I just reread Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. I can’t recommend this book too highly. It’s beautiful. You can read it in an hour or take days or do one then the other.
Late medieval erotic pilgrim badges, which I s’pose should also qualify as badges of common objects. (via Jane).
Cardboard clouds by Fantastic Norway.
Advertising for love blog (via Maud Newton, I think, and even if it wasn’t you should read this conversation in Granta between her and Alexander Chee as they read Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford.) This reminds me of the personals and want ads we found on disintegrating bits of prewar newspaper when we redid the roof of our building. One of them was a desperate sounding announcement by a husband stating that after X date he would no longer honor his wife’s debts. It concluded with an ominous line advising merchants to give credit at their own risk. There were also a number of families in the Bronx advertising for au pairs and nannies. Many of these ads included lines like: Poles ok, no Jews… I remember when I first realized that the ideas of eugenics that so pervaded that era would have been personal. I was perhaps ten and my history teacher was explaining that in Nazi Germany anyone with a single Jewish grandparent was required to wear a star. Up until that moment, I had never been conscious of my own privilege, or that it might not have existed in another time and place… I sometimes get a little queasy when I’ve read some of the contemporary language on nutrition in the last few years. There is a weird echo of the prewar language of eugenics that exists not very far enough away from good common sense. Michael Pollan, a fine skeptic, references the Weston A. Price Foundation in either The Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food (I can’t recall which), whose work is about two thirds fascinating and provoking and about one third lurching in an disturbing direction, emphasizing the physical characteristics of “degeneration,” and by extension their opposite. (I just looked though their site and there seems to be less of that than there was a couple of years ago.) That sketchy third overlaps with a horrid world of people whose language falls (not always) just this side of early twentieth century descriptions of fitness and creepy fetishistic primitivism. (All I wanted was a Pepsi—I mean, a stick of butter.) When Aure was a newborn I remember reading message boards where people were discussing certain physical qualities in terms of fitness and breeding. It was distressing, and not only because I was still wildly hormonal and willing to entertain the idea that I might have ruined my newborn by not eating liver while pregnant. I also, at that point, was embarrassed not to have a flat stomach four weeks after giving birth, lying awake at night worrying about what an awful person I was for not sending thank you cards to everyone who gave me baby things, and constantly imagining evil people might emerge from the sewers and snatch my baby away. (Who the hell was that poor wretch?) I managed to endure it by remembering the childbirth education teacher describing how a mother she knew was terrified to take her baby into the sunlight for fear it might die of skin cancer and how that was perfectly normal (hahaha, we all said) as long it didn’t prevent her from actually leaving the house. And she was right of course. In a month or so, it was fine… I almost didn’t read that article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker on parenting crap because I am angry right now about how those moments of vulnerability are exploited and bored silly with the meta conversation about parenting (also gerunds unnerve me a little) and whether it is socially acceptable to discuss one’s spawn. But it turns out the author puts her finger precisely on why all the rib digging and ho-ho confessions are so annoying.
Paid parental leave? Better day care? Nah. More memoir is what we need.
Obviously. The more sensational the writer, the less she personally need worry about parental leave or paying the bills… Which reminds me of a recent confusing book review by Jessa Crispin. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, though I’m beginning to suspect her provocation is as calculated as is Waldman’s. I was right there with her until the end of the first half, which she left oddly hanging. Is she really trying to say she doesn’t understand the importance of marriage (not the importance of being married, mind you), isn’t interested in empathizing with a life not her own? Does she really not understand the cultural relevance of marriage right now, when so many Americans are passionately fighting for—what? A license to soggy crackers and lifetime of impotency? Come on. Given the stats on marriage, who could call that life playing it safe? The very hope that a long and passionate connection with the beloved can exist alongside the quotidian of curtains and bills and bodily functions is altruistic and excessive and heroic and romantic and utterly uncynical. Maybe that’s the problem. (I also love how she got in that tidy little misogynistic jibe about mommy bloggers too. Well done. Never forget, ladies, if you do anything between giving birth and dying, we passionate creatures don’t want to hear about it.) If I want to read Nehring’s book it’s because of What’s Wrong With The American Essay, in which she spanks American essayists not for “focusing on tiny fragments of their own lives,” but for refusing to extrapolate from their own stories to gesture at something larger in the form of theories, questions, and audacious aphorisms. For chrissake, she’s referencing Montaigne, who wrote about his own health at excruciating length (gravel!). It’s okay to write from the minutia of a life, it just has to go somewhere larger. The bigness or smallness of the starting topic’s not the problem. I always imagined Nehring was railing against the ladylike, the idea that too much passion, too much tooth and nail is somehow unseemly. She’s complaining about the compliant role of the American essay as one more mechanical prop to pat us all on the head and remind us to obey the rules. For example, the rules defining which subjects are palatable and which brand us hysterical.
The delightful descriptions of “chicken of illustrious race” in chapter ten of House of the Seven Gables. (About midway through.)
The cubed universe.
Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran. The whole world is watching. More eyes again…
An office by (and for) Selgascano in the forest outside of Madrid. The Spanish are so joyfully gung-ho for color. Sometimes it fills me with a pale gray suspicion me but this time it makes my mouth water.
And after a glance through American Craft, a bunch of tangents, starting with a crazy video of Matthew Szosz inflating fused window glass to make his pneumatic creatures. More of his work from an extinct show in Brooklyn and at the Friesen Gallery’s site. And while I’m poking around for more things made of stone (more or less), Chadwick Augustine’s MFA work from Alfred. Every now and then I lie awake at night thinking maybe I should go back to school and have all day to jog here and there making things out of clay or drawing or poking holes in stuff that are my very own problem and no one else’s. Then I look at the tuition for anything available near where I already live and I think to myself, self, that is probably not a very good idea. One of the nicest things about being an adult-adult is not owing monstrous student loans. And so I go and eat some chocolate ice cream and make something small and easy to complete like dinner or more chocolate ice cream, or a set of eight posters, which admittedly took a bit longer than dinner. I have learned a few things about scanning line drawings though. Really the trick is to scan at a resolution that makes your computer explode and the scanner melt, then adjust and resize in Photoshop, fully expecting the software to fold when you add more than one layer to the file. (And yes, I have 4GB of RAM on my Powerbook. What on earth is wrong? Don’t you people work at print resolution all the time?) And that, or maybe the thing before that brings me again to the question of where to live. Or where else to live, since we are rather heavily invested in our building for the next twenty years or so. After that article on Andy Brayman in American Craft, maybe I should add Kansas City to the list. His workshop is the old farmer’s market! A-ok. Right now the Traverse City area is an object of fascination, though combining that with NYC is a bit rough. I have no desire to leave NYC in the summer. I love it here in the hot weather. It’s social and full of art and fresh tomatoes and picnic food! Winter, on the other hand, leaves me barely alive. But maybe if I lived in a cottage with a fireplace and a lot of canned tomatoes and a nice workshop in a remote forest during the winter, it would be okay. (All this I stumble upon while picking strawberries in the woods, where I meet the owner who is moving to Guam and unloading the place for eleven thousand dollars in my fantasy, where I have a habit of never making things utterly free or completely random becuase what kind of a fantasy is that? Too easy. Too greedy. Not a very good story.) I might not want to ever leave my warm cottage and workshop. An older friend, a lifelong New Yorker, was telling me how when she was young, nearly all middle class New Yorkers had a little place to stay outside the city, however shabby. (Ha! There were middle class New Yorkers in those days. In Manhattan no less!) And if your parents were too poor for that, you were sent away to a camp to learn to swim and fish because the country air was good for you and fortified you against all sorts of infectious urban miasmas. I often find myself thinking of things like “country air” when I am at the playground with Aure. So many of the kids in my neighborhood look perpetually sickly. So many dark circled eyes and pasty little faces gnawing forever on cheetos dispensed by tense parents. I can’t help thinking how the disadvantages of poverty are so snarled, so much more than cash or education or nutrition or stimulation or touch or time or the cumulative effect of generations of everything gone wrong. Some of these little people go straight from a fractious babyhood to a unhappy toddlerhood and right on through, never knowing how it feels to not be subtly ill, not ever experiencing the magical phase of teenage invincibility the rest of us have to marvel at for the rest of our lives.
A delicious breakfast from House of the Seven Gables: Broiled mackerel, indian (corn) cakes with clovery butter, and coffee. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was sitting in the jury assembly reading room around lunchtime. I and three other people had the place to ourselves. I spread out at my own table, put my feet up, and got to work. All morning long, I pounded away on a pile of design work I’d been trying to do get around to for weeks. The reading room is better than silent, the ventilation is loud enough to cover all the small sounds of people working alone. The throat clearing, sniffs, and shuffles are flattened out in a nice white whoosh. No toddler to show me things or explain how cool his pelota is or list the colors of all the balls be plays with that the playground or explain to me how naughty it is to put tiny balls of tin foil in one’s mouth. All the perfectly justified interruptions that are enough to derail me over and over. When I got home last night, he had a whole new repertoire of La Ballena Moby stories to tell me, mostly morality tales describing how La Ballena Moby knows how to wait for his hard boiled egg without screaming or how La Ballena Moby never goes in the street because it’s dangerous. Dangerous, which he pronounces dangeous, is a very popular word these days and the base of his very first pun: Juice, juice, juice, dangeous! Hahaha! Fun-ny! All of his jokes conclude with haha funny. And speaking of remarkable urchins, I have been not really enjoying House of the Seven Gables as much as I have been enjoying Hawthorne’s notebooks with their unconnected characters and landscapes, but I did love the description of Hepzibah’s small gingerbread animal eating patron as Father Time.
…These articles Phoebe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after engulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
On the other hand, 2666 is perfect so far. All weird little eddies of characters and voices. If only I have more moments with a free hand to hold up an actual book.
An example of an existing structure of authority in Science (Medical in this case). So to answer your question, I don’t think disrupting the centers of authority in the medical or scientific or publishing world is bad or dangerous at all. Just the opposite. So much of what Jane Jacobs said about urban community and safety is relevant again here in our new communities. It’s a struggle again between the muscular authoritarian model of urban development imposed from above and the gentle accretion of a structure made of paths worn and spaces populated by the people within an environment—that is, those who have the most interest in it. The most to gain and the most to lose by every change. More eyes keep us safe. More eyes keep us honest. (Go DIYbio!)
McSweeny’s is busting out with a newspaper!
Does Kenichi Yokono ever make prints anymore?
