Reading Room

Just a small pitch for watching the early movies of a director you love. Sólo con tu pareja by Alfonso Cuarón came out in 1991. It is weird and great and if you like later movies of his, Y tu mamá también (2001) and Roma (2018) which were released 10 and 27 years after his first movie respectively, it is fun to see how he continues touching on similar themes. Cuaróns filmography: 1991 Sólo con tu pareja 1995 A Little Princess 1998 Great Expectations 2001 Y tu mamá también 2004 Harry Potter and…

I avoided reading this for a couple of years because but I found it to be incredibly thought provoking. Magid strikes me as an incredibly intellectually honest and rigorous writer. His thinking and sources do not line up neatly with whatever you come in thinking the different camps are. His arguments and explorations are nuanced and I hope enrich the conversation around this. An excellent book. link here

From the movie Sin (2019) where Michelangelo is talking to Dante. By Andrei Konchalovsky of Andrei Rublev (1966) and others. That you could be doing something at his level for more than 60 years is incredible. And that you could circle around the same themes for that time, I used to find upsetting but I now find beautiful and comforting. Thank you Mark K. for the rec.

An incredible 5 minute documentary that left me in tears. link here Thank you Riley.

It's second generation, which emerged in the 1940's - Howard Nemerov, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, John Berryman, among many others - would fuse these techniques with postwar malaise, and an interest in psychoanalysis and existentialism, to produce works that often depended on minor scandalousness, from the incorporation of impolite words like "public hair" in an otherwise traditional sonnet, to the "confession," in…

There are books, movies and music that you would be missing something if you didn't experience. We may never know what we are missing but no doubt we are. And then there are those that wash over you, you snap out of it and you are not changed in any meaningful way. Disclosure Day uses tropes and dramatic camera zoom ins to Emily Blunts eyes as she stares at a cardinal - but after watching this movie you are no different for having seen it. No part of you is better or more aware. I want to say…

Via my parents. Found in my suit pocket after resting there for nine years.

—Henry David Thoreau Via Emily KF

From the Tatterhood Fairy Tale Thanks to Sean Kenney

A few quotes from the beautiful documentary "Jimmy and the Demons." A wonderful new film from the same director and editor team as "Buck" The engine for creativity is play. I just knew I had to present myself to this project. I don't know what Im doing but my hands know what to do. My great advantage is that I don't know what Im doing and I'm old and I don't have time to learn to do it right. Use sharp tools. Change blades often. Art is a blood sport. What makes a person old is lack of purpose.…

I always tell my students not to worry about originality; just try to copy the manners and musics of the various, the more various the better, poetries you love: your originality will come from your inability to copy well: YOUR GENIUS IS YOUR ERROR. Dean Young "The Art of Recklessness"

"Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?" Widely quoted and attributed to many but the original source of this is unclear

"13. When a young person first decides he wants to write, a number of mountains spring up around him, labeled with the names of his heroes. Hemingway Mountain, let’s say. He heads up it, armed with his love for Hemingway. At some point, he starts to get tired. Tired of imitating. Tired of the low-ceiling feeling of trying to express his reality in someone else’s voice. Tired of the way that, by trying to sound and think like someone else, he is falsifying: selling his own experience of life…

The main teaching of the Buddha is not to struggle against your life. Pema Chodron

Sometimes when we feel disappointed with a poem, with our effort, feel that the poem fails us, it's because it seems to fall short of our intentions. But those intentions are often vague and speculative, and any attempted actualization of those ideas can't help but be anemic. Let us forgive ourselves for writing poems that aren't better than every other poem that has ever been written. Dean Young "The Art of Recklessness"

Places can be holy, Almásy reminds us, not because we are told they are, but because we want and need them to be. Places can be holy because we are sharing them with someone we love, just as some places become cursed because they've taken people we love away from us. From Edwidge Danticat - "The Art of Death"

I had the pleasure of getting to the MET for the Rafael show which was everything I was told it would be and more. Thank you to those who encouraged me to go. A few gems from the show and a few from nearby exhibition rooms.

Courtesy of the fine people of Catskill NY Previous

link here If you have not read "The Birds" I can't recommend it more highly. For an assignment for her high school English class my niece recently asked what book I think everyone should read. Though I hesitate to be prescriptive in these matters, I secretly am and "The Birds" was and is my answer. Previous

link here - essay begins on pg 388 Previous

It is commonly assumed that we all love freedom and are willing to fight and to die for it. That such an assumption is untrue and dangerous is recognized by a few - who nevertheless fail, it seems to me, to understand what they describe. The truth seems to be that we like the idea of freedom and admire those who feel free, but at the same time we are afraid of freedom, and tend at times to be drawn towards being controlled. we like the idea of freedom and admire those who feel free, but at the…

If there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view of places of transition - along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms. From "A Pattern Language" Previous {{ next_post }

If there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view of places of transition - along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms. From "A Pattern Language" {{ next_post }

Thank you to Nick for your poems Previous

Thank you to Larry Legend for gifting me this print 15 years ago. Previous

I have a hunch that whoever put these here made them as well. Previous

As dark as it was in winter so it is now light. For a wonderful law of nature assigns to every spot on the earth a precisely equal span of time in the sun. Not precisely true but poetically true enough for me. From "A Woman in the Polar Night" by Christiane Ritter - thanks to Rob Spillman for the recommendation. Previous

From the incredible fourth book of On the Calculation of Volume. And now: Who was pressuring us? No one. Where were we going? Nowhere. What was expected of us? Nothing. We weren't living in a world of collisions and obstacle courses, we weren't opponents or stepping stones or helpers or pawns in one another's games. There was no need to assert ourselves, perform, posture, pick up the pace, cross any finish line. We lacked for nothing, there was no need to fight for jobs or prestige or higher…

Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller Thank you to Mark Kissler Previous