Happy Holidays

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah,  a Wonderful Winter Solstice, a Sumptuous Shabe Chelle, a Peaceful Pancha Ganapati and a Happy New Year!

Frances Wessels A Portrait of 89 Years from Jason Akira Somma on Vimeo.

(Image found here)

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-

I, too, am America.

--Langston Hughes.

Pierre Huyghe

space space space

(Pierre Huyghe via mariangoodman)

Space

"One of the most basic principles of every single art form has to do not with what's there - the music, the words, the movement, the dialogue, the paint - but with what isn't. In the visual arts it's called the 'negative space' - the blank parts around and between objects themselves. The negative space allows us to see the non-negative space in all its glory and gloom, its colour and mystery and light. What isn't there gives what's there meaning. IMAGINE THAT."

-- Cheryl Strayed

The Fox of Bloody Woman Island

(image found here)

Sunday Tune

Saturday Poem

contained and uncontained

Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God ... I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

--Wallace Stevens

(via evencleveland)

Photos from Shilly Shally Lodge, Gatineau Park. From Library and Archives Canada, discovered via A London Salmagundi.

Movement is Life

'in a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists'

— jhumpa lahiri, the lowland

Carl Andre

Carl Andre

(gif found here)

Valentina Liernur

Valentina Liernur

Stories

“You know how doctors who work with children get the children to tell stories? And they figure out from the stories what’s frightening the child, what’s worrying the child, what the child thinks? Well, a novel is just a story. You work things out in the stories you tell.”

Happy birthday, Joan Didion! Read her 1978 Art of Fiction interview and 2006 Art of Nonfiction interview.