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Images
“Where We Find Ourselves” – The Lost and Found Photography of Hugh Mangum
More here.
“The sitters who moved in and out of Hugh Mangum’s view between 1897 and 1922 smiled, laughed, and daydreamed; they threw their arms around or leaned upon one another; they wore their best dresses and fanciest hats, or they wore coarse cloth and stood barefoot. In an era of racial terror, as Jim Crow tightened its grip on the South, Mangum set up makeshift studios across North Carolina and Virginia (sometimes just a tent outside of town) that were open to white and black sitters alike. A gangly white man with an appealingly unkempt mustache, Mangum often used a Penny Picture camera, designed to capture up to thirty exposures on a single glass plate. Sitters would line up and take their places in front of the camera; Mangum would charm and cajole them, shifting the plate a little bit for each new exposure. The result, inadvertent but still provocative, is a record of how much daily life and experience was shared by the people whom racist American custom and law treated as separate.”
“All The Names They Used For God” by Anjali Sechdeva
Beautiful, terrible, rebellious, dreamlike. A lovely collection of short stories vary from the good to the very excellent. Recommended if you like your realism magical.
I found this quote by the author in a recent interview:
“Some people would argue that writing stories about rebellious people is not actually an act of rebellion, but I believe those people underestimate the extent to which we internalize a story that really moves us. In the introduction to her novel The Rending and the Nest (Bloomsbury, 2018) Kaethe Schwehn writes, “The most dangerous thing of all is the absence of a story, a narrative to explain what is happening to you … Because someone will always arrive to invent one. Then you will be at the whim of someone else’s story…” I absolutely agree with that, and I think there’s a lot of hope to be found in reading stories where you see people fight back against injustice and ugliness.”
..and on endings:
“My endings definitely evolve as I write the story. They are almost always the last thing I write, and it’s not at all uncommon for me to write three or four different endings before I find one that I’m satisfied with (to say nothing of the additional revisions where I fiddle with the ending to try to get the pacing and the cadence and the final note just right). I have heard some great writers say they always or often write their endings first, or at least know what the ending is going to be when they start out, but I am almost never in that position.”
quotes via PopMatters
“All The Name They Use For God” –Â US/UK
More in #ReadingRecord:
680A Sad Not so Sad Is Rainshine – From Rainday on a Rainy Day — Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1970)
“Transautomatism is a modern style of painting, founded by Friedensreich Hundertwasser. It is a kind of surrealism, focusing on the viewer’s fantasy rather than an objective interpretation. Different people see different things in the same picture. The artist’s intention is less pertinent to the end experience, therefore, than how the viewer chooses to interpret it. Transautomatism is based on the different styles which Hundertwasser developed, e.g. spirals and ‘drops’.”
“Transautomatism is about Hundertwasser’s theory that straight lines are ‘godless and immoral’. That as humans we have lost our connection to the organic geometry of nature by forcing ourselves to exist in boxes as homes. He believed in the fluidity of line and shape hence his architectural and painting style. Being educated in a Montessori school his self-directed learning came from nature and therefore his drive to return to colour and organic states.”
— Wiki
Interesting fog the other evening.
Mapping Preferences over Brexit in the House of Commons
“The network graph shows how different options are related to each other: they are closer if a greater number of MPs have voted for them. Their size shows the number of favourable votes for each option (none of them obtained a majority.”
In the graph above (zoomable version here), I have mapped the votes of British MPs in the 8 options given to them on March 27 (a couple of hours ago) in indicative votes. This is a 2-mode network linking MPs and options for Brexit. The network graph shows how different options are related to each other: they are closer if a greater number of MPs have voted for them. Their size shows the number of favourable votes for each option (none of them obtained a majority. The graph show the high level of polarisation over these different options, with two clear poles: the “Hard Brexit” pole with a number of MPs for whom the only option is No Deal, or a preferential trade arrangement, and the Soft Brexit-No Brexit pole, linking the Customs Union, Labour’s Plan and a Second Referendum/Revocation of article 50. The EFTA/EEA and Common Market 2.0…
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Forms – From concert programmes to chocolate wrappers – The Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson
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“Although Dickinson did lead an active life outside the home in her youth, her increasing reclusiveness in her later years give the very notion of house and home a special resonance in her work. As such, the unusual piece pictured below is of particular interest, just one of Dickinson’s many “envelope poems” – the focus of a recent book, The Gorgeous Nothings by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. In this instance, Dickinson has cut apart an envelope so all that remains are the flap and a portion of the body. She orients the paper so the point of the flap is at the top then she fills that peak with words: “The way hope builds his house…” Or, to phrase it more directly, she writes a poem about a house on a piece of paper that looks like a house.”
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More in #codex:
- “Chart of sources for Arthurian legends” – Graphite text with ink on paper – David Jones (1949)
- The Codex Rotundus
- NĂĽshu
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‘La paresse’ by Felix Valloton 1865-1925, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Last weekend looking across to Moorend.
Paul Greer 