'“Photography is all right,” Hockney liked to say, “if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralysed Cyclops, for a split second.” He’d pause, waiting for the image to sink in. “But that’s not what the world is like, and it’s not what actually experiencing the world is like.”'
—Lawrence Weschler, David Hockney’s Timescapes
Image: David Hockney’s Celia Making Tea, N.Y., Dec. 1982, photographic collage, 25 x 21”, an edition of twenty.
"Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal—a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing."
—Jeanette Winterson to The Guardian
"Two animals have lighted on each other."—Nietzsche
A little known correlative to the dramatic principle of Chekhov’s gun is that if a carton of rocky road is shown in the first act it must be eaten in the third.
"The truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle the dog, at the cheaper beasts in the zoo, and the soul slips in."—Virginia Woolf, diaries
The scene of the mush.
“You can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, and you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer. PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.”—Alexander Chee in MFA vs NYC
“Yes, many of us MFA-ers were rounding into our thirties while making 10:00 p.m. IHOP runs for dinner, eating eggs that didn’t look quite right, as if they came from some other kind of bird, maybe a pigeon.” —Maria Adelmann in an essay in MFA vs NYC
Pictured: Actual egg from my time in Florida as an MFA student, age 30.
"One lives so badly because one always comes to the present unfinished, unable, distracted." —Rilke
The health science library is the best library.
40°F finally. Outdoors, hello.
"There’s so much beauty in this world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this chance to live—if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I’m just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at haven been given this one chance to live.
"I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will cry into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of announcing the arrival of the next cock—I mean, messiah—I will shit into my oatmeal." —Sheila Heti, risking failure in How Should a Person Be, her “novel from life”
I ate frozen blueberries too quickly and now I’m in pain. Chilled esophagus.
The internal matches the external, at least. Chilly inside and snowy outside. Chilly inside and icy on the outside. Oh how I hope to not be icy. I wake up every morning thinking, “I will be as warm as a bread loaf. I will fan flames on heart cockles and be a furnace of love.” It never happens. Always icy.
Outside there’s a pile of snow at the end of the parking lot. And a father is perched on top of it, taking videos of his two kids sledding down the small slope. One of the kids is bundled blue, the other pink. Are they fans of Milton Bradley’s Game of Life? I wonder.
The only way to deal with the climate crisis is to make the subject a mandatory course, like math and English, that everyone would take every year from kindergarten to college. Maybe through immersion we can change the values that are driving us to destruction.
We screwed up. We are screwing up. We will continue to screw up.
I say this because I was reading about the drought in the southwest while working today. I wanted to hug every lake in the midwest—from Minnesota to Wisconsin to Michigan. Maybe that sweet belt of a river too.
And now those kids are gone.
"Giant tortoises are capable of oceanic crossings, riding the waves like an inflatable raft, head up, patient, enduring…" —Song of the Dodo
"Are you Instagramming our repository?"
“Yes.”
