paris, a very small tour.

From Butte Montmartre. One of my favorite places because you can sit and watch all the people getting to the top, completely tired from all the steps, and then see them turn around and see Paris like this. I like to walk back down behind the basilica and then (if it is daytime and they are open) go into the many fabric shops. That's where I got the printed cotton with flying geese on it (with my mom when she came to see me).

A small Jewish grocery in the Marais, selling glazed fruits in these bins. The walls are lined with every possible kind of alcohol you could imagine, all different bottles reflecting all different kinds of light. This is where I found a bottle of Izarra for my dad. Right down the street from many little shops, including Petit Pan and many shops selling Japanese goods.

The herbs and plants in my friend's kitchen. Her window looks out on the court but it is the 5th floor, so there is lots of light.

The view from her window. I loved the neighbors' geraniums and the zinc-colored pipes and drains. Even though I remember how miserable living in those old buildings could be, I recognise their beauty (and hope I did, then, too). And the grey sky, against which the buildings of Paris are particularly beautiful, although they are stunning against the bright blue, too.

See? They're just made for that. The colors are so elegant and understated, and then all of a sudden they're right in front of you and you realise how well-planned they are, how they are just made to go together. The shades and shadows the different angles make. That gold dome!

Speaking of exclamation marks, here's one in the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden founded in the 17th century. Those trees are so Parisian as to be a cliché, aren't they? But they exist. I sat in this garden many times drawing.

Drawing these bean-poles, specifically. And watching the people. And listening to them talk.

This is Mélodies Graphiques, also in the Marais, very near the Ile-St-Louis. I bought a tiny card (about 1.5" by 2") that had had a pattern burnt out of it: flowers and leaves in an arbor. He collects the beautiful mail his customers send him. I promised to send something, but haven't. Maybe this year.

And this is Austerlitz Station (Gare d'Austerlitz), to which I had a fond connection because of W.G. Sebald's book Austerlitz, which you can read about here. And here. And here. And here. The Métro trains going in are bright turquoise, which is brilliant against the gray stone and glass, and echoes the faded turquoise paint on the façade (you can see a hint of it in the mullions of the window in the lower left corner of the photograph).

return to the archive

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote about Derrida. Well, let's change that. I'm re-reading The Postcard for the chapter I'm writing right now and it makes me remember exactly why I love Derrida. He is so materially romantic. The archive? Yes, it's the part of memory work that contains the trace of the past, and it's an important theoretical trope. But it's also a material love story for Derrida, who caresses his distant beloved via his careful treatment of the things around himself. He notices everything. The book is full of trains, photomatons, houses of cards, pots of growing myrtle, books, letters, postcards, photographs, traces of the beloved and the disappearance. And throughout it there is the insistence on the burning of the archive--let's destroy it as we go, let's start over, Derrida (or 'Derrida', because as readers we're not meant to be sure of who we are reading, I don't think) says. Let's build this record of all the things that I love and you love and then if we need to let's leave it all behind, poems and libraries and Purim cakes and telephones and hands and cut-paper flowers.

"...but he did have pictures of this apartment. He got the job."

It's the last sentence of this article* that I think speaks most to me--about how our 'training' as thinkers, makers, and academics has to be flexible, and not only nominally so. It's time for a re-valuing of diverse and deep knowledges, and of unorthodox expressions thereof! Why not--why can't a maker be a geographer, or a pattern designer, or an amateur (in the best sense of that word) astronomer? Especially with the amount of information that is available to us now via the internet (not to mention via the more traditional sources--public libraries, museums, universities, etc.), there is so much possibility for deepening and broadening our understandings.

It wasn't so long ago that an apprenticeship--proving one's capabilities, learning by doing--was an acceptable way to learn things. Why not now? Come on, all you auto-didacts: there's a whole lot of everything out there waiting to be known and thought about and wondered at and questioned. And that can change the system as we know it--where at the moment more and more it seems that education is 'just' a means to an end; where things like 'impact' (what does that even mean?!) mean more than passion and wonder; where learning is commodified and curiosity loses ground.

Education in the most open sense of the word--open access to and curiosity about the world, or as much of it as possible--should be for everyone. And it begins in thinking that things are possible, that one can learn about what is interesting.

So what would you do? What do you want to know? Where are you going to begin?

---

* N.B.: I do find the kind of blithe endorsement of collecting for the sake of the aesthetic of collections kind of bizarre, though. What's the point of having Wellies you don't wear? Okay, they're beautiful objects, designed objects...but they're also functional. Design for design's sake? I think W. Benjamin would have something to say to that.

grain

The grain guarantees the mediation and points me beyond the representation (the photograph) and to the Real (which, despite all postmodern tendencies, I find I do believe in, in my fashion). This is the moon at 5:15 p.m. today. Still a little light in the western sky; I can't believe how fast winter is going this year. I love this flickr group: The Archival Moon and Waiting.

Tomorrow I go back to the library, where I'm writing about textual ontology and reading books about art history. On Friday I start teaching again, as a lecturer in Leicester. Birds, rabbits, some Dutch, some French, some cakes, and probably lots of photographs in the interim. How are you?

I love this.

"But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

"Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

-David Foster Wallace, from this.

new finds

Poster from Museum Dr. Guislain. I liked the colors and the design. And I don't have anything so serious or stark in my house yet. You can see the museum's webshop here, though the poster isn't there. The link takes you to the catalogue for the exhibition.

NOTPAPER is a blog about collage. Really inspiring. I like this large format collage by Lisa Congdon, too. Found a big book of collage in the library today, makes me eager to get back there tomorrow!

dr. guislain

inmates' sinks

Last time I was in Belgium I spent my Friday afternoon searching for and then walking slowly through the Museum Dr. Guislain. If you are in Gent, take the #1 tram to Guislainstraat; the museum is just around the corner.

Jozef Guislain changed the way psychiatric patients were cared for, and, with the Brothers of Charity, began a new institution for their care. The hospital is now a museum and teaching facility. I think there is still a working psychiatric facility as well.

Besides the featured exhibition (while I was there, it was UIT HET GEHEUGEN: over weten en vergeten, or FROM MEMORY: on knowing and forgetting), there was a show of outsider art, a permanent collection of artifacts pertaining to psychiatric care from the 1700s to the present, and (tucked away in a trio of back rooms) a collection of curiosities: wax models of well and diseased bodies; a calf with two faces; babies in formaldehyde; skeletons; a photograph of a baby with two heads; a bearded lady. (I had seen some of this at the Wellcome Collection when I ws there for the Exquisite Bodies show in October, and that's what sparked my interest in the museum.) But while I was actually there I was really struck by the ways that humans have tried throughout the centuries to understand the mind and bring its essential incomprehensibility into some smaller scope...to fit it into the parameters we understand, whether those are chemical or religious or magical.

wax models of bodies and parts of bodies

* * *

And--just a reminder that if you're in Nottingham, you can stop by and see my kiosk today! It's on Pelham Street, across from Homemade Café, just up from Zara. You can see some things I've made here. We're open Tues-Weds-Thurs this week (1-2-3 December) from 10-6 T/W and 10-5 Th.

Ratae Coritanorum

This is the Leicester Market, recently voted 'Best Market in the UK'. It has existed here for 700 years. The hawkers shout prices and food names; there are tables selling scarves, underwear, socks, magazines, bread, fruit, vegetables, candy. At one point (in Rugby) I made a recording of the sound of hawkers in a market. If I can find it I'll post it. Sometimes I feel as if I could close my eyes and be in the Middle Ages here. The hawkers' voices dissolve into an older English. Buildings on the site of buildings. Roads that have been used for millennia. Leicester was a Roman city (that's its name up there in the title) before it was English, like many big cities here.

I found MetroCentric's photos and weblog and they are pleasing to see.

Today is Fibonacci day: 11/23.

pretty

I get so many compliments when I wear my star-shaped rhinestone brooch. It's failsafe; every time I wear it, at least one person will comment on it. This is the only thing I wear besides my red shoes that has this effect so reliably. And the red shoes are a different story. Sometimes I come home after wearing them and feel like I need to be invisible for a while.

Recent pleasures: the blue hour. new socks from tabio. knitting with my friends, using a yarn that's wonderful to knit with. miss capricho's fashion girls. making bobêches and designing labels for the market!

Have you seen Fideli Sundqvist's stunning work?

daguerrotype

The first photograph to contain a human being?

Exposures were so long that movement wasn't captured. But he held still long enough and made it into this century. And surely beyond.

Tomorrow I'm going to Belgium via train. I really like that journey and it will be nice to do work on the way. I'm bringing my (film and digital) cameras. When I get back I expect I will have used up my first roll of film and I'll be able to have it printed and see what the exposures look like. For my birthday, two friends gave me a Kodak camera that's even older than the one I have been using (a Pentax ME) and I want to find film for that and try it out. Maybe very early in the morning, before people are on the street.

I tend to prefer spaces with no people in them.

the last apples

Heidegger: Things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place (in "Art and Space").

Mitchell: "an artwork as a social, dialogical object" (What Do Pictures Want?, 239).

Wallace Stevens:

The Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

flax

This is the traditional way of preparing flax--it has to rot before it can be used (see retting). We saw these and I wanted to stop and Jonathan said it's pretty rare to see flax this way at all now.

One thing I really like about him is that he always asks me what I think and what I want, but not in such a way that I feel like he's giving up his interests.

* * *

"The question to ask of pictures from the standpoint of poetics is not just what they mean or do, but what they want--what claim they make upon us, and how we are to respond. Obviously, this question also requires us to ask what it is that we want from pictures" (W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The lives and loves of images, p. xv).

* * *

No internet at work now; I'm more productive that way. But in recent evenings I've discovered Grijs and Debi VanZyl.

And that's all!

here is another sort of mushroom

claudette




delphine




marcel



* * * * * * * * * * * *

For a Christmas market or two that I'll be in in Nottingham. I love making them. I enjoy making their 'clothes' the most.

Recent finds:

You Can Make It Easy
Vlijtig
Foodbeam
It will stop raining

Two I have liked for a long time:

88
Flor de Papel (again)

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Listening to Garrison Keillor and catching up on some work after a full day of poetry and chestnut-confectionary making. And lots of silly time with Neele and Ben. I've been listening to a lot of MPR lately and it's very nice. I miss having a radio. But I love that I can listen to radio from home (though six hours off the 'right' time) and I love that now I have a landline I can call home for free.

Happy and connected.

una flor de papel

Everything she creates and the way she writes inspires me.

Robert Frost: In composing a poem, I am packing up to go a long way on wings.

This is a long way on wings, too. The difference between Masters (taught) work and Ph.D. (self-directed) work--it feels a little isolated. Structure provides the distinction between productive and unproductive (depressing) isolation. I've been writing and drawing daily, and beginning next week I'll be working on my scholarly writing daily, too.

Out my window I can see the clouds move across the landmass.

Once I saw a fox in the parking lot.

Lavender, the moon rising through mist so everything softens.

Joseph Beuys, I like America and America likes me, 1974

Not ironic nostalgia; a genuine longing for objects that are real and have been made.

I am for an art...

I am for an art that is paper, plastic in its adjectival sense; art of fragility; an art that is ephemeral, passing, transient; I am for an art that makes naughty jokes behind your back; red-nose art, walnut-ink art, brushes-my-dad-used art.

I am for the art that rusts on the driveway until someone picks it up.
I am for an art on winter nights with snow cover and no class in the morning.

I am for the art of living in the always-ending world.

Huang Yong Ping • Kiki Smith • fluxus • Joseph Beuys • Paula Rego • William Kentridge

Kiki Smith, Blue Girl, 1998

[Rufus Wainwright, "The Tower of Learning."]

Always makes me feel like I am getting off the TGV in Gare de Lyon, smelling that first air, knowing I'm in Paris--the curling ironwork of the station. Then into the night. This is the music video in my head: city dark, and the Métro waiting, and the rush of cars on Blvd. Rochechouart, and the Russian grocery store, and the lights on the river.

One of my favorite things about England is its proximity to France.

Your favorite things are helping me be excited to go. Thank you for them.