August 31 - September 2, 2008

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 4 - 5, 2008

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!!!!]

July 10 - August 2, 2008

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..."

February 16 - March 8

Wanderlust

A history of walking

Rebecca Solnit

2000, hardcover

54 cards

I read Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost at the suggestion of Claire. It was a wonderful meandering, thinking, reflecting book that merged intellectual ideas about solitude with punk rock and so much more. When I came across the title of this book, the R.E.M. song Wanderlust (followed by Pilgrimage and We Walk as I read the book) came to mind as well as the German word it is. The best discoveries often come from wandering or browsing and this book was all one could hope it to be. I have a list of many more books to read as a result. Solnit wonderfully merges art, architectural and intellectual history into her discussion while keeping in mind pop culture, experience, activism and reflection. I have only lived in a few where walking for most everything was possible and I hope to return to places like that again. I knew I hated treadmills and gyms but I thank Solnit allowing me to understand the roots of both and the greater cultural implications of both.

Highlights from the cards:

p. 4 "The history of walking is everyone's history... a desk is no place to think on a large scale."

p. 5 "...thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something that is closest to doing nothing is walking."

p. 6 "...it is both means and end"

p. 7 "Think of the ruin as a souvenir from the canceled end of the world."

p. 8 "It was a revelation to me, the way this act of walking...could articulate political meaning..."

-Thoreau's essay Walking

p. 9 "the sense of place that can only be gained on foot"

-people living "in a series of interiors...On foot everything stays connected."

p. 10- "It's the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value."

p. 10-11 erosion of public space

p. 11- "The random, the unscreened, allows you to find what you don't know you are looking for, and you don't know a place until it surprises you."

p. 13- "When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back."

"Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains."

p. 20-21- Rousseau "Reveries of a Solitary Walker"

p. 23-25- Kierkegaard

p. 24- "Kierkegaard's great daily pleasure seems to have been walking the streets of his city. It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them..."

p. 27 mentions George Orwell's statement "The opinion that art should not be political is itself a political opinion."

p. 33- John Napier "Human walking is a unique activity during which the body, step by step, teeters on the edge of catastrophe."

"walking begins as delayed falling"

p. 55-57- The Peace Pilgrim

p. 58- "a pilgrimage makes an appeal while a march makes a demand."

"Nonviolence means that activists are asking their oppressors for change rather than forcing it."

p. 67-68- quote at the bottom of the page- "An active line on a a walk moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk's sake." Paul Klee, Allegorizing Drawing

p. 68 "A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape..."

p. 69- moral of mazes

p. 70- Marianne Moore

-children's books

-"...sometimes the map is the territory."

p. 71- labyrinth- 1 route

p. 72- "Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to travel the route of the absent."

p. 88- ha ha ditch

p. 90- French gardens and English gardens

p. 95- guidebooks- what to see, some how to see

p. 96- picturesque- William Gilpin

p. 106- "The poem is also a kind of atlas of the making of a poet"

p. 119- William Hazlitt, 1821, On Going on a Journey, "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey, but I like to go by myself,"

-"solitude is better on a walk because 'you cannot read the book of nature without being perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of others.'"

p. 124- "You must be complex to want simplicity"

-Bedouins

p. 143- "What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history, though it often becomes visible as literature."

p. 149 "...the consequence of the theory that nature is supposed to make you happy is that those most desperately in search of happiness tend to show up there."

p. 158- when walking becomes marching

p. 160- rambling

-"walking is classless" (access to the land another issue)

p. 162- "Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning."

-"Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforates the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property."

p. 167- "Walking has become one of the forces that has made the modern world- often by serving as a counterprinciples to economics."

p. 171- "Cities have always offered anonymity, variety and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune teller's, only to know that one might."

-"A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination."

p. 174- Sierra Club dictum, "Take only photographs, leave only footprints."

p. 175- "Streets are the space left over between buildings."

p. 176- "the ideal city is organized around citizenship- around participation in public life."

-most American cities and towns organized around consumption and production

-"Walking is only the beginning of citizenship, but through it the citizen knows his or her city and fellow citizens and truly inhabits the city rather than a small privatized part thereof."

-"Walking the streets is what links up reading the map with living one's life."

-Jane Jacobs

-"To me, the magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany."

p. 186- Patti Smith, when asked about how she prepares for performances, "I would roam the streets for a few hours."

p. 187- Virginia Woolf, "How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured."

p. 191- Alan Ginsburg

p. 192- Frank O'Hara, about whose work reveals as Solnit says "Cities are forever sprawling lists."

-David Wojnarowicz, Close to Knives, "He writes in a collage of memories, encounters, dreams, fantasies and outbursts..."

p. 197-198- Walter Benjamin- "...Paris taught me this art of straying." The Arcades Project

p. 199-200 the flaneur

p. 202 Proust

-Baudelaire- "The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else...Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality."

p. 204 Haussmann

p. 205- what upset people most was what he obliterated, which was "the mental map walkers carried with them and the geographical correlatives to their memories and associations"

p. 206- Benjamin on Louis Aragon's book, so exhilarating, "evenings in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down."

-Benjamin and Franz Hessel has worked on a translation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past

p. 210 "Parisian writers always gave the street addresses of their characters"

p. 211 Hannah Arendt "...so one inhabits a city by strolling thought it without aim or purpose"

p. 212- Guy DeBord- Psychogeography and Theory of Derive (drifting)

-Greil Marcus

p. 213 "map of your own thoughts, the physical town replaces by an imaginary city."

p. 213 De Certeau- "A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities."

-"frightening possibility...post pedestrian city...risks becoming a dead language"

p. 216 Joseph Beuys "Everyone an artist."

-"This is the highest ideal of democracy- that everyone can participate in making their own life and the life of the community- and the street is democracy's greatest arena."

p. 218- "But when public spaces are eliminated, so ultimately is the public."

-"Paris is the great city of walkers. And it is the great city of revolution."

p. 229 and 230

p. 230- "A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illuminating the darkness of our old arrangements so that we will never see them quite the same way again."

-Reclaim the streets

p. 231 "Stop the car, Free the city"

p. 232- walking and courtship

p. 233-234 women and walking

-"women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport"

p. 249- 1970s census- majority of Americans suburban

p. 250- suburban home only a place of consumption

p. 251- suburb product of the Industrial Revolution

p. 255- "Political engagement may be one of the things suburbs have zoned out."

p. 260 "The body has ceased to be a utilitarian entity for many Americans, but it is still a recreational one."

-treadmill- "meant to rationalize prisoners' psyches"

p. 263- "The everyday acts of the farm had been reprised as empty gestures"

p. 264- treadmill most perverse- "simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared"

"disinclines people to participate in making that world habitable or to participate in it at all"

-the modern treadmill consumes power (originally could be used to power things)

p. 267 "The disembodiment of everyday life I have been tracing is a majority experience."

-Walking as art, 1960s

p. 269- Lucy Lippard- sculpture- Carol Andre, "My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road."

p. 270- Richard Long, artist from England, Line Made by Walking, 1967

p. 271- Long, "A walk expresses space and freedom and the knowledge of it can live in the imagination of anyone and that is another space too."

p. 272- Stanley Brouwn

p. 278- Las Vegas- new outpost of pedestrian life

p. 278-279- quote at the bottom of the page- Ivan Illich, "The world has become inaccessible because we drive there."

p. 283- Michael Sorkin and theme parks

p. 286- Vegas reinventing the garden and the city

-privatization

-"But the world gets better at the same time it gets worse."

p. 289 Red Rocks

-fight for free space, fight for free time

"Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true crime titillations, and celebrity crises."

p. 291- "The constellation called walking has a history...but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still."

p. 288-291- bottom of the page- Yoko Ono, Map Piece, 1961

p. 284-287- bottom of the page- A.R. Ammons "A poem is a walk"

p. 325-326 Sources for Foot Quotings

February 14-15, 2008

The Principles of Uncertainty

Maira Kalman

2007 hardcover, library

5 cards

Maira Kalman is fabulous. The word fabulous exists because of people like Maira Kalman. If you've seen the new Elements of Style you know who Maira Kalman is; she painted the wonderful pictures in a fabulous new version of that book. She also wrote/painted/created/thought of this book, The Principles of Uncertainity, a conceptual walk that's also a picture book for those in a reflective and contemplative state of mind. I first saw this book during the holidays but I didn't look at it too much for fear that I would need to have it. The book jacket's inner sleeve confirmed my suspicion but I put the book back before leafing through. Then the library had it. Thank you library! Kalman's paintings are unique undertakings, seemingly simultaneously drawing upon Milton Avery, Francis Alys, Florine Stettheimer and Jenny Holzer's Truisms- completely magical and profound. The index and the appendix are also delights for bibliophiles and collectors, not to mention a map (A MAP!!!) in the back!

It's all fabulous but these pages I found particularly fabulous:

p. 3 dodo

p. 4 Evdaimonia

p. 5 stuffed Pavlov's dog

p.8-9 map her mother drew

p. 20 looking between slurps

p. 26 walking and cities and magnificent chairs

p. 28 "excellent United Pickle tag lying on the sidewalk" (pickles!!)

p. 37 old people and walking (so true)

p. 42 "How are we all so brave as to take step after dtep? Day after day?"

p. 46 we are all going to die

p. 47 fruit platters

p. 50 obituaries "Maybe it is a way of trying to figure out, before the day begins, what is important. And I am curious about the things that make up a life."

p. 52 (fabulous painting of a donut shop)

p. 55 bundt pan

p. 56-57 Tolstoy and Gorky

p. 65 Alzheimer's

p. 83 "The world is coming to an end. What to do Spend the day on the subway."

p. 97 string

p. 99 "How do you know who you are?"
p. 102 collections "...tangible evidence of history, memory. Longing, delight."

p. 111 Abe Lincoln

p. 122-23 candy collection (I had one of these when I was younger)

p. 124 "It is well known how much Goethe loved candy."

p. 162 "The silent sink in the Corbusier house that speaks the truth." (Tim would like this.)

p. 163 "The ottoman on the way to the Proust room."

p. 164-65 Proust notebook

p. 166 museum guard

p. 176 Sabine- "clothes and shoes she made herself." "She tells me to read "Butterball" by Maupassant. I will."

p. 184-85 Louise Bourgeois

p. 186 "I think of her Bed Construction that says, 'Art is the guarantee of sanity.' I really hope that's true."

p. 192 "Washing dishes is the antidote to confusion. I know that for a fact."

p. 194 Alzheimer's, Sweet 'n Low packets

p. 195 Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest "That is a very big poin in the plus column of life."

p. 208-211

p. 236-38

p. 242 "How do you go mad? How do you not go mad?"

p. 245 "The truth is everybody gets on everybody's nerves."

p. 251 Freud and Wittgenstein

p. 252-53

p. 259 "Berlin Childhood around 1900" by Walter Benjamin

p. 261 Helen Levitt

p. 270 "One thing leads to another."

p. 284-85 Cartier-BResson photo

p. 287 "You cannot order a Deluxe grilled cheese sandwich. There are limits to deluxe."

p. 296-97 "Keep calm and carry on"

Fabulous index

Fabulous appendix- especially: things that fall out of books, packets, postcards