to act

"To be hopefull in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." Howard Zinn.

danny and the deep blue sea

"This play is dedicated to everyone in the Bronx who punched me or kissed me, and to everyone whom I punched or kissed." Dedication in John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, An Apache Dance

Image: Little Joy via Horse Hunting

mix tape

Jolie Holland via Bona Drag mix tape

what one says

"I stop talking about it. There's no need to talk about it, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does." Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

Wrapped Coast, 1968-69 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude via Grey

smoking cigarettes and watching captain kangaroo

In Kime Buzzelli's bunny shirt.

like a sailor knows the open sea

Erie Basin

everything that rises

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention. Flannery O'Connor

Maya Villiger in Jak and Jil also here

the goddaughter and I

love Bang Bang.

twilight of the superheroes

"It's broadening. You meet people in your family you'd never happen to run into otherwise." Deborah Eisenberg

Photo: Stil in Berlin

the arrangement

"Composition is the arrangement of unequal things." Richard Ford quoting John Ruskin in NYT

Untitled 1957, Clyfford Still at SFMOMA

rhyming action

White Dr. Martens for the goddaughter. APC for me.

seeing what happens

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Kiki Smith, Blue Girl, 1998

cut off

Genius cut off boots from Ascot Friday. A nod to this Golden Goose

Scout Holiday

Scout Holiday's Wish List is my wish list. 2008 too.

clamoring storm

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. Vladimir Nabokov

Syoin kajii via gotsalviento via Pour Porter

mislaid

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.

Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse

Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.

- Lorrie Moore, from "Self Help"
Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton

novels do not get easier to write

Miss Mazure's face was wildly askew. Every feature went its own way, and her nose was a large distraction

- All Souls by Christine Schutt
Image: The Ugly Earring

where art happens

The goddaughter at San Francisco Institute of Art.

you forget what you want to remember

"When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac's typewriter," Glenn Horowitz told the New York Times. "It's as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss army knife." NYT via Guardian.

if I thought you would, I'd never leave

A bit of an obsession with ERIE BASIN | tumblr
Mittens and this artist, Jazmin Berkha, at even*cleveland
Pour Porter via Karey M's (Mackin Ink & T. Ruffles) favorites
grijs always
This bear embrace
The folks at Backyard Bill
Every bag Nivaldo de Lima ever made
And something joyful about forty-sixth at grace

Solar System Quilt circa 1876 via ERIE BASIN | tumblr via Look Mom
(Now Voyager would love this quilt)

the matter

"I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is." Nabokov

Photo: Larry Bercow

what writers wear

Of course clothes are more fun if you leave the house once in a while.

Charlotte Rampling, Paris 2009 by Albrecht Fuchs via Horse Hunting

Ara Peterson: Turns Into Stone

At Ratio 3 (since I missed him at MACRO).

unless you feel

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die. Robertson Davies

Lyell Fall 2006

it is not your business

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. Martha Graham via Dear Genius, The Letters of Ursala Nordstrom

Cy Twombly, Ferragosto V, 1961

we can never know

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Peggy Gugenheim in Venice

ryan mcginley

Made it to Rome before I did.

Ryan McGinley. Jonas Snow Barn Disco, 2009

perfect pairing

"As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened." Kazuo Ishiguro

Reading: A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
Viewing: The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography at MOMA

colour

Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple, 1949

and there's no cure for that

"You're on earth. There's no cure for that." Samuel Beckett

Image from Melancholia

camera crush

Alessandra.

when despair seized the author

This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally to ask, with interest, "Does genius burn, Jo?" They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on, in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew, and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor.

From Little Women
Photo: Lyell Fall 06

l'ennui

Sylvia Plath's copy of The Great Gatsby via Melancholia

what is missing?

"I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world." Maya Lin.

Saw What is Missing? at the California Academy of Sciences. Also spending time at (and writing imaginary letters to) Ugly Earring and new to me, Wendy's blog.

thinking I was dorothy

"As for you, my galvanized friend, you want a heart. You don’t know how lucky you are to not have one. Hearts will never be practical until they are made unbreakable." Wizard of Oz via Melancholia

Conroy + Wilcox ring at Erie Basin

after betty

"I've always felt the gap between words and things, the impossibility of articulating what's really out there in the world, the strangeness of naming everything, including the self, how completely arbitrary it all is, and yet, at the same time, how it determines identities."

Siri Hustvedt in conversation with Thisbe Nissen
Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Painting: Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988

I'll go on

Beckett

bibliotheque

Bibliotheque dress via unruly things

junction of amends

When she talks about meeting her birth parents, the first things Sandra McPherson mentions are the wildflowers. When the thirty-seven-year-old poet first approached her birth parents' Northern California house, she saw wildflowers and mushrooms spilling across the lawn and began staring at their whorls and shapes, naming them in her head. For her whole life, not knowing her own birth name, Sandra McPherson has been mesmerized by naming things their right names...

From "Junction of Amends; Sandra McPherson's Poetics of Adoption" by Jan VanStavern
Photo by Gareth McConnell Lyell Fall 2006

I open the window and ask

Porter and Hollister were featured in NYT today (above) and if you haven't already, vote for Porter's appearance in Mad Men by giving her 5 stars. That would really make my day.

Photo by Michael Weschler for NYT

drift

"In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment."

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Photo NYT

it needs some wild darling

Test shots of the tremendous goddaughter.

the killers

The gunman is useless.
I know it.
He knows it.
The whole bank knows it.

I am the Messenger, Markus Zusak
Photo: The Selby

any question of the moral

"But any question of the moral inevitably raises—for the artist, at least—the question of the beautiful." John Banville in conversation with Ben Ehrenreich, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Golden Goose Distressed Sneakers, La Garçonne

reading to an empty room

Paul Auster: There's a great entry in Kafka's diaries in which he describes an imaginary writer in the process of giving a public reading. So-and-so is up there onstage, and people are getting restless and bored. "Just one more story," he says, "just one more..." People start getting up and leaving. The doors keep slamming shut, and he goes on begging, "just one more, one more," until everyone is gone and he's left alone at the podium, reading to an empty room.

Paul Auster & Jonathan Lethem
The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
Painting, Egon Schiele via Rooms

in the third act

At the end of the drama THE TRUTH—which has been overlooked, disregarded, scorned, and denied—prevails. And that is how we know the Drama is done.

... We recall how each attempt (each act) seemed to offer the solution, and how raptly we explored it, and how disappointingly we (the hero) were on finding we had been wrong, until:

At the End of the Play, when we had, it seemed, exhausted all possible avenues of investigation, when we were without recourse or resource, (or so it seemed), when we were all but powerless, all was made whole. It was made whole when the truth came out.

-- Three Uses of the Knife, Mamet
Photo: Mociun via Lena Corwin

promise me you'll always remember

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

Christopher to Pooh, A.A. Milne
Painting: '61 Pontiac, 1968-69, Robert Bechtle

all desire

Lucy Corin loves Frank O’Hara’s "Morning."

Photo Sally Singer, The Selby

in a dress my mother made

"I was married ten years ago, on a brazenly warm day in January, from my father's house, in a dress my mother made, with the same blithe blindness that sends a bungee jumper off a bridge" For Better or Worse by Lynn Darling

Photo by Estelle Hanania via Montmartre's Sketchbook
(Reminiscent of a Gerhard Richter painting)