IT’S OK TO ACCEPT GOOD FORTUNE
These are little phrases I doodled next to in a terrific Will Oldham article in the New Yorker. I erased everything surrounding and collaged them together. Just a little experiment. Just goofing around…
VACATION
I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.—David Lynch, Catching The Big Fish
What is a vacation and why do we go on one?
Last week I was sitting by myself in an IHOP in Cambridge, MA, eating a $5 breakfast special. Here I was, on vacation in a great big city, on a beautiful college campus, with tons of exotic sights to see…and all I wanted to do was sit in this mundane little restaurant and drink coffee and think and doodle in my sketchbook.
Idling without guilt.
It was delicious.
In the early 1890s, GK Chesterton wrote that there were 3 types of leisure:
The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.
This weekend, I encourage you to not feel pressured to fill your holiday with activities. Go someplace mundane where the coffee flows and let your mind wander. Savor it.
CAN GHOSTS MAKE ART?
THE NEW HOUSE
In the midst of the mortgage crisis, Meg and I went out and bought a house. We closed today, we move in this weekend. In the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve never lived in anything bigger than a one-bedroom apartment. Now we both have offices, a washer/dryer, a two-car garage…it’s very surreal.
When you live with someone in a tiny apartment, you’re always in close proximity. You never see that person more than 10 or 20 feet away, because there isn’t 10 or 20 feet to gain between you. You get used to seeing them from a particular distance.
Meg and I often meet each other for lunch on campus. When I see her from far away, walking towards me, she looks like a different person—she looks like a stranger, or someone I just met. It’s like a visual refresh. (I wonder if this visual element isn’t part of the hidden magic of what self-help couples books tell you to do: meet for dinner, but take separate cars…)
I’m reminded of this passage from Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville:
Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind – the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time – or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time. […] But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies.
I wonder about this proximity of bodies. I wonder how we will grow in a bigger space, with an upstairs and downstairs. How our changing spatial relationships might alter our story…
Above is a sketch of the house, superimposed over a page from William Maxwell’s wonderful short novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow.
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- …
- 68
- Older posts→