I should have begun with this: the sky.A window minus sill, frame, and panes.An aperture, nothing more,but wide open.
...but we live by the grace of the simple fact that our bodies take good care of us. It's in this sense that I tell students that they have to be able to trust themselves. What we all have to do is to use this bodily wisdom, staying close to the kinds of processes and ideas and emotional anchors that are most appropriate to our feelings, to ourselves. You can't evade your ideas, which are precious to us, but micromanaging our ideas can be as much of a hinderance as they are a great help.... When we are young we are self conscious, we think about what people think about us. As artists, the more we think about our audience and what we are trying to present, the less, perhaps, we are in touch with the physicality of the experience, the particulars, the minute details of our experience.Emmet Gowin, talking to John Paul Caponigro
Sackdresses dyed the sunas sun passed through, making a brash stained glassagainst the leading of the tenements,the warehouse holding medical supplies.I waited for my bus by that window of trussesin Caucasian beige, trying to forgetthe pathological inside.I was thinking of being alive.
Alice Fulton, from Industrial Lace
In this, your future, waves rechristen the sea
after its tiny jeweled lives
that hiss “Us Us” to the shore all day.
Where’s the kid called Kateydid? the moonfaced
Kewpiedoll? The excitable pouting
Zookie? The somber O-Be-Joyful?
Lost girl, playing hopscotch, I will do what you could.
Name of father, son, ghost. Cross my heart and hope.
While the sea’s jewels build shells and shells
change to chalk and chalk to loam and gold
wheat grows where oceans teetered.
Alice Fulton, from Fierce Girl Playing Hopscotch
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Jack Gilbert, from Failing and Falling
The drive to make sense out of experiance, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and as pressing as the more familiar biological needs. And, this being so, it seems unnecessary to continue to interpret symbolic activities -- religion, art, ideology-- as nothing but thinly disguised expressions of something other than what tey seem to be: attempts to provide orientation for an organism which cannot live in a world it is unable to understand.
George Geertz, anthropologist
While subjectivity will continue to reign supreme when it comes to our individual preferences for one type of photographic print process over another, the subjective nature of those personal choices will thankfully remain the very source from which art derives one of its most beneficial pleasures.
-Huntington Witherill, on why he stopped printing silver gelatin in 2006
Just keep onlike I do and pay no attention. You’llfind that people always will complainabout the atmosphere, either too hotor too cold too bright or too dark, daystoo short or too long.If you don’t appearat all one day they think you’re lazyor dead. Just keep right on, I like it.
Frank O'Hara, from A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
post script: i made a yogurt-anything cake with bleuberries and a lemon glaze... originally from Ina Garten, secondarily from Smitten Kitten, who is amazing. Gosh I love Blog Land.
