Beginnings

Artist and graphic novelist, Marjane Satrapi speaks about her beginnings and the need to create in a short but sweet film by Chiara (daughter of the fabulous Francesco) Clemente.

'Everybody has something to say, of course. But the art is not about having something to say, the art is about how you say this thing.'

Beginnings: Marjane Satrapi on Nowness.com.

See more of Chiara Clemente's lovely Beginnings series on the Sundance Channel.

Once more to the lake

Heading up to Maine this weekend for a quiet (and most likely rainy) summer get away. I'm prepared to hunker down with a good book, if that's what the weather dictates: I'm bringing an E.B. White biography that I picked up at a used bookstore in Bath last summer. White & his wife, Katherine, (and, often, one of their dachshunds, which White wrote lovingly and hilariously of) spent many years living in a farm house in Brooklin, Maine and I can't help but enjoy the idea of beginning his biography with such geographical tidiness. Looking forward to a little reading & relaxation (with my own comedic hound) up north... the way life should be.


'If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.'

- E.B. White

On the bookshelf...

Though my post-grad school reading pace is not exactly what I would like it to be, I live with quite a lot of books and, occasionally, I actually read them! I also like to know what others are reading and what you've loved & devoured or couldn't put down or couldn't get through and what you've thought about what you've actually made time to read. So I've added an 'On the bookshelf...' column just over there to the right, with a list of what I've been reading and links that are somewhat related to those books. What's on your bookshelf these days?


The library above is from the blog Bookshelf Porn, a great site if you're someone who loves to live surrounded by books.

Words, to live by...

Some friends and I recently had a conversation about writing, the internet and, more specifically, thoughtful content. With all of the blogs and online news outlets that we're reading daily we have found ourselves craving carefully edited writing that isn't just sent out into the world willy-nilly to be quickly digested, words that are thoroughly considered and, occasionally, painstakingly chosen. As wonderful as the all-info-all-the-time world wide web is, it can tend to be short on the well-chosen word. To balance all of that free flowing information out, I've felt a gravitational pull toward poetry. It began, innocently enough, by listening to Garrison Keillor's daily podcast The Writer's Almanac, a lovely full five minutes a day to consider a writer's life and to listen to Keillor read a single poem. But wait, there's more...

If you're feeling a similar pull toward a bit of old-school word play, turns out there's an app for that. The Poetry Foundation has it's own iPhone app that is a perfect marriage of technology and text. You can select a hybrid of subjects manually or via a roulette wheel-like spin, bringing together such classic combos as passion & love or the less expected optimism & aging. And so, after scanning through an endless stream of new posts and status updates and tweets, via the very same gadget, you can enjoy a few quiet moments of good, old-fashioned written words. Ain't modern life grand?

Happy Valentine's Day ♡