“Q: But has that instinct [for calling out social/racial unfairness] led you astray? Like the Taylor Swift interruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, things like that.
A: It’s only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.”
I don’t know how to tell you about my grandma. She was funny in a dry, droll way that’s hard to describe. She was incredibly sweet, in her undemonstrative, quiet way. She made a life in her garden and her kitchen, and when she was there that was where I wanted to be.
She loved dogs, birds, flowers, and babies. She loved the southwest. She was always whistling songs. She saved everything. She bought me the best pair of shoes I own, and found me a wonderful green hat in a gutter. She could always tell when I’d been crying or upset or had lost weight, and sent me to rest or fed me custard. She believed I deserved every good thing that could possibly happen to me. She’s a huge part of who I am and why.
The last few years were cruel, as they stripped away too much of what she’d loved doing and being, from her garden to her privacy. But even in the last days, she was still there and still herself. Even when she couldn’t speak, I could see she was mouthing “I love you.” And when she decided to let go on Friday night, she did it her way: quietly, after a long day of song and visits and love.
As she would say: Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.
*****
As Deb says — this past week made us incredibly grateful for each other, everyone at Serene Corner, and Evergreen Hospice.
The lawyer is not a content strategist. When you use sloppy words, IP lawyers are not going to send you a nice note.
I wrote a thing on Medium. Really fun to see @jfuchs and team’s work in action.
Auto-reblob My Fair Lady / current status
This past week I turned off Twitter and all the email notifications and took off for Hawaii with Jon, MFK Fisher, a new bathing suit, and a lot of sunscreen. I’ve never been so relaxed — or sunburnt — in my life.
(Related: I highly recommend this book if you’re ever headed that way.)
(Source: Flickr / coreycaitlin)
“The archives are best just before sleep, as memory and imagination take sway. Every archive has an intended logic, a day logic, with well-defined topics, alphabetical orderings, hierarchical taxonomies, or cross-referenced indexes. At night we see less of what is intended and more of what is there. We notice that the butterfly specimen cases ended up next to the drawers of pressed flowers. The minutes of the astronomy club are on the highest shelves, and some papers of Francis Bacon the essayist got in among papers of Francis Bacon the painter. Nothing can be as crowded with meaning as an archive and not earn its own dream logic of short circuits and coincidences.”
Charlie Loyd in The Garden, which is the last, wonderful bit of Contents Magazine’s phenomenal issue on the archive.
This is one of those rare pieces of writing that hits some weird part of my brain just the right way, making me want to read and re-read and re-read and makes me suddenly need to write things I didn’t even remember I knew. It’s one of the rare strings of words that reads so correctly I have trouble not weeping.
A haiku from the article: ‘Artful,’ by Ali Smith, a Novel With a Ghost
“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”—Chinua Achebe.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 22, 2013
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”
(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)
The trailer for Night Sky, a film project by artist and UC Irvine alum Alison O’Daniel, is absolutely mesmerizing. In a conversation with ArtForum last year, she said:
I grew up in the hearing world, but have always found myself just slightly outside of understanding what is going on; as a child, this caused a sense of wonder that has continually evolved. Not having access to everything creates a space for transcendence, and out of that a language of abstraction can emerge, and sound becomes profound.If possible, do yourself a favor and watch the trailer twice: try following the instruction to close your eyes, and then ignore it.
Seriously gorgeous.
And if you like research, brain stuffs, or human progress in general, follow the UC Research tumblr.
[Full disclosure: sometimes I help out with posting a bit.]
via @kissane
From Are Romantic Comedies Dead? by @nprmonkeysee:
Moreover, if you really examine these films, what you’ll find is that … story-wise, they’re resoundingly silly. They are exercises in flawless scene-level execution, not storytelling — the stories, such as they are, are really just frames to hang great conversations on. When Tracy and Hepburn sequester themselves in the upstairs stacks of her research library and talk about the beautiful fashion model who once bored him to death talking about women’s necklines getting higher, that’s a breathtaking scene because of the chemistry and the dialogue.
…
What’s most profoundly wrong is the terrible, mean-spirited scripts that are getting made, that are making people feel justified in using “rom-com” as an eye-rolling insult, and we’ve got to stop that first. Stop saying “chick flick” like it’s “pile of rotten meat,” and stop saying “chick lit” and “chick book” and “chick movie” and anything else that suggests that love stories are less than war stories, or that stories that end with kissing are inherently inferior to stories that end with people getting shot. Or, if you believe they are and you want to continue believing that they are, stop pretending you’re open to romantic comedies getting better.
This piece is just wonderful and I love it (not least for its focus on Desk Set, which is one of my absolute favorite silly-wonderful movies).
If you know how to read them, the words between the lines are as important as the ones in black and white. If you know how to follow them, the connections between books are threads of conversation. If you know how to look, every book is a quilt stitched from a fabric of borrowed words.
From my article over at Contents Magazine about reading and how we should be helping each other out to make the hard books more decipherable and the “simple” books more complicated. There’s also an example working library on intertexts that has some of my favorite quotations/books/links, even if you don’t read the whole article.
I wrote this in part because I’ve been haunted, for about five years, by the character of Magda, who’s constituent texts are so disconnected from other humans that she’s completely unmoored.
And this morning, also in Contents, I was thrilled to read The Windhill Bequest, in which a seemingly sterile list of texts (or archival items) evokes a rich, humane history and community.
It keeps coming back to this, for me. When we’re talking about how we connect to the past and maintain and illuminate the relationships between texts, these are the existential options: Magda or Elizabeth Windhill; bewildered pastiche whose texts further fragment demented self-delusions, or loving collection that uses texts to tie our selves to a past and a future.
