February 24, 2010 at 12:05 am · Filed under Literature, Memoirs
[Thought for the day || Life wears grooves in every soul. It saddens me how some people grow weary and become so hard, so untouched, so untouching. Relished for the cracks in the paint ... who wants to live in a white-picket-fence world? I get how it happens; Lord knows I've seen my fair share of ups-and-downs ... I've questioned, I've faltered, sleepless nights over things I couldn't control.... but so what? In your own way I'm sure you have too....and like me, I'm sure you've made it through (a better person for it). In a society filled with walls, boundaries, protection, and fear ... I prefer the freedom found in those who appreciate that life is perfect because of it's imperfections, not inspite of them.
In tune with the poem below, perhaps that is the one thing that I appreciate the most about my mothers life (and her passing) ... even in her twilight, she was an open source of light ... teaching lessons as she learned them herself. If she had been born of another fiber, one who cursed the world for that which she did not request ... or reclused at every sign of need or hope (because with it, might also come pain) ... she would have never left such deeply beautiful tracks upon my soul.]
THINGS SHOULDN’T BE SO HARD
Kay Ryan
A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.
January 19, 2010 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Art, Literature
Picking it up tomorrow….definitely. :)
From his very first photograph, made on assignment for Vogue in 1943, to startlingly fresh images that he continues to make for that magazine today at age 87, Irving Penn again and again shows an uncanny ability to surprise the world with his art. Far from a typical career retrospective, A NOTEBOOK AT RANDOM is a revelation. Included here are some of Penn’s signature images, along with the rough sketches and line drawings that provide a window into ideas and images in the making. The book is populated with artists, writers, and models whose lives intersected with Penn’s: Picasso looks out at us with that timeless intensity that characterizes an Irving Penn portrait. Many of the photographs are alternate poses or torn test fragments, pages from his personal ‘notebook’; some are newer-found discoveries, including a previously unpublished portrait of Truman Capote. Some of the most striking pages in this ‘notebook’ reproduce Penn’s painted photographs and mixed-media works, images so layered and exquisitely constructed that they resemble Cubist assemblages. With brief text excerpts and notations from Penn throughout, this is the most intimate and arresting book yet from one of the most admired artists of our time.
About the Author
Irving Penn was born in 1917. He studied design with Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and, in 1943, produced his first color photograph, a still life for the cover of Vogue. In a career of more than sixty years, he has made an extensive and influential body of work in portraiture, fashion, and still life. Mr. Penn is the author of several books, including Moments Preserved (1960), Worlds in a Small Room (1974), Flowers (1980), Passage (1991), Still Life (2000), and Earthly Bodies (2002).
January 15, 2010 at 12:20 pm · Filed under Literature
Rilke has recently become one of my new favorite muses. :) A 19th century poet, wise beyond his years…he was just 27 years old when he wrote the first letter of the series. I’m currently on my second trip through this book. Below are a few of my favorite quotes from his writings…
“Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.”
” ‘Living and writing in heat.’ — And in fact artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstacy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.”
“(…) it was of the sort that one reads again, when one finds them among one’s correspondence, and I recognized you in it as though you had been close at hand.
“(…) no human being anywhere can answer for you those questions and feelings that deep within them have a life of their own.”
“(…) to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you (…)”
“(…) love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”
“(…) your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand.”
“There I shall live all winter and rejoice in the great quiet (…)”
“What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love (…)”
“(…) they, who are long gone, are in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our destiny, as blood that pulsates, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.”
“Read the lines as though they were someone else’s, and you will feel deep within you how much they are your own.”
“love (…) the last test and proof, the work for which other work is but preparation.”
“(…) to become world for himself for another’s sake”
— Off to Nashville, TBC :) xo
