A Card Catalog

Weep no more, little love-notes, your shoebox homes are safe from Dewey's decimals.

I have found a prettier way to index.

Fair Play

Fair Play (New York Review Books Classics)Fair Play by Tove Jansson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Purchased at Community Book Store (Park Slope), read alongside Moominpappa’s Memoirs. Jansson’s children’s books were usually published with a bio stating that the artist/writer lived alone in a little cottage on an island, but in point of fact she was one half of one of those mythical creator-lesbian protocouples. So it was an especial pleasure to read Fair Play while also reading about Too-ticky, Jansson’s kid-washed version of her long-term companion (lover) the artist Tuulikki Pietila, some of whom I suppose shows up in its pages as well. The book reminds me a bit of my favorite NYT Real Estate article about friends (or were they lovers?) sharing adjoining apartments, or living in apartments subdivided into two living spaces: in this case we have Mari (a writer) and Jonna (an artist), two women living and working together and apart. Especially loved the first bit where Mari reorganizes Jonna’s studio. Living arrangements, arrangements more generally, lovers’ rituals and creatives’ spats, lingering disagreements and surfacing agreements sublimated into illustrations or Konica movies. Ali Smith’s introduction blurbs it better: “This novel is about creativity from the start—about how to take a day…and make it really new and fresh, no matter what age you are, what life you’re in.”




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peach couch

When your brain’s all topsy-turvy, maybe try saying an atheist prayer to Maira Kalman for principles of uncertainty, elements of style.  Her tonic always puts my bleh mood to rights again. Just one page in her books unwrapping layer upon layer of pastels that would make Key West turn lime-green with envy. Alternate worlds a synesthesiac could love. The jumbliest, grittiest New York street scene or claustrophobic prewar apartment refracted into sweetly-tilted planes of color. Slightly tart like a clever friend in conversation, the artist’s hand. It imprints on your heart a cheery feeling. How oddly-shaped and yearning our human lives are! Stretched out on the peach couch with one of her books    smoothing out my jaded eye    Just as nice, I think, as meditating or going to yoga. Hello to dourest old dowager, absurdist but apropos pronouncements, hoarder-neurotic’s humor, we meet again. Everything so like life on this island and couch. Except a just-mixed zest of tenderness like the most beautiful pistachio ice cream, rose-water macaroon. 



A Mind Map always radiates from a central image. Every word and image becomes in itself a subcentre of association, the whole proceeding in a potentially infinite chain of branching patterns away from or toward the common centre. Although the Mind Map is drawn on a two-dimensional page it represents a multi-dimensional reality, encompassing space, time and color. New Age sparkle fromThe Mind Map Book: How to use Radiant Thinking to maximize your brain’s untapped potential. (Burzan & Burzan, 1990).

A Mind Map always radiates from a central image. Every word and image becomes in itself a subcentre of association, the whole proceeding in a potentially infinite chain of branching patterns away from or toward the common centre. Although the Mind Map is drawn on a two-dimensional page it represents a multi-dimensional reality, encompassing space, time and color.

New Age sparkle fromThe Mind Map Book: How to use Radiant Thinking to maximize your brain’s untapped potential. (Burzan & Burzan, 1990).

we three in the children’s section, CSH library that first summer in NY for the record, i was wearing shorts

we three in the children’s section, CSH library that first summer in NY

for the record, i was wearing shorts

Sometimes we allow ourselves to /give over/ to our moods, feeling a heightened sensitivity to ourselves in menstruating. We can retreat temporarily from the stiff demands of smooth interaction and getting things done efficiently in order to brood. We close in on ourselves for a couple of days a month and reflect on our lives, often with a sense of melancholy or wistfulness. We experience our moodiness as coming from nowhere, and we feel it dissipate just as much without our willing or steering it.

Small acts of resistance: withdrawing to reread the excellent essay “Menstrual meditations” from Young, I.M. (2005). On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. 

bedside reading for my second major. february

bedside reading for my second major.

february

I basically destroyed my favorite books with the pure logorrheic force of my excitement, spraying them so densely with scribbled insight that the markings almost ceased to have meaning. Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.
Sam Anderson

(Source: The New York Times)


a small post with too many tags.

a small post with too many tags.

Butler card catalog

Butler card catalog