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The lovely litte film was created for the New Zealand Book Council. Watch it.
I am absolutely smitten with the idea of using easels as stands for flat screen televisions.
Check it:
via gizmodo.fr
We have not (yet) got a flat screen, but the mister keeps threatening to get one and the idea of trying to mount one on our 160 year old plaster walls gives me the heebie jeebies. This looks like a perfect solution.
But look what others are doing with the idea:
via dsaslaw’s flickr set.
So swanky, but this is more my pace:
via stylenorth via Metropolitan Home and House Beautiful respectively.
Now I’m wishing I hadn’t given away the big brass easel I had three lifetimes ago.
I don’t know why I never thought to look this up on youtube before today, but there it was, in all it’s po-mo glory; Silverstein’s The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. It’s one my all time favourite children’s books and even after doing a Lacanian reading and analysis of it, it’s not ruined for me. Now I can share it with you:
Haven’t been around much as my silly computron as been down with this crap stomach thing that’s been going around, I’m sure. It has been somewhat liberating and I’m getting a lot more real world stuff done like helping friends move, cleaning the kitchen and sleeping, but I do feel like part of my soul has been ripped away. The mister is currently working on getting my baby up and running again so we’ll see.
This week has brought us a small reprieve from the minus holy shit weather we experienced through January but came by way of upsy downiness and lots of snow then freezing, then melting and more snow then freezing again bringing us to this day which is pleasantly mild & drippy yet still wintery with an atmosphere that only comes on days like today. It’s so very different than the catch as catch can impromptu visits and catching up of spring, summer and fall. We’re all a little more insular in our snow globe homes. All the business of our main drag location just seems to happen around us but we can be cosy & well kept in our little worlds which look all samey in their abundant beigy/bluey/whiteness but there are so many wonderful little bits of eye candy and signs of life in our back/front/side yards.
It’s fun that our neighbours have their own take on enjoying this weather too. They built this lovely snow & ice sculpture in their front yard.
And then there are all of the sculptures and vignettes nature leaves our little urban landscape.
And then there’s life imitating nature in its patterning and design.
Even the chiffon is reflective of winter.
And the pièce de resistance at the moment is this handsome snowman some other neighbours-friends built in our backyard. Isn’t he a dandy?
I’m glad to live in a neighbourhood of imagination & play. Life is afoot.
I’m sick today and sick really sucks in my world. I don’t get sick often, the most poorly I feel is usually down to second day of menstruation ickiness which makes me wonder if I could sell my uterus on ebay. It’s produced two lovely loin fruits, I don’t see why it can’t go to someone who really needs it rather than hanging out with me. But I digress. I believe I’ve caught whatever the daughter had last week. It’s that kind of gut-wrenching, dehydrating, headache-inducing bug that I know will go away in a few hours with rest and soup but I go too long between viral bouts to really equip myself with the skills to deal with it and end up with a wonderful emotional cocktail comprised of 1 part frustration, 1 part discomfort, 1 part depression and 3 parts guilt. I really don’t have a lot to share with you beyond that and I’m tired of whinging about it so I’ll leave you with one of my favourite bits of one of my favourite books because the mindless busy work of typing it out has made me somewhat happy. Take some. Enjoy:
But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.
“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.
“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.
“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at our surroundings.
“In real life.”
“I study.”
“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”
“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”
“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”
“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”
“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”
“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”
“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”
“Casaubon.”
“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”
“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”
“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”
“And that covers everybody?”
“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”
“Idealtypen.”
“Very good. You know German?”
“Enough for bibliographies.”
“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”
“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”
“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”
“No,” the girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”
“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”
“Getting back to the lunatics.”
“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I ‘m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”
“All right. My round.”
“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”
“Let’s.”
“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”
“Yes, I know a few of those.”
“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”
“I do.”
“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous etes negre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon general!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”
“What about the morons?”
“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”
“Which they are.”
“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”
“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”
“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”
“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”
“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”
“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”
“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”
“A duel between morons.”
“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism.”
“We’re surrounded by morons.”
“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”
“Somehow I feel that Godel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”
“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”
“My round.”
“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”
“That’s moronic thinking.”
“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”
“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”
“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel prize.”
“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”
“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moron-ism or not?”
“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”
“And what if you were a moron?”
“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”
“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”
“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”
“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”
“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”
“I’m getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
“Invariably?”
“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”
“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”
“What makes you trust me?”
“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”
A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”
“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.
“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”
“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”
Now go read the book. It will change your life.
I’m sick today and sick really sucks in my world. I don’t get sick often, the most poorly I feel is usually down to second day of menstruation ickiness which makes me wonder if I could sell my uterus on ebay. It’s produced two lovely loin fruits, I don’t see why it can’t go to someone who really needs it rather than hanging out with me. But I digress. I believe I’ve caught whatever the daughter had last week. It’s that kind of gut-wrenching, dehydrating, headache-inducing bug that I know will go away in a few hours with rest and soup but I go too long between viral bouts to really equip myself with the skills to deal with it and end up with a wonderful emotional cocktail comprised of 1 part frustration, 1 part discomfort, 1 part depression and 3 parts guilt. I really don’t have a lot to share with you beyond that and I’m tired of whinging about it so I’ll leave you with one of my favourite bits of one of my favourite books because the mindless busy work of typing it out has made me somewhat happy. Take some. Enjoy:
But I was talking about my first encounter with Belbo. We knew each other by sight, had exchanged a few words at Pilade’s, but I didn’t know much about him, only that he worked at Garamond Press, a small but serious publisher. I had come across a few Garamond books at the university.
“And what do you do?” he asked me one evening, as we were both leaning against the far end of the zinc bar, pressed close together by a festive crowd. He used the formal pronoun. In those days we all called one another by the familiar tu, even students and professors, even the clientele at Pilade’s. “Tu—buy me a drink,” a student wearing a parka would say to the managing editor of an important newspaper. It was like Moscow in the days of young Shklovski. We were all Mayakovskis, not one Zhivago among us. Belbo could not avoid the required tu, but he used it with pointed scorn, suggesting that although he was responding to vulgarity with vulgarity, there was still an abyss between acting intimate and being intimate. I heard him say tu with real affection only a few times, only to a few people: Dio-tallevi, one or two women. He used the formal pronoun with people he respected but hadn’t known long. He addressed me formally the whole time we worked together, and I valued that.
“And what do you do?” he asked, with what I now know was friendliness.
“In real life or in this theater?” I said, nodding at our surroundings.
“In real life.”
“I study.”
“You mean you go to the university, or you study?”
“You may not believe this, but the two need not be mutually exclusive. I’m finishing a thesis on the Templars.”
“What an awful subject,” he said. “I thought that was for lunatics.”
“No. I’m studying the real stuff. The documents of the trial. What do you know about the Templars, anyway?”
“I work for a publishing company. We deal with both lunatics and nonlunatics. After a while an editor can pick out the lunatics right away. If somebody brings up the Templars, he’s almost always a lunatic.”
“Don’t I know! Their name is legion. But not all lunatics talk about the Templars. How do you identify the others?”
“I’ll explain. By the way, what’s your name?”
“Casaubon.”
“Casaubon. Wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?”
“I don’t know. There was also a Renaissance philologist by that name, but we’re not related.”
“The next round’s on me. Two more, Pilade. All right, then. There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.”
“And that covers everybody?”
“Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.”
“Idealtypen.”
“Very good. You know German?”
“Enough for bibliographies.”
“When I was in school, if you knew German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese.”
“My German’s poor, so I’ll graduate. But let’s get back to your typology. What about geniuses? Einstein, for example?”
“A genius uses one component in a dazzling way, fueling it with the others.” He took a sip of his drink. “Hi there, beautiful,” he said. “Made that suicide attempt yet?”
“No,” the girl answered as she walked by. “I’m in a collective now.”
“Good for you,” Belbo said. He turned back to me. “Of course, there’s no reason one can’t have collective suicides, too.”
“Getting back to the lunatics.”
“Look, don’t take me too literally. I’m not trying to put the universe in order. I ‘m just saying what a lunatic is from the point of view of a publishing house. Mine is an ad-hoc definition.”
“All right. My round.”
“All right. Less ice, Pilade. Otherwise it gets into the bloodstream too fast. Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”
“Let’s.”
“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”
“Yes, I know a few of those.”
“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”
“I do.”
“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous etes negre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon general!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”
“What about the morons?”
“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”
“Which they are.”
“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”
“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”
“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”
“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”
“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”
“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I ^can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”
“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”
“A duel between morons.”
“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic mo-ronism.”
“We’re surrounded by morons.”
“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”
“Somehow I feel that Godel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”
“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”
“My round.”
“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”
“That’s moronic thinking.”
“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”
“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”
“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel prize.”
“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”
“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moron-ism or not?”
“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”
“And what if you were a moron?”
“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”
“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”
“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”
“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”
“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”
“I’m getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all id6e fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
“Invariably?”
“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…”He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”
“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number 1, Via Sincere Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”
“What makes you trust me?”
“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”
A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”
“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.
“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”
“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”
Now go read the book. It will change your life.
I could read Andrea’s blog for the eye candy alone. She’s an amazing artist and gifted writer. I love her language of colour and composition but I totally crush on it because of posts like this one.
How cool (and brave) of her to post about her process? I’m a complete chickenshit when it comes to sharing anything unfinished, which is why it all stays nicely hidden in my studio behind a closed door. The thought of playing mentor to the masses boggles my mind, but she’s gracious enough to do it. Go check her out.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who gets excited about it either. I always look forward to National Geographic’s
Best Science Images of the year. The one above amuses me to no end. Go check them out.
Just a quick blurb to let all y’all know that I’ve survived the weekend. The focus fair holiday arts & craft show was a brilliant event. The collective did a fabulous job of pulling it all together, getting the word out and keeping it all ticking. Vendor turnout could not have been better if everyone was hand picked by Martha. We had such a great array of talent and personalities it’s no wonder we got the traffic we did. Using The Spill was a stroke of genius and I’m so grateful to Dave for lending us the space. This kind of cooperative spirit is what makes me happy to be part of this community.
The work has been published and I’m a conflicted soul. Kerouac and Burroughs both felt the work to be sub-par and unworthy of publication but can’t very well argue from the grave now, can they? We selfish, living folk decided to go against the wills of two of the 20th century’s greatest creative minds and plublished their work posthumously. We trusted their judgement then, what happened? Pandora’s box has been opened and I feel that in owning this work I puts the blood on my hands, but in not owning it I would be missing out on that feeling of connectedness with something really special. The feeling I got sitting by Louisa May Alcott’s grave and experiencing the weight of history & utter loneliness bearing down on me whilst exploring West Kennet and its surrounding moors while chasing my Heathcliff. So do I put it on my wish list or do I honour their wishes and leave well enough alone? What’s a girl to do?
Oh, and if you’re interested you should check out what the always lovely Jaime The Nonist (RIP) has to say about it. He’s far more eloquent than yours truly. I have a huge nerdgirl crush on him.
cushti 