Earlier today I had a ranging conversation with a local bookstore owner. I told him that I thought that where one locates oneself on the ideological continuum really depends on little more than the amount of empathy one feels toward others. If you can't put yourself in another's shoes, then whole worlds of possibility are closed off. If everything is ego-oriented, if everything is about oneself, then there's going to be trouble. No one can be all things to all people; but aren't we defined as much by what we do as what we don't do, by what it doesn't even occur to us to try to do?
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One of the books I bought today from my friend: Blasphemy: Art that Offends by S Brent Plate
(Black Dog Publishing, 2006).
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This past Christmas I received a digital voice recorder which I've only just now, months later, taken out of its plastic wrap. I decided I wasn't going to open it up until I had a project to use it for. Now I have the idea about what to use it for, I just don't know how to use the recorder. It looks somewhat complicated for such a tiny little thing.
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Last Summer we bought our first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share. We're doing it again this year. Every week we receive a box of fresh, locally grown produce. Today we got our first one of the season: radishes, leaf lettuce, green onions, strawberries, and brown eggs.
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Anthony Braxton and company batting away on the stereo.
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Rainy, humid day.
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What is a picture? What is an image?
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There's a passage in Emerson's journals that I find interesting: "Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will always be the same gulf between me & thee as between original and picture."
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In Vollmann's Kissing the Mask there's a recurring riff about relations between a man and woman being about the pleasure of crossing an abyss.
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The fascinations of the mask.
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There's so much I don't know. And I, myself, am so unknown (even by myself).
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Sexual desire. Wanting to touch and be touched. Wanting to be open to surprise. Wanting to be surprised.
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Where does one find oneself in terms of thinking about the role of waiting in one's life?
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After a hiatus I'm again trying to win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. It's one of my few ambitions. Hi Karri!
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Hi, Tom! I haven't really looked into them for awhile, either. The one I have at hand right now is the one from last week, the guy doing the hedges in his yard. Couldn't come up with anything, really. "A neighbor just texted, honey. Calls them 'Fall Classics.'" Think I'm overdoing it?
ReplyDeleteInteresting question, about the difference between picture and image. I guess a picture contains an image (but seldom the other way around, unless there's a picture hanging on the wall in that image...) But that might be simplifying it too much. But I think an image is more abstract, as compared to, say, a drawing or a photo.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me. Breton's L'amour fou just came out in Finnish translation. And as I look at it, there's a picture by Man Ray on the cover. It's the Violon d'Ingres that depicts a woman with the f-holes (?) drawn on her back. Now, there's an example of a picture containing an image with pictorial elements in it, if there ever was one. Am I making sense?
As for the cover: Ray's photo is a great one, of course, but does it depict foolish love? I don't think so.
Here goes I: "I bet it goes down awesomely with wasabi."
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