with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

-"To be great is to be misunderstood."

139- "See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency."

-"Greatness appeals to the future."

140- "a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature."

-"all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons."

141- intuition

142- worshipping the past- "The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul."

143- "If we live truly, we shall see truly."

-"Fear and hope are alike beneath it."

145- "We must go alone."

146- to live in truth

147 "...he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."

149- (travelling)- "the wise man stays at home"

150- "Insist on yourself; never imitate."

"Every great man is unique."

"Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much."

153- "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

April 22 - May 13, 2008

2008-05-15T19:07:00.000-07:00

Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson

1999, hardcover

16 cards

Autobiography of Red was recommended to me by someone who has pointed me in the direction of brilliantly fabulous books. Anne Carson is an amazing writer. She chooses words and combines them in ways that delight and surprise, and also more. Her fascination with and command of language proves what can be done with language. Other writers in comparison often only arrange letters.

Some excerpts/points of interest:

3- Gertrude Stein quote

-words bouncing

4 "Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else."

-"These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the worlds to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being."

22- Emily Dickinson, "Can human nature not survive without a listener?"

-"The only secret people keep is Immortality."

23- (stones) "To stop and imagine the life of each one!"

26- "A space for its meaning remained there but blank. The letters themselves could be found hung on branches of furniture in the area."

28- "Facts are bigger in the dark"

30-rhinestoning

36- He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell of the screen itself as it pressed its grid onto his face."

39- "They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics."

42- map

43-"'How does distance look?' is a simple direct question, It extends from a spaceless within to the edge

of what can be loved. It depends on light."

46- "Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary."

-photograph

48- "He could feel the house of sleepers around him like loaves on shelves."

49- toast and death

51- "Red Patience"

55- painting

56- "Nothing to say. Nothing."

58- "Why are you along in this huge blank garden like a piece of electricity?"

59- Barnum circus

61- Krakatoa

65- "...photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships."

-stars, memories

66- "...nobody knows how to look at a photograph nowadays."

-Yeats

70- "Huge wads of silence stuffed the air."

72- yellowing index card

73- donuts

-Muhammad Ali, poems

75- slide projector

80- 15 names for clouds

-"What is time made of?"

-accordion

82- Heidegger, postcards

90- "It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion."

92- "White is black. Black is white. Perhaps I will get some new information about Red."

93- time, photographs

94- olives

-"Children make you see distances."

97- slippery foods

98- "Empty street below gave back nothing of itself. Cars nested along the curb on their shadows. Buildings leaned back out of the street."

-"sleeping pavement"

-moods

103- nothing

105- Philosophic problems, red

106- Walt Whitman

109- wings

120- water tank

125- "trying to think how to photograph Lima"

131- "Human Valentines"

139- "I am a beast"

-gamboling

141- time

145- Photographs #1748

-"The Only Secret People Keep"

148- blinking, blindness

May 8 - 10, 2008

2008-05-10T15:30:00.001-07:00

If You're Feeling Sinister

Scott Plagenhoef

From the fabulous 33 1/3 series http://33third.blogspot.com/

Paperback, 2007

8 cards

I have always been fond of Belle & Sebastian. The characters in the songs tapped into bits about how I felt in high school, the people they sung about were the people I wanted to be friends with, but in a town with one stoplight, they weren't too many like them around. I didn't hear Belle & Sebastian in high school though, if I had, they would have been much like R.E.M. for me. I remember Automatic for the People allowed me to realize there are interesting people out there, they think some of the same things you do, that it can get really interesting out there in the world, and there's lots to discover. I first borrowed B&S cds while working at an ad agency. I enjoyed them but the quest to know more about them didn't grip me. Their new cds came out and I enjoyed them. Then a few years ago something caused me to go back and listen more closely to certain songs, particularly Sinister's "Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying." I saw them a few years ago live in Detroit. I love Belle & Sebastian now, but I still didn't know as much as I should. Thanks to Scott Plagenhoef though now some of that's been filled in. One part of Plagenhoef's book that I don't quite understand however is his stand against the internet and quick, dismissive chatter about bands on it. He waxes on this topic here and there throughout the book yet the back cover says he works for Pitchfork. While I read Pitchfork and it is great for tour news, it is one of the biggest contributors to being quickly dismissive of amazing albums or bands. What I know about Pitchfork and what Plagenhoef writes about seem to be at odds. This is still a good book and I really enjoyed reading it. He's totally right about how we currently listen to music, and the need to really listen, and not just allowing it to become merely background noise. Listening with people is also a lovely activity much like conversing about music.

Selected notes/passages

1- "In November 1996, when Belle & Sebastian released their second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, being a fan of the band took a great deal of patience and work."

3- Madame Cecile Aubrey's Belle & Sebastian

4- "Murdoch had taken to songwriting in order to engage with a world outside of home..."

6- "B & S's cover stars weren't celebrities or cult heroes, they were friends and acquaintances no more glamorous than the people expected to be buying the records."

7- interviews- "...repetitive and dull for the subjects themselves"

8- Murdoch, "The band is really not about me. The interesting things happen when it goes beyond me."

9- playing at offbeat locales- libraries and churches- "...a hearkening back to the time when underground or indie music was something discovered and investigated by the curious rather than something branded in the music press."

10- Murdoch, "I always think that the best songs are the ones I'll write tomorrow..."

11- "They hold hands but 'only as a display of public solidarity.'"

12- imagining and discussion of Tigermilk

15- strong sense of place in B & S songs

17- "Characters hope to belong, to find kindred spirits, but crucially they refused to compromise themselves in the process, as so many of us must throughout adulthood."

-"life is never dull in your dreams"

20- "do something pretty while you can"

31- (The internet's Sinister list) "The entire experience felt like a night at the pub with friends, dissecting and examining culture, art and each other's lives."

-John Phillip Sousa and the phonograph- "Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music."

-"Their fans couldn't investigate the group itself, so they made inroads into each other's lives instead."

32-33- (Sinister list) "a place where people engaged in conversations about each other's thoughts and ideas about music rather than merely their record collections or the contents of theirs external hard drives."

41- rockism

43- Murdoch, "the trumpet should be as important as the guitar, the cellos should be as important as the piano"

47- Malcolm McLaren, "In the end [punk] is about making ugliness beautiful, it's about destroying in order to create something that liberates you from orthodoxy."

47-48-"The modernists and their followers challenged the belief that creative aesthetics wasn't mean to simply reproduce or reflect life and pursue beauty, but to alter and shape society through intellectual pursuits and progressive approaches to technology, science and the arts."

48- Duchamp

-beauty and youth culture- being suspicious

55- "...audience and artist were almost indistinguishable from one another, in look, and, some would sneer, talent."

63- Isobel Campbell- The Bell Jar and Dorothy Parker

71- Murdoch's exploration of emotions through childhood- "is less about nostalgia or escapism as it is exploring core human emotions without the distractions, compromises and obligations of adulthood."

75- "poet laureates for the outcast liberal arts set"

-dedication of "We Rule the School" to a young, smalltown girl on the BBC- "because life isn't easy for a 16 year old in the middle of nowhere."

-discussion of New Pop vs. The Smiths

79- "Murdoch not only wrote his own myths, he also wrote his own apologies as well."

84- laddism vs. wallflower feminism

85- Nick Hornby

- (talking about Murdoch) "In his songs, women take the chances, have sexual fantasies, and are generally the ones either put at risk or rewarded for living active rather than passive lives."

86- freedom to stumble and fall

87- (Murdoch on cd) "...he's merely a vessel for communicating about life in general rather than his life in particular..."

-"sex, religion, friendship, education, family- rarely are any of them finite or defining characteristics. Whatever we think of any of the above shifts depending on the year or day, and in Murdoch's songs you can feel his characters struggle to come to terms with each as well."

88- Jenny Toomey's writing about their ability to "describe a character in a way that represents their complexity."

-Murdoch "No regular rock venue is set up to deal with the subtlety of singing... But the intimacy of someone's bedroom, when they've just got the record home, there is no scope for any bullshit. To absolutely absorb somebody as they listen tot he LP through on their mono Dansette is what I really want."

91- iPod era "more time hearing music...but less time listening to it...typically something we do in isolation"

92- "One's first records are often spoken of as mystical or magical things- you'd study the sleeve, maybe imagine your own parents being young and listening to the music you discover in your home."

97- "Frankly, almost any line on 'Get Me Away'- perhaps the most immediately loveable track on Sinister- is worth quoting."

104- "Online criticism now seems less about communicating ideas than about simply sharing music."

105 "shrinking column inches and fencesitting major media outlets...considers music criticism to be nothing more than a utilitarian tipsheet, to the point that many are suspicious of anyone wanting to communicate ideas about art rather than simply bit-sized opinions. And although there may now be more chatter about music than ever before, there seems to be far less conversation."

April 27 - May 8, 2008

2008-05-10T14:55:00.000-07:00

Andy Warhol

Blow Job

Peter Gidal

Afterall Books, 2008

Part of their brilliant One Work series http://www.afterall.org/books_onework.html

11 cards

I think we're really getting into an interesting period of Warhol scholarship and this book is just one step in that direction. Warhol left a lot behind. There is a lot to deal with but in what has been dealt with, much has been overlooked. This type of focused approach to a single work is the best type of contribution to writing on Warhol since differences and minute details are integral to Warhol's practice. He left many clues but many remain to be found or deciphered to the extent of their full complexity. Gidal sets out a careful and thoughtful analysis of Blow Job while offering exciting jumps to connections between the film and Velazquez's Luncheon or Three Men at a Table as well as Duchamp's Large Glass. I love the MCA bookstore in Chicago and I was particularly excited to see that they had this new release.

Select notes/passages of interest:

1- Warhol's classic figment quote

-exploration of duration

-projected speed, flares, edge numbers, time for reel breaks

4- "...his courage in being prepared to act without denying his sexuality was no mean thing, then or now."

5- four agents in the space

7- Gertrude Stein

8- "no less real for not being seen"

-"The real world is appropriated by the film..."

11- "unendurable durations"

12- the paradox

14- Proust

15- "...not about time regained but time lost. 'In search of...' means not that you find it but that you don't."

18- "existing only in its absence"

19- Velazquez

22- "making nothing materially present"

24- mirror

26- Warhol's time

-"The fear of death doesn't need more than a moment."

-shadow

28- shadows "understanding the state of suspended or arrested recognition"

"Warhol's works are emphatically not iconic"

31- real time during the viewing

32- Proust again

-"extreme light can create an absence of image"

36- "We are unable to lose ourselves in the series of acts represented....'realism' of another kind."

37- machine and body

-"In that re-viewing, the repetition becomes a memory."

38- palimpsest

-"the taking up of time, its being filled, is what obliterates it"

-"Thus the subject of the film is never just what you 'see.'"

-silkscreens and squeegee marks

41- Warhol titles

45- boredom

46 (Warhol film) "you are left bereft"

59 Henri Bergson (via Bertrand Russell)

60- the subject and where it exists

61- adequateness and language

61-63-discussion of leaders

63- The Chelsea Girls- silent screen, indexical

64- Empire- "the skyscraper can be both itself and an image of a stable structure and fragile evanescence."

-printing of Sleep

-discussion of time and death towards the bottom of the page

65- "'You don't have sex with a name.'"

66- "So what."

69- time held- Suicide silkscreen

71- "In Warhol's films, meaning is, in the end, always determined by production not consumption. And in the beginning too."

73- Duchamp's Large Glass

73-74- concept of Marcel Duchamp

75- stillness

76- uttering a word- "no sooner spoken than unspoken"

78- moments only

April 15 - 23, 2008

2008-04-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

You Are Here
Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination
Katherine Harmon
Softcover, 2004
10 cards

I became quite interested in maps and the newest issue of my collage zine, la colle, took maps on as a theme. This book was lent to me by Amanda in my quest to learn more about maps. It offers a wonderful collection of essays by thoughtful writers (Denis Wood and Stephen S. Hall) while also including a range of images of maps by cartographers, artists and others. Maps in literature, particularly children's literature, loom large throughout the book, my favorite is the end quote from Roald Dahl's The BFG.

Lewis Carroll quote
-8-9 Bedolina petroglyph at Valcamonica, 2500 BCE, one of the oldest known maps
-10- mapping making us human
-11 gambol
-own dialect
-"These are maps of the imagination, as all maps are, only more so.
-"three-years-olds are born cartographers
-15 I Mercator by Stephen S. Hall
"We all travel with many maps, neatly folded and tucked away in the glove compartment of memory- some of them communal and some of them universal..."
-private maps
-personal atlas
-16 sentimental documents
-Robert E. Lee
-reader and the map
-"What the map fails to supply, the human mind (or human yearning) sometimes has the power to conjure."
-"the mood of the map-reader colors the map itself. The ability to conjure, the willingness to fill in the blanks, the urgency with which one needs to know- all contribute to what the map becomes in the hands of the inspired imaginer: an instrument of destiny."
-"It is hard to look at a map without sensing, in our bones, private hopes and secret fears about change."
-17 "Out of one territory, one map, can bloom a thousand geographies."
-change- ways of seeing the world
-"fate maps"
-18 wooden puzzle of the United States
-19 "...We need some secure oasis or order, even if only a memory (or a fiction), as a home port for our various explorations, our attempts to make sense of the unknown."
-"'home' which appears on page one of every private atlas"
-19 exploration
-look at it long enough
-"all the things we still do not know"
-24 Paula Scher's map
-38 Chukchi drawing, Siberia, 19th century
"map lays out paths to dreamed destinations...uses notations that are collectively understood to guide others in their dreams and prevent them from becoming lost."
-42-43 Adolf Wolfli
-46 Howard Finster
-53 Geographical Guide to a Woman's Heart, 1960 (Sanctuary of Silence, Just Friends Lane, River of True Communication)
-54-55 Ernest Dudley Chase, A Pictorial Map of Loveland, 1943
-74 Oldenburg
-104 The Maps of Boylan Heights by Denis Wood
-"We mapped everything we could figure out how to map."
-108-109 The American Road
-110
-111 Michigan
-114-115 stone maps
-120-121 William Wegman's Vacationland, 2003 (utterly exquisite and fabulous)
-130 Memory Map by Katie Davis
"Some days, what's missing is more vivid than what is."
-132 What's Up? South! http://www.odt.org/ alternative views of the world
-"It takes many points of view to see the truth."
-133
-135 (who knew the Futurists had a cookbook?)
-136 Ed Ruscha
-142 Ellsworth Kelly
-147 Common Ground Apple Map
-149 R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island
"I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe."
-173 Simon Patterson, The Great Bear
-176-177 Mark Bennett- maps settings of sit-coms
-192 R. Dahl, The BFG: "That's why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They're for new countries. You're meant to fill them in."

April 17-19, 2008

2008-04-20T11:22:00.001-07:00

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

Hardcover 2005

31 cards

It's hard to read a book while crying, but it is truly amazing to read a book that moves me to tears. When this book was lent to me the picture from 9/11 was flipped to. I admit this was a picture I did not want to see at the time, I didn't watch the news, I didn't need the images at the time. While I loved Foer's other book Everything is Illuminated it took a month or so for me to pick this book up, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. Using the picture as a sort of Readymade and wrestling with Duchamp's both and rather than either/or (the door that is both open and closed), Foer, from a child's perspective (a child anyone would live a richer life to know) offers amazing story layered upon story, driven by letters and emotions, while also revealing revelations about life not unlike Jenny Holzer's Truisms. Foer includes amazing statements about love throughout while also cracking the reader up. I thought I was one of the few who see the need for a detachable pocket and I was delighted to see that Foer through Oskar also see the need. This is likely the best use of a tambourine in a story. Ever. "Heavy boots" but boots worth putting on and wearing.

I don't even know where to begin with my stack of cards from this book. Each page offers a present. A rich experience with each page turned.

-2 birdseed shirt

-tambourining

-4 "It's that I believe that things are extremely complicated."

-7 children and parents

-8 map of Central Park

-"Was nothing a clue?"

-9 "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I be right?" "...Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"

-10 not stop looking

-"The more I found the less I understood."

-11 letters

-12 laminator

-13 "Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are."

-17 yes, no

-36 coffin and closet

-40 319 post offices, 207,352 post office boxes, 41,163 million locks

-42 "someone walking on a tightrope between the Twin Towers" (Phillipe Petit, about whom I just saw the film, Man On Wire)

-Stuff That Happened to Me scrapbook

-45, 47, 48, 49

-46 "...most people write the name of the color of the pen they're writing with."

-"Would you mind not shaking the tambourine in the store?"

-53

-60-61

-59, 62, 63

-69 "It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone."

-71 portable pocket

-Mencils

-72 and 73- ambulances

-74 "We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."

-"In the end, everyone loses everyone." (This reminds me of Jason Collett's song We All Lose One Another)

-76 (letter) "Where had it been for those 15 years?"

-"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."

-ruby bracelet

-"I had a letter from everyone I knew."

-81 "Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted."

-"We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it."

-82 "I was more along than if I had been alone."

-84 "Together and separately."

-87 meeting people with last name Black

-88 "I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me."

-90 Edna Saint Vincent Millay

-95

-96 elephants, remembering

-99 "So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are."

-card

-100 scarf and knitting

-101 "Don't go away."

-102 love and collection

-106 inventions: wedding rings and bracelet

-108 "songs are as sad as the listener"

-109 "...at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news."

-111 Something. Nothing.

-126 "Trying to be"

-130 "My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met."

-133 "I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life."

-145 gambols

-147 Coney Island, Cyclone

-149 leather

-154 "I was keeping a list in my head of things I could do to be more like him."

-"There are more places you haven't heard of than you've heard of."

-LP...Polaroid...drive-in...Frank Lloyd Wright

-156 "Is a love song a love song?" "Yes!"

"Is love love?" "No!"
-biographical index

-160- 230 years of peace

-162 library sinking

-163 being careful with people

-164 artists, arms, feeding each other, believing in the story

-166 and 167

-169 "His memory is here"...

-cells

-170-171 Feelings Book entries

-172-173

-175 taking pictures

-178 "Everything will be..."

-179 shyness, shame

-colder

-books, grandfather clock, time

-180 book crying

-189

-"Why are you so weird?"

-190 Buckminster Fuller

-191

-193 postage stamp, creme brulee

-194 "He said poverty made him nervous, not people."

-195 watching the world

-202 Cucumber, Formica

-203 juicebox

-207 Hey Jude

-208-216

-208 "You write to someone you can't be with."

-214 typewriter

-215 "Life is scarier than death."

-216 letter- "And here I am instead of there. ..."

-217 the Sixth Borough

-220 "I love you" and response

-222 "Maybe we're lost..."

-Antarctica

-230 staples and tape

-226-229

-230-232

-232 "That beautiful person is mine! Mine!"

-233 empty envelopes

-239 "In Chinese ny mean 'you' Though was 'I love you.'"

-245 Empire State Building- what it's really like

-247 "I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for."

-Ruth

-249 "We'll care incredibly much."

-250- kissing, electric sparks

-251 "If I had an answer, it wouldn't really be love would it?"

-252 spotlight

-253

-255

-256 "Maybe he didn't say he loved me because he loved me."

-257 "Why Yes and No?"

-260-261

-269

-275

-278 "The room was filled with the conversation we weren't having."

-map of where he went

-280 "We didn't talk about unimportant things."

-285- Mr. Black's

-286 Oskar Schell: Son

-"...I wouldn't have let him go."

-believing

-287-288

-304-305

-"I wish I were a poet."

-307- nothing to write on

-309

-310 "It's better to lost than never to have had."

-312 "What if we stay?"

-314 "It's always necessary."

-316 book invented

-318

-319 names, keep

-321 dictionary definition

-324 extremely complicated

-325 reversed the order

March 19-26, 2008

2008-04-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
Karen Russell
Hardcover
11 cards

Thank you to Claire for pointing me towards this book, even though the cover of the version I read differed from the one she read even though I forgot to take a picture of the book I read. Beautiful writing with words known and created, beautiful ideas and heartbreaking ones too, close attention paid to the oridinary in an extraordinaryly revealing way.

Brief excerpts and notes of interest:
-3 "...a tin roof that hums with the memory of rain..."
-6 Swamplandia!
-names, palindromes
-10 "Alligators talk to one another, and to the moon..."
-12 "I'm lonely and I want to have a secret with somebody."
-16 library books
-28 bird watching
-35- G-L-O-W-W-O-R-M G-R-O-T-T-O
-"Olivia was a cartographer of imaginary places."
-36- "But I left you a map!"
-40 shooting stars, lemmings
-41- x- map- places where someone is not
-46 "To enter the grotto, you have to slide on your back, like a letter through a mail slot."
-50- "Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal."
-53- "sleep is the heat that melts time..."
-"We just want to provide you with a safe place to lie awake together. And maybe even," she beams at the crowd, "to dream."
-55 "My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly."
-"our worshipful respect for the hobo."
-"But we are sleep twins...He is the first and only person I have ever met who is also a prophet of the past."
-56- saving
-57 dirigible
-58 Our Storied Past!
-"The table of contents was like an index to my dreams..."
-70- forgetting
-74 tin foil
-76- "In the moonlight, he looks like he's made of liquid silver."
-78 "Do not interfere with the moon!"
-84- "ifs" to "whens"
-85- "1 Mr. Goodbar=187 sick children's wishes"
-97- "...thinks the ocean's actually erasing his foot."
-99- "They seem so old and so young all at once."
-106 "I was startled by this, the speed with which one apocryphal watercolor was transforming our future."
-'...that fiery alchemy, whereby "raw" becomes "food."'
-108- "Our necessities...are now burdensome luxuries."
-116- Acres of lightning!
-120 "Everyone wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore."
-142 wondercould
-145 "It looked like she caught a bad dream from somebody."
-156 The City of Shells
-157 skitterclatter
-159 pickle sticks
-163 "...it felt like being parenthesized."
-170 (Houdini) "She knows that he was all the time just searching for a box that could hold him."
-176 "The world swells into an apocalyptic howl, as if the world can't keep its secrets any longer."
-180- measuring time
-246 dill pickles

March 22 - 23, 2008

2008-03-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Velvet Years 1965-67 Warhol's Factory

Photographs by Stephen Short and Essay by Lynne Tillman

Paperback, 1995

15 cards

I have read a number of books about Andy Warhol and this book caught me by surprise. First, because I have not come across it before, and second, because of the writing and interviews. Lynne Tillman writes about Warhol thoughtful, insightful and revealing ways, with sentences oscillating between the poetic and profound, "His scavenging was emphatic, his 'lacks' not absences but presences in his work.." to forthright statements with deep resonance, "If anyone showed how weird the idea of taste is, it was Warhol." Chuck Wein plays and big role in the recent film Factory Girl, but this book shows how the Cambridge crowd he and Edie were part of fit into the Factory. This book also dispels myths of the factory. It was a quite place, sometimes, as well as rarely the site of parties.

A few excerpts from the cards:

(The two mentioned above are from page 11)

-11- "His work is difficult though, if one lets it be, just because it can easily be taken at face value. It questions what one is looking at merely by being on the wall, being looked at by you."

-(soup cans) "Even if they no longer shock, they still may surprise."

-12 "Warhol's own system relied on making a lot of a little."

- dialectical manner

-13- something to argue about

-mixer

-14 palimpsest

-15 image- not being a tortured, isolated artist

"There are those who aren't interested in Warhol's work, don't get the picture, never did or will, fine or see nothing, no qualities, in it, none at all in him."

-L. Woolf's defense of Virgina Woolf

-hyphens

"The frame is an embrace, a lover's decision, and like any embrace, something's included, something's excluded."

-17- photographs

-18 "Death is the frame with the toughest grip, with an embrace for everyone."

-memory and history

-Barthes

"No one is ordinary or everybody is, profoundly."

-29- Gordon Baldwin, "...people just improvising, what their lives are, and no one's quite sure what's expected of them."

-29-20 napkin conversations

-30 "Gee Whiz"

-film Lunch

-45- Gerard Malanga, "A people collector. His being quiet added to it."

-63- John Cale- Piero Heliczer

-sense of humor

-64- "A doer, always a doer."

-75- Donald Lyons, quoting Oscar Wilde, "I put my genius into my life, my talent into my art."

-dandyism

-83 D Lyons about Nico, mentions she was learning Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep it with Mine"

-89- Sterling Morrison, "Rather than put it off till next month, he just did it."

-93- Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, saving his life, motorcycle accident

-99- D. Lyons, "The Velvets were suburban. Except John."

-108- Susan Bottomly/International Velvet, "I think we cam with our own show."

-115- Jonas Mekas, "As you look at the work of any unrepeatable artist, anything that is unique like that cannot be repeated by anybody else. You cannot repeat Eisenstein or Dreyer."

February 26 - March 19, 2008

2008-03-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

Chronicles, Volume 1

Bob Dylan

Hardcover, 2004

25 cards

One would expect Bob Dylan to be a great writer, but it is a delight that he is this good. These works shed light on Dylan, his process, his music, as well as his tussles with critics, interviewers, the public and language, and more. Hopefully there will be a volume two.

Excerpts from the cards

p. 7 Conversation with another man:

"What kind of music do you play?"

BD: "Folk Music"

"What kind of music is folk music?"

"I told him it was handed down songs. I hated these kind of questions. Felt I could ignore them."

p. 9 New York City

p. 11 description of the acts at Cafe Wha? and mention of Hubert's Flea Circus

p. 18- strumming-driving people away or drawing them in closer- "There was no in-between."

"Folk songs were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were worth more than anything I could say."

p. 20 (grandmother ) "...told me once that happiness isn't on the road to anything. That happiness is the road."

p. 32 "There were a million stories, just everyday New York...you'd have to pull it apart to make any sense of it." and also his comment about romance.

p. 34- On the Road and Howl- 45 records being incapable

"LPs were like the force of gravity..." staring at their covers

p. 35 "I just thought of mainstream culture as lam as hell and a big trick."

p. 36 "I was looking for the part of my education that I never got."

p. 39 "The folksingers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses."

p. 40- art books and artists

p. 42-43 (grandmother) "There are some people you'll just never be able to win over. Just let it go- let it wear itself out."

p. 45- morality and politics

-Vom Kriege Clausewitz's book- "If you think you're a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you're not even capable of dreaming. Dreaming is dangerous."

p. 46- "Horde your energy."

p. 52 "I never looked at songs as either 'good' or 'bad,' only different kinds of good ones."

p. 54- protest songs- "...You have to show people a side of themselves that they don't know is there."

p. 55 "Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open. He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that."

-"I watched it intently, thinking I might not see it again."

p. 55-56- tv, destroying minds, "the three-minute song also did the same thing. Symphonies and operas are incredibly long, but the audience never seems to lose its place or fail to follow along. With the three-minute song, the listener doesn't have to remember anything as far back as twenty or even ten minutes ago. There's nothing you have to be able to connect. Nothing to remember."

p. 56 "I didn't feel the need to examine every stranger that approached."

p. 57 corduroy trousers

p. 60 Remington typewriter

p. 65 Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet Theatre

p. 71 "Folk songs are evasive- the truth about life and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be."

-"A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening."

p. 73 T.S. Eliot poem description

-"...Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life... I felt like that too."

p. 77 snowy streets and NYC as a magnet

p. 79 importance of spelling

p. 80 (New York City) "Lot of walking. Got to keep your feet in good shape."

p. 84 NYPL and microfilm- language and rhetoric of newspapers

p. 85 "It's all one long funeral song."

p. 86- different concepts of time in the North and the South

p. 87 Metro Diner, near 6th Ave

p. 88 "Semantics and labels could drive you crazy."

p. 93 "Polka dances always got my blood pumping."

p. 96 "I'd never seen a robin weep, but could imagine it and it made me sad."

-Hank Williams' songs "the archetype rules of poetic songwriting."

p. 99-100 Woody Gurthrie and the box of lyrics that Billy Bragg and Wilco would record

p. 112- Archibald MacLeish- sacrifices

p. 113 1968 "the cities were in flames"

p. 115 "As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now."

"...spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with my generation that I was supposed to be the voice of."

-"Being true to yourself, that was the thing."

p. 118 "Privacy is something you can sell, but you can't buy it back."

p. 122 Chekov

p. 123 "The press? I figured you lie to it."

p. 133 "...though he is approaching the perilous age of 30..."

p. 146- live performances

p. 147- keeping his word with himself

p. 148 "My own songs had become strangers to me."

p. 150- lying

p. 153- crowd, cutouts

p. 155 "They came to stare and not participate."

-"...the kind of crowd that would have to find me would be the kind of crowd who didn't know what yesterday was."

-"Most music journalists had become nothing more than a public relations staff anyway."

p. 156 "My bright eyes were dull and I could do nothing."

p. 158- Number 2 and popular music

p. 163 "As long as I was alive I was going to stay interested in something."

p. 165 "A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true. They're like strange countries that you have to enter." "You can write a song anywhere...it helps to be moving."

p. 180- New Orleans "The city is one very long poem."

p. 182- Mason Ruffner- libraries- "reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire to get his language down."

p. 189 "...but the only way to find out, it to find out."

p. 195 "When it's right, you don't have to look for it."

p. 199 small print comment

p. 200- old water tower

p. 201 "...she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. She's always had her own built-in happiness."

p. 202 "Sometimes you could be looking for heaven in the wrong places."

p. 220 "Sometimes you say things in songs..."

p. 221 "Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them."

p. 226- advice from his Dad

p. 235 "I supposed I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road..."

p. 243 Flo Castner introduced him to Woody's solo music

p. 244 "...his voice was like a stiletto."

p. 245- Woody's book Bound for Glory

p. 247 (Woody) "He painted with words."

p. 265- Suze- "We started talking and my head started to spin."

p. 269- Red Grooms

p. 270- drawings

p. 272 Bertolt Brecht

p. 275 "The audience was the "gentleman" in the song."

-comparing the song to Guernica

p. 283 "Twenty-four hour news coverage would have been a living hell."

p. 284 "When December rolled around, everything slowed down, everything got silent and retrospective, snowy white, deep snow."

p. 288 Suze introduced BD to Rimbaud "Je est un autre."

March 12, 2008

2008-03-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

Highway 61 Revisited

Mark Polizzotti

2007, paperback

6 cards and notes on back cover

Highway 61 Revisited is the type of 33 1/3 book that I love. It gets into the album, the history, the musician, the cover and more while shedding new light on Bob Dylan. Polizzotti's book about Andre Breton has been on my bookshelf for a long time since I picked it up years ago. After this book I look forward to reading his take on Breton. Polizzotti writes about Dylan as "the thinking person's rock star," and also quotes Joan Baez, "Some people are just no interested. But if you're interested, he goes way, way deep." I'm interested. Polizzotti also keys into the simple but profound workings of Dylan and songs with statements like "Every great song has one moment that stands out above the rest..."

Highlights from the cards

p. 5- opening line about gaze

"The outer photo is as much performance as the music inside"

-glowering rock stars

p. 6 "...he knows the music is good, the best he's ever made, but he doesn't expect you to recognize it and he's gearing up for a fight."

-baby stroller

p. 7- Sergei Eisenstein

"Music that still has the rare quality, after all this time, of making us hear what we want to hear."

p. 8- this record being "too good"

p. 9 "The album is a road map into new territory..."

-"As the thinking person's rock star..."

-"...it pushes one to confront is again and again..."

-Joan Baez, "Some people are just no interested. But if you're interested, he goes way, way deep."

p. 10 "...the supposed turn toward electric music was really a return"

-Dylan, "...I played all the folk songs with a rock 'n' roll attitude..."

p. 12 Dylan, "'Protest' is not my word." ... "amusement-park word"

-"...There are many sides to us, and I wanted to follow them all."

p. 13 "poetical" approach

"he not busy being born and then reborn, is busy dying"

p. 14 Harry Smith

-Greil Marcus

p. 16- Suze

Dylan to Nora Ephron in 1965, "Folk music is the only music where it isn't simple."

-vegetables and death

p. 17 and 18- painters including Red Grooms

p. 19- singing when he writes

-Al Kooper's organ playing

p. 20- Kant and Mallarme

p. 21- Freud

p. 23- Midwestern

p. 24 BD "I left where I'm from because there's nothing there."

p. 25 Bessie Smith

-flipping the record

p. 31- Greil Marcus misses...

-boredom and the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone"

-D.A. Pennebaker

p. 32- "rhythm thing on paper"

-interviews as theatrical performances

-ghost writing "Like a Rolling Stone"

p. 33 "Also rare for a chart-topping hit, the lyrics focused not on love but its opposite."

p. 35- discussion of who Miss Lonely is (makes a good case its not Edie Sedgewick who I was thinking it was)

p. 37- ultimately...

-any of the phonies

p. 38 "It's up to you to figure out who's who"

-language used in Like a Rolling Stone

p. 39- French Symbolists

-Rimbaud, "I is someone else"

p. 41- Tarantula

-"the sun is still yellow. some people would say it's chicken" from Tombstone Blues

p. 43- writing songs

p. 52- Al Kooper's organ story

p. 53- the result...

p. 55- promo copies

p. 62- did sound check at Newport

p. 63 "sellout jacket"

p. 65- "...the sound of the street..."

p. 70 Woody Guthrie

p. 71 "Woody made each word count. He painted with words."

p. 75- names famous and obscure

p. 85- magpie's nests

p. 89 his voice

p. 90 (voice) "...it exists on its own terms..."

p. 92 "Love Minus Zero"

p. 93 Chelsea Hotel

p. 94 "If he was really serious about her, she had to be unknown..."

p. 110 "...the man Dylan's listeners swore to themselves they'd never become, and with whom most eventually all grew all too familiar."

-Jones vs. Smith for rhyming

-songs on the album- "those addressed to someone...and those...that flash by like glimpses through a car's window as it speeds across this frantic carnival of a nation."

p.111 "Once we have walked into this room, it is not certain we will ever find our way out.

-"Thin Man" song he often performs live

-rhyme scheme

-"Every great song has a moment that stands out above the rest..."

p. 117 BD "My songs are just me talking to myself."

p. 128- Rimbaud's "My Bohemian Life"

p. 129 warning "stepping off the road can leave you very lost"

p. 130- Kooper playing a Hohner Pianet

130-131- Tom Thumb

p. 134- postcards, cultural memory

p. 135- circuses and carnivals and carny life

p. 144

February - March 8

2008-03-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

My Life as a Red Furry Monster
What Being Elmo has Taught Me about Life, Love and Laughing Out Loud
Kevin Clash
2007, hardcover
7 cards

Elmo came late in my Sesame Street viewing life but I was always interested in his personality and outlook on life. Kevin Clash's love for puppet making and desire to be a Muppeteer comes through clearly in this book. While his insights are not earthshaking his points remind you what you know but sometimes forget in the midst of busy, noisy days.

Card highlights
p. 9- the phenomenon of Elmo is linked to love
"the human desire to love and be loved."
p. 10- "'I love you.' Those are magic words- basic, simple, easy to say, but as adults we often forget their power. We often forget to say them."
p. 34-35- "No matter who you are- a big yellow bird, a grouch in a can, a frog in a trench coat, or a furry red monster- you can love and be loved and find your place in the world."
p. 40- Motown music
p. 44- Elmo's laugh
"You will never see Elmo hold himself back from laughing when he feels joy, though he is always careful never to laugh at someone.
p. 49- fabric store- "whump of the bolt" and sound of the pinking shears
p. 51-52 Jim Henson
p. 52 "For a living legend, Jim was one of the most accessible and silliest men I've ever met....Jim was Kermit the Frog....Jim's main goal in life was to have fun."
p. 53- tux for a puppet
p. 86- drawing one's day
p. 87- (art with children) "It's not what you create, it is simply the fact that you are helping that child celebrate the joy of creativity."
p. 88 "Elmo gives us grown-ups the permission kids never nee to let our creative juices flow and maybe, just maybe, to reenter the world of make-believe and let some of our dreams come true."
p. 115- "Elmo knows how to see a child and not a disease or a condition. What Elmo sees is a potential playmate..."
p. 121- "Knowing when to admit you're in over your head takes courage."
p. 122- "You can't be afraid to fail, because you never know true success unless you have a flop or two (or six)."
p. 133-143 (Elmo and friends) "He looks at each meeting as an opportunity for fun."
p. 135- not being a follower
p. 145- No
p. 148 (friends) "You can keep your friends close, just by thinking of them."
p. 170- "...cooperation means more than simply being in agreement with another person. It means offering encouragement and aid, working together to resolve conflicts, compromising and sharing."
-(life as a performer) "...never been a solo act. No life ever is."
p. 177- creative element to the assignment
p. 178- "When we take the time to be creative in our teaching, chances are that we'll be more successful in engaging a child's mind."
-"Kids love to feel in control and smart."
p. 183- ask questions and admit when you don't know something
p. 188- "Dreams are fragile things, but when they've been bolstered by the support of parents and teachers and reinforced with early success, they can withstand the skeptics and take flight."
"Kids are the architects of their own dreams."
p. 199- corduroy pants
p. 205 "Even if one mind closes, thousands of others are opened up."
-moving forward