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Approaching a City | Edward Hopper

On Edward Hopper by Mark Strand from The New York Review of Books | Article

“something that is not there at the outset but reveals itself slowly, and then completely, having traveled an arduous route during which vision and image come together,”

“By the time the gas station appears on canvas in its final form it has ceased being just a gas station. It has become Hopperized. It possesses something it never had before Hopper saw it as a possible subject for his painting. And for the artist, the painting exists, in part, as a mode of encountering himself.”

“With the uncertainty under which the painter labors, extended periods of doubt, it is a wonder that he can ever be free of anxiety or finish a work. Even the prodigiously talented Picasso needed constant reassurance. ¶ One of the ways Hopper dealt with his lack of certainty was to make many preparatory drawings for each painting;”

“It was not that he needed to be sure how to paint a sugar dispenser of salt shaker as in Nighthawks (1942), but that they should become his. ¶ This absorption of the outer world into his inner world could only be accomplished through a protracted ritual of drawing and redrawing, slight adjustments here and there adding up to imaginative ownership and psychic freedom.”

“Again and again, words like “loneliness” or “alienation” are used to describe the emotional character of his paintings.”

“It was thrilling to suddenly go underground, travel in the dark, and be delivered to the masses of people milling about in the cavernous terminal.”

Read: Mark W. Turner essay comparing “the wall in Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Hopper’s walls.

See:

New York Movie (1939) (at MoMa)

Nighthawks (1942) [at Art Institute of Chicago]

Approaching a City (1946) [Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.]

Morning Sun (1952) [Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia]

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Eat Pray Love

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York, N.Y.; Penguin, 2007. Print. (First ed. 2006)

“When the Crusaders drove East for the holy wars, they witnessed worshipers praying with these japa malas, admired the technique, and brought the idea home to Europe as rosary.” p. 1

“the number 108 is held to be most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to nine, which is three threes.” p. 1-2

“This division means that there are 36 tales in each section, which appeals to me on a personal level because I am writing all this during my thirty-sixth year.” p. 2

Om Namah Shivaya

“It wasn’t so much that I wanted to thoroughly explore the countries themselves; this has been done. It was more that I wanted to thoroughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country,” p. 37

“Therefore, what we today call French is really a version of medieval Parisian. Portuguese is really Lisboan. Spanish is essentially Madrileño. These were capitalist victories; the strongest city ultimately determined the language of the whole country.” p. 57

“What this congress decided would henceforth be considered proper Italian was the personal language of the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. When Dante published his Divine Comedy back in 1321, detailing a visionary progression through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, he’d shocked the literate world by not writing in Latin.” p. 58-59

“He wrote his masterpiece in what he called il dolce stil nuovo, the “sweet new style” of the vernacular, and he shaped that vernacular even as he was writing it, affecting it as personally as Shakespeare would someday affect Elizabethan English.” p. 59

terza rima

“Dante writes that God is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle… ” p, 60

il bel far niente “the beauty of doing nothing” p. 80

“For me, though, a major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure was my ingrained sense of Puritan guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is very American, too–the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness.”p. 81

“Dai, dai, dai, Albertini, dai … va bene, va bene, ragazzo mio, perfetto, bravo, bravo… Dai! Dai! Via! Via! Nella porta! Eccola, eccola, eccola, mio bravo ragazzo, caro mio, eccola, eccola, ecco–AAAHHHHHHHHH!!!  VAFFANCULO!! FIGLIO DI MIGNOTTA!! STRONZO! CAFONE! TRADITORE! Madonna… Ah, Dio mio, perché, perché, perché, questo e stupido, e una vergogna, la vergogna… Che casino, che bordello… NON HAI UN CUORE, ALBERTINI! FAI FINTA! Guarda, non e successo niente.. Dai, dai, ah… Molto migliore, si si si, eccola, bello, bravo, anima mia, ah ottimo, eccola adesso … nella porta, nella porta, nell–VAFFANCULO!!!!!!!” p. 90-91

Plan Roms im Altertum. Via Wikimedia.

Augusteum

“The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve… Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.” p. 100

magari (maybe, if only, I wish)

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

“Parla come magni.” p. 115

“Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where “all is correct.” But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course.”” p. 126

The Bhagavad Gita–that ancient Indian Yogic text–says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” p. 127

“I drop out of my Italian-language school, having come to feel that it was interfering with my efforts to learn Italian, since it was keeping me stuck in the classroom instead of wandering around Italy, where I could practice with people in person.” p. 128

codega “a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets.” p. 135

“Or maybe I only want to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: “Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is.”” p. 148

 

“Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot.” p. 150

The Italians (1964) by Luigi Barzini

“In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible.” p. 152

“You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.” p. 154

arati prayer

“Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: “You bear God within you, poor wretched, and you know it not.”” p. 161

To Read: Epictetus

“”Our whole business therefore in this life,” wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”” p. 162

To Read: Saint Augustine

“the monk quoted to me from the Bhagavad Gita, the most sacred ancient text of Yoga: “Oh Khrisna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding. I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind.”” p. 174

Ham-sa mantra

Saint Teresa of Ávila by Peter Paul Rubens. Via Wikimedia.

Saint Teresa of Avila

“The most difficult challenge, the saint wrote in her memoirs, was to not stir up the intellect during meditation, for any thoughts of the mind–even the most fervent prayers–will extinguish the fire of God.” p. 190

kundalini shakti  

“You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.” p. 199

guru gita

“Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.” p. 226

Vipassana meditation

“”The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world,” says an old Buddhist teaching.” p. 229

“Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention.” p. 235

“Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.” p. 236

“”Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress.”” p. 244

(Instructions for Freedom) “3. The day is ending. It’s time for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that is beautiful. Now, let go.” p. 245

“7. Let your intentions be freedom from useless suffering. Then, let go.” p. 246

“the rules of transcendence insist that you will not advance even one inch closer to divinity as long as you cling to even one last seductive thread of blame.” p. 247

“To know God, you need only to renounce one thing–your sense of division from God.” p. 255

Sextus “”The wise man is always similar to himself.” p. 256

Sentences of Sextus

turiya state (pure consciousness)

 

“We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time. Your treasure–your perfection–is within you already. But claim it,” p. 262

“”All know that the drop merges into the coean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop,” wrote the sage Kabir” p. 265

To Read: Kabir

“”Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine,” he said. “You want to stay near the core of the thing–right in the hub of the wheel–not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place,” p. 275

“In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are.” p. 312

“The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.”” p. 313

“The next piece of land was rejected because it was too close to a river, which, as everyone knows, is where ghosts live.” p. 411

“We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure… I’m lonely…I’m a failure… I’m lonely…) and we become monuments to them.” p. 433

“Saint Anthony once wrote about having gone into the desert on silent retreat and being assaulted by all manner of visions–devils and angels, both… you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.” p. 435

The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul, Master of the Osservanza, 15th century. Via Wikimedia.

To Read: Saint Anthony

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Animal Farm

Orwell, George. Animal Farm. New York, N.Y.: Signet Classics, 1996. Print. (First ed. 1945).

“Orwell called the book “a fairy story.” Like Voltaire’s Candide, however, with which it bears comparison, it is too many other things to be so handily classified.” p. vi
“Orwell started work on Animal Farm in 1943. As he discovered when he went looking for a publisher, Stalin’s Soviet Union was so popular that year in Britain and America that few wanted to hear or read anything critical of it.” p. viii

Orwell’s essay “”Politics and the English Language,” showing how politicians twist the language to distort and deceive.” p x

Candide by Voltaire

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

 

Orwell and others “Why did they get it all wrong? For one thing, they were men who had come to maturity in the age of the dictators.” p. xiii

Rimsky-Korsakov‘s Le Coq d’Or “a fairy tale with a moral.” p. xxi

“The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without a morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical merit–for being ugly or beautiful respectively, for instance, or for even more unsatisfactory reasons.” p. xxii

“Moses, who was Mr. Jone’s especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker. He claimed to know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died.” p. 17

“Some hams in the kitchen were taken out for burial,” p. 23

“A unanimous resolution was passed on the spot that the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum.” p. 23

“THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS

1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings is a friend.
3. No animal shall wear clothes.
4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
7. All animals are equal.” p. 24-25

“The mechanical details came mostly from three books which had belonged to Mr. Jones–One Thousand Useful Things to Do About the House, Every Man His Own Bricklayer, and Electricity for Beginners.” p. 49

“But just at this moment Napoleon stood up and, casting a peculiar sidelong look at Snowball, uttered a high-pitched whimper of a kind no one had ever heard him utter before.
“At this there was a terrible baying sound outside, and nine enormous dogs wearing brass-studded collars came bounding into the barn.” p. 52-53

“”He fought bravely at the Battle of the Cowshed,” said somebody.
“Bravery is not enough,” said Squealer. “Loyalty and obedience are more important.” p. 55

“He was always referred to in formal style as “our Leader, Comrade Napoleon,” and the pigs liked to invent for him such titles as Father of All Animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Sheep-fold, Ducklings’ Friend, and the like.” p. 93

“Squealer would talk with the tears rolling down his cheeks of Napoleon’s wisdom, the goodness of his heart, and the deep love he bore to all animals everywhere, even and especially the unhappy animals who still lived in ignorance and slavery on other farms.” p. 93

“By the evening of that day it was learned that he had instructed Whymper to purchase in Willingdon some booklets on brewing and distilling.” p. 108

“the retiring age had been fixed for horses and pigs at twelve, for cows at fourteen, for dogs at nine, for sheep at seven, and for hens and geese at five.” p. 112

“But the explanation was very simple. The van had previously been the property of the knacker, and had been bought by the veterinary surgeon, who had not yet painted the old name out. That was how the mistake had arisen.” p. 125

“No one stirred in the farmhouse before noon on the following day, and the word went round that from somewhere or other the pigs had acquired the money to buy themselves another case of whiskey.” p. 126

“Squealer was so fat that he could with difficulty see out of his eyes.” p. 128

“But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally.” p. 129

“neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labour; and there were very many of them, and their appetites were always good.” p. 130

“Sometimes the older ones among them racked their dim memories and tried to determine whether in the early days of the Rebellion, when Jone’s expulsion was still recent, things had been better or worse than now. They could not remember. There was nothing with which they could compare their present lives: they had nothing to go upon except Squealer’s list of figures, which invariably demonstrated that everything was getting better and better.” p. 130

“She neighed again, and all the animals broke into a gallop and rushed into the yard. Then they saw what Clover had seen.
“It was a pig walking on his hind legs.” p. 132

“And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.” p. 133

“There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS” p. 134

“He believed that he was right in saying that the lower animals on Animal Farm did more work and received less food than any animals in the country.” p. 137

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” p. 141

To Read:
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) Novel
Burmese Days (1934) Novel
Homage to Catalonia (1938) Novel

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Blue Jasmine

Watched:

Blue Jasmine | Woody Allen | Woody Allen | DP: Javier Aguirresarobe |2013

Watch:

A Streetcar Named Desire | Elia Kazan | Tennessee Williams | DP: Harry Stradling | 1951 |

Read:
Woody Allen article from the Guardian … “You’re probably happier in life if you can forget things,”

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The Things They Carried

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, N.Y.: Broadway Books, 1990. Print.

“He wondered how the tides and waves had come into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology.” p8

“They would sit down or kneel, not facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there-the tunnel walls squeezing in” p. 10

“just sailing that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways” p. 23

Banyan tree

“There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood.” p. 32

“The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the safe spots were and where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you could end up like popcorn.” p. 33

“Forty-three years old and I’m still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it’s an obsession, that I should write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a Shetland pony.” p. 34

“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” p. 38

“Courage, I seemed to think comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down.” p. 40

USS Maddox, DD-731, 1960s. Via Wikimedia.

USS Maddox at the Gulf of Tonkin. Tonkin Resolution.
Gulf of Tonkin incident

Rainy River. Via Wikimedia.

Rainy River, Minnesota/Ontario border.

 

“He was a witness, like God, or like the gods who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.” p. 60

“I was a coward. I went to the war.” p. 61

Chapter Enemies p.62-66

Chapter How to Tell a True War Story. 67-85

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.” p. 68

“Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks… They can’t get on the horn and call back to base and say, ‘Hey, listen, we need some firepower, we got to blow away this weirdo gook rock band.’ They can’t do that. It wouldn’t go down. So they lie there in the fog and keep their mouths shut.” p. 73

“The dark was coming on hard now, and off to the west I could see the mountains rising in silhouette, all the mysteries and unknowns.” p. 73

“It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” p. 78

On war: “It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference–a powerful, implacable beauty–and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.” p. 81

“But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.” p. 83

“Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be truer than total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” p. 83

“For Rat Kiley, I think facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.” p89-90

South Vietnamese Regional Force flag (RF). Via Wikimedia.

Ruffs and Puffs: Regional Force / Popular Force

“The Greenies were not social animals. Animals, Rat said, but far from social.” p. 92

“Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary.” p. 106

“We all heard plenty of wackier stories. Some guy comes back from the bush, tells you he saw the Virgin Mary out there, she was riding a goddamn goose or something. Everybody buys it. Everybody smiles and asks how fast was they going, did she have spurs on.” p. 106

“And bones. Stacks of bones–all kinds. To one side, propped up against a wall, stood a poster in neat black lettering: ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN GOOK!! FREE SAMPLE KIT!!” p. 110

“But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues. Elongated and narrow like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upwards as if caught in a final shrill syllable.” p.110-111

“She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.” p. 116

Batangan Peninsula

“Sometimes, like that night in the shit field, the difference between courage and cowardice was something small and stupid.” p. 147

“Some of the men began shooting up flares. Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.” p. 148

“it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.” p. 158

“The rain made quick dents in the water, like tiny mouths, and the stink was everywhere.” p. 165

“The countryside itself seemed spooky–shadows and tunnels and incense burning in the dark. The land was haunted. We were fighting forces that did not obey the laws of twentieth-century science.” p. 202

“You don’t try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over.” p. 204

“It was a feeling VC must have. Like a puppeteer. Yank on the ropes, watch the silly wooden soldier jump and twitch.” p. 208

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.” p. 230

The Man Who Never Was (film, dir. Ronald Neame, 1956) (Book by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu)

“But in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging.” p. 236

“We kept the dead alive with stories.” p. 239

There was a story for instance, about how Curt Lemon had gone truck-or-treating on Halloween. A dark, spooky night, and so Lemon put on a ghost mask and painted up his body all different colors and crept across a paddy to a sleeping village-almost stark naked, the story went, just boots and balls and an M-16-and in the dark Lemon went from hootch to hootch-ringing doorbells, he called it-and a few hours later, wen he slipped back into the perimeter, he had a whole sackful of goodies to share with his pals: candles and joss sticks and a pair of black pajamas and statuettes of the smiling Buddha.” p. 239

“To listen to the story, especially as Rat Kiley told it, you’d never know that Curt Lemon was dead. He was still out there in the dark, naked and painted up, trick-or-treating, sliding from hootch to hootch in that crazy white ghosts mask. But he was dead.” p. 240

**'”Well, right now,” she said, “I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like … I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading… An old one, It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checkout for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”‘ p. 245

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The Orchard Keeper (I)

McCarthy, Cormac. The Orchard Keeper. New York, N.Y.: Vintage International, 1993. Print. (First ed. 1965).

“A phantom rabbit froze in the headlights, rolled one white eye, was gone.” p. 20

“One by one the fallen were entering through the front door red with blood and clay and looking like the vanquished in some desperate encounter waged with sabers and without quarter.” p. 26

“For miles on miles the high country rolled lightless and uninhabited, the road ferruling through dark forests of owl trees, bat caverns, witch covens.” p. 31

“Above the heads of the dancers he could see himself hollow-eyed and sinister in the bar mirror and it occurred to him that he was ungodly and tired.” p. 32

“Cabe made off with a cashbox and at the last minute authorized the fleeing patrons to carry what stock they could with them, so that with the warmth of the fire and the bottles and jars passing around, the affair took on a holiday aspect.” p. 47

“By now the entire building was swallowed in flames rocketing up into the night with locomotive sounds and sucking on the screaming updraft half-burned boards with tremendous velocity which fell spinning, tracing red ribbons brilliantly down the night to crash into the canyon or upon the road, dividing the onlookers into two bands, grouped north and south of harm’s way, their faces lacquered orange as jackolanterns in the ring of heat.” p. 47-48

“There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and flutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble, murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon.” p. 48

“Coming back he glanced down at the water again. The thing seemed to leap at him, the green face leering and coming up through the lucent rotting water with eyeless sockets and green fleshless grin, the hair dark and ebbing like seaweed.” p. 54

***”She told him that the night mountains were walked by wampus cats with great burning eyes and which left no track even in snow, although you could hear them screaming plain enough of summer evenings.” p. 59-60

“In the fall before this past winter he had come awake one night and seen it for the second time, black in the paler square of the window, a white mark on its face like an inverted gull wing. And the window frame went all black and the room was filling up, the white mark looking and growing. He reached down and thumbed the hammer and let it fall. The room erupted… he remembered the orange spit of flame from the muzzle and the sharp smell of burnt powder, that his ears were singing and his arm hurt where the butt came back against it.” p. 60

“The well hidden in the weeds and johnson grass that burgeoned rankly in the yard had long shed its wall of rocks and they were piled in the dry bottom in layers between which rested in chance interment the bones of rabbits, possums, cats, and other various and luckless quadrupeds.” p. 63

(young rabbit in the well) “He brought green things to it every day and dropped them in and then one day he futtered a handful of garden lettuce down the hole and he remembered how some of the leaves fell across it and it didn’t move. He went away and he could see for a long time the rabbit down in the bottom of the well among the rocks with the lettuce over it.” p. 64

describing a market “By shoe windows where shoddy footgear rose in dusty tiers and clothing stores in whose vestibules iron racks stood packed with used coats, past bins of socks and stocking, a meat market where hams and ribcages dangled like gibbeted miscreants and in the glass cases square porcelain trays piled with meat white-spotted and trichinella-ridden, chinks of liver the color of clay tottering up from moats of water blood, a tray of brains, unidentifiable gobbets of flesh scattered here and there.” p.82

“And the sun running red on the mountain, high killy and stoop of a kestrel hunting, morning spiders at their crewelwork. But no muskrats struggled in his sets.” p. 87

“The old man remembered it now with dim regret. and remembered such nights when the air was warm as breath and the moon no dead thing.” p. 89

“The moon was higher now as he came past the stand of bullbriers into the orchard, the blackened limbs of the trees falling flatly as paper across the path and the red puddle of moon moving as he moved, sliding sodden and glob-like from limb to limb, flatly surreptitious, watching as he watched.” p. 89

“The glade seemed invested with an aura of antiquity, overhung with a silence both spectral and reverent.” p. 90

***”And on the very promontory of this lunar scene the tank like a great silver ikon, fat and bald and sinister.” p. 93

“But there was the house looming, taking shape as he approached, and he felt that he had come a great distance, a sleepwalker who might have spanned vast and dangerous terrains unwittingly and unharmed.” p. 93

“He dropped the lid of the locker closed and the lamp flickered, on the wall a black ghoul hulking over a bier wavered.” p. 94

“The bottle clattered on the floor, he lurched once, wildly, collapsed into the bread rack and went to the floor in a cascade of cupcakes and moonpies.” p. 96

“Wiping water from his eyes he looked about and saw the flashlight, still lit, scuttling downstream over the bed of the creek like some incandescent water-creature bent on escape.” p. 100

“They paid little attention to him and he just watched them, the injured man waving his arms, telling the story, the other scratching alternately belly and head and saying Godamighty softly to himself from time to time by way of comment.” p. 105

“Mornin, the man said cheerfully.
Are you hurt? she asked. She was small and blond and very angry-looking.” p. 107

“The boy looked down at himself, soggy and mudsplattered, seeds and burrs collected on his waterdark jeans like some rare botanical garden being cultivated there, at his rubber kneeboots with twigs and weeds sticking out of them,” p. 108

architecture, art, books, education, history, memoria, notes, paintings, sculptures, weekly book

Geometry of Design (II)

Elam, Kimberly. Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2001. Print.

See Fibonacci number

Golden section square construction Method p. 24

square-construction

AB         AC
—-   =   —–
AC          CB

A C B
|——————-|———|

“The golden section rectangle is unique in that when subdivided its reciprocal is a smaller proportional rectangle.” p. 25

Golden Section Spiral construction. p. 25

620/377 = 1.61803 Golden Section. p. 29

Golden Section Triangle and Ellipse p. 30

Golden Section Proportion of the Star Pentagram p. 31

Root 2 Rectangle Construction (√2)  p. 34

Hambidge Fig. 10 showing construction of “root rectangles. 1920. from Dynamic symmetry: the Greek vase. Via Wikimedia.

Root 2 Rectangle Construction. Circle Method p. 35

DIN System of Paper Proportioning A1-A5

“Root 2 rectangles possess the special property of being endlessly subdivided by proportionally smaller rectangles. It is for this reason that the root 2 rectangle is the basis for the European DIN (Deutsche Industrie Normen), a system of paper sizes.” p. 36

Root 3 rectangle p. 38

Root 4 Rectangle p. 40.

Lacey Davis Caskey – Geometry of Greek Vases: Attic Vases in the Museum of Fine Arts Analysed According to the Principals of Proportion Discovered by Jay Hambidge. Via Wikimedia

See The Modulor by Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier: “the composition of of works of art is governed by by rules; these rules may be conscious methods, pointed and subtle, or they may be commonplace rules, tritely applied. They may also be implied by the creative instinct of the artist, a manifestation of an intuitive harmony,”  p. 43

See Jules Cheret and Star Pentagram proportions.

Hippodrome, Leona Dare, 1883. Via wikimedia.

See Belle Époque

See Bauhaus typeface.

See Oskar Schlemmer

1932 Schlemmer Treppenszene anagoria. Via Wikimedia.

See East Coast poster by Tom Purvis

Designed by Tom Purvis and believed to feature his son with a Meccano. Via Wikimedia.

Circles aligned in Wagon -Bar Poster by A.M. Cassandre, 1932.

А.М. Кассандр (1901 — 1968) Via Wikimedia.

See Constructivism

‘Proun Vrashchenia’ by El Lissitzky, 1919. Wikimedia.

See Die Neue Typographie (1928) by Jan Tschichold

Root 2 rectangles and circles in proportion p. 73

Type construction p. 74

See Max Bill

See Inge Druckrey

See Bruno Monguzzi

Le Corbusier (from Modulor, 1949):

“The regulating lines do not bring in any poetic or lyrical ideas; they do not inspire the theme of the work; they are not creative; they merely establish a balance.” p. 101.

“Biology, geometry, and art are taught as separate subjects. The content area of each that is congruent to the other is often neglected and the student is left to make the connections on their own. In addition, art and design are commonly viewed as intuitive endeavors and expressions of personal inspirations.” p. 101

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