A diary of creative inputs
From the category archives:
Amy Hillman recently tweeted this photo of the dedication in a book from Bob’s Red Mill:
...a simple, sustaining way of life...
Not too surprising that someone who cares about his wife, work and values this much gave the company to his employees on his 81st birthday.
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Whenever I sense that I’m getting too tangled up in a specific process, or overly attached to a particular tool or way of thinking, I often find myself muttering: “My pen! My pen!”
I just recently found the sketch that inspired that little tactic of re-centering, after not seeing it for years:
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From the back cover of Haiku Year:
“In 1996, seven friends agreed to write one haiku a day and mail them to each other. At the end of the year, they realized that their collection of simple, critical observations had given them a new way to look a the details of their lives.”
Examples:
Tom Gilroy:
The Smiths on
Starbucks’ sound system
another dream over
Rick Roth:
Bitter stamp taste
Licked for a letter
that will get no reply
Jim McKay:
People in cars
telling life stories
in red light glances
Tom Gilroy:
the father pushing
the kid on the tricycle
when it’s easier to tell him to pedal
Anna Grace:
at dawn
we fall asleep
mid-sentence
You can even post your own to their guest book.
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I’ve been meaning to post something by Anis Mojgani since I first started this scrapbook. And while I feel there’s something in Mojgani’s work that these videos don’t quite capture, there’s no use waiting for perfection.
As a representative of the night-time cereal eaters, among several other characters listed, I give you “Shake the Dust”:
And be patient with this one — it really unfolds in the last minute or so, from the moment he says: “Because every breathe I give…”:
“…and the answer comes:
Already am,
Always was,
And I still have time to be…”
To learn more about Anis Mojgani: LiveJournal | MySpace
Listen to audio from IndieFeed’s Performance Poetry channel:
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MacArthur Fellow Heather McHugh, in a recent Newshour profile:
“If you look around, the surface of the water is never the same any two moments, much less any two days. Any skyscape is never the same thing. You can’t possibly see it all.
We narrow meaning to make our meanings of it.
For me, the whole point of poetry is to liberate the larger sense. The great paradox of poetry is it’s the smallest unit of language you can make that releases the greatest number of readings.”
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On the 60th anniversary of the founding of the (so-called) People’s Republic of China, this image resonated with me:
Camouflage 2 by Liu Bolin
From photographer Liu Bolin:
“I choose to merge myself into the environment. Saying that I am disappeared in the environment, it would be better to say that the environment has licked me up and I can not choose active and passive relationship.
In the environment of emphasizing cultural heritage, concealment is actually no place to hide.”
via Shoot! The Blog and designboom
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I found the following videos of Arthur Ganson’s sculptures via a tweet from the Long Now Foundation.
I really like the way these short films unfold the structure of each sculpture through time. It gives viewers a completely different experience of them than we might have if we walked into a room with one of them. Well done.
And:
And:
As one commenter pointed out, the sound of that last one is amazing.
There are more films of Arthur Ganson’s sculptures available on the dreamingmachines YouTube channel.
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But what’s wrong with being didactic every now and then? (Or always, if that’s your thing…)
“…Elephants
are mostly
made of four
Elements…
via Boing Boing
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I never expected to post any cat pictures on this particular blog, but there are moments for everything. And when a form reaches a pinnacle like this, lines must be crossed, and implied rules tossed.
(Why not throw in a facile and silly rhyme, too?)
It is a slightly misshapen watermelon...
I don’t know who took this picture, or how or why. (I found it via reddit.com)
But I identify with this cat, its absurd situation, and the look of determination on its face despite its surreal and quasi-Sisyphean task. (I’m projecting, of course.)
Cribbing from some anonymous Wikipedian:
Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, sees Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but concludes “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” as “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
Or, perhaps, a cat’s heart.
Keep pushing, little watermelon cat. I imagine you happy.
Or at least out of the water, with your nose buried deep in that watermelon.
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Perhaps - Reply to the Loneliness of a Poet Perhaps our hearts will have no reader Perhaps we took the wrong road and so we end up lost Perhaps we light one lantern after another storms blow them out one by one Perhaps we burn our life candle against the dark but no fire warms the body Perhaps once we're out of tears the land will be fertilized Perhaps while we praise the sun we are also sung by the sun Perhaps the heavier the monkey on our shoulders the more we believe Perhaps we can only protest others' suffering silent to our own misfortune Perhaps because this call is irresistible we have no other choice
– Shu Ting (Translated by Tony Barnstone and Newton Liu)
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Writing about music is difficult. How many times have you read a well-written review of a concert or recording, and then still had no idea at all what to expect when hearing the music?
That’s why I find this excerpt from a Tang Dynasty poem so remarkable:
“The thick strings splattered like a rain shower,
the thin strings whispered privately like lovers,
splattering and whispering back and forth,
big pearls and small pearls dropping into a jade plate.
Smooth, the notes were skylarks chirping under flowers.
Uneven, the sound flowed like a spring under ice,
the spring water cold and strained, the strings congealing silence,
freezing to silence, till the sounds couldn’t pass, and were momentarily at rest.
Now some other hidden sorrow and dark regret arose
and at this moment silence was better than sound.
Suddenly a silver vase exploded and the water splashed out,
iron horse galloped through and swords and spears clashed.
When the tune stopped, she struck the heart of the instrument,
all four strings together, like a piece of silk tearing.
Silence then in the east boat and the west.
All I could see in the river’s heart was the autumn moon, so pale.”
From “Song of the Lute” by Bai Juyi (772-846)
Translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping
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W.H. Auden, in the essay “Reading” from the collection The Dyer’s Hand:
What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
- Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
- Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
- Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
- Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
- Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
- Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
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“The things that make you strong, and make you feel as though you’ve accomplished something, are not the easy ones; it’s the things you had to work and struggle through. Those are what give us our depth—that make us not just gray and plain and nothing, but give us depth and texture and longing.”
– Dr. Jerri Nielsen, the emergency-room doctor who discovered she had breast cancer while over-wintering in Antarctica in 1999, died June 23rd. She was 57.
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From the Elsewise Media blog: