Boring. Real boring. What I realize this time is that resistance is indeed futile. I have these precious mid-night hours, all to myself. I’ve come to really love and appreciate this and will be kind of disappointed when my regular sleeping pattern returns in several weeks (that’s another thing, why does it take so long on this end!). I’ve been up since 1:30, reading and knitting, and feeling a lot of pleasure for these things:

The delicious humor of John Prine, especially in Dear Abby:

The wistful gorgeous beauty of Judy Collins singing Sons Of:

The color red, in all its punch and power and vivid life. I especially loved it this morning in the work of Catherine Ryan:

I just love the quality of color in that piece, but it’s characteristic of her work and the colors all make me feel grateful to be alive this morning.

Stick with me on this one: death. I’m grateful for death. I don’t want my life ever to end, but the fact that it will makes everything matter. Is this what I would be doing, right at this moment, if I knew I had 3 months to live? Maybe, it’s only 3am and I’m enjoying this moment, but keeping the question in mind makes life vivid. I’m thinking about it this morning especially because one of my dearest friend’s mother died on Sunday. She’d been lost to Alzheimer’s for years, and my friend was lucky enough to spend an hour with her mother Sunday, telling her stories of how much she’d been loved, and then other family members arrived and her mother slipped away, gently. Her mother had introduced her to Mary Oliver’s work, and my friend is the one who introduced me to Mary Oliver’s work, so this morning I remember her mother with this poem:

When death comes — Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

I’m also grateful this morning for metaphor and the artistic articulation of meaning. My daughter Marnie just got the first part of her new gorgeous tattoo done:

that's Pallas Athena

See this blog post she wrote about the levels of meaning behind her artistic choices, what these images mean for and about her. Since the image and story are on her public blog, I assume she won’t mind my putting them here.

There’s a lot more — I seem to be feeling extremely grateful this morning! — but this is getting long and I want to get back to my knitting. Speaking of: I’ll be finished with my Wintry Mix sweater in about an hour, and the yarn for my Vodka Gimlet arrived while I was gone and ohmygod it’s a gorgeous color. Another post on knitting-related things to come soon!

[and p.s., posted here for myself, so I don't forget: two nights ago I dreamed I was being held in the back room by the Chinese. That's it. There were no images with it, I just woke up and knew I'd dreamed that. WTF!! It's kinda funny.]

They wrote:

Few things become unwanted earworms more quickly than the automated “L” station and train announcements. People have had harrowing nightmares where “Attention customers: an INBOUND train toward the Loop will be arriving shortly” plays endlessly, with the train never arriving at the station.

Monkey-Rope Press is the brainchild of illustrator, printmaker and bookbinder Marnie Galloway. Galloway’s Etsy store is a glorious time suck of amazing prints, none more so than these letterpress posters of “L” station announcements. We also love the bicycle subculture pugilism prints.

It’s never too early to begin your Christmas shopping.

!!!!!!!!! IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY TO BEGIN YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!!! Let the shopping begin!

all drawn by hand. Every tiny leaf. The hatching on every tiny leaf. Thousands of tiny bunnies. Really. You will be awestruck.

Marnie’s one-a-them Arteests. She simply is an artist, it’s how she thinks, how she perceives the world. So, for instance, I look at her book and say oh, so gorgeous, it’s about three women who are building a boat! And Marnie says it’s about the difficulty of doing her work. Her – huge artistic view; me – immediate surface-level view. Her – artist; me – reader. Her formal description of this book is

This 22-page mini-comic is the first volume of a six-part, wordless narrative about obsessive creative production and failure. Volume 1 frames the future volumes, as 3 storytellers sing the tentative world of the rest of the story into existence.

Here’s a link to the flickr set so you can see the pages; here’s a link to her announcement on her professional website; and here, two ways to buy. She’s a smart cookie! You can either buy a copy of this volume, or you can subscribe and receive the additional volumes as they publish. Feel free, do one or the other.

Does anyone want them? I’ll drop them in the mail to you, if you can use them! Airfare and expenses not included.

I didn’t really grow up with my father, but when I met him when I was an adult, I realized all kinds of tiny ways I was just like him, things I couldn’t have picked up from seeing him. Like the way I wipe both corners of my mouth unconsciously, the way I used to search the personals section of the newspaper (back when that wasn’t code for porn), looking for something someone might’ve written for me – he did both those things too. OK, big deal, so do many people, but to see that we did both things in the exact same way, it was a little eerie. Gifts, characteristics, invisible threads connecting us across time.

So all my children received many things from their father and from me, and I think about them, and am struck by them now and then. There’s a very clear example in my daughter Marnie. Marnie’s dad draws these little cartoons – always has, as long as I’ve known him. He draws a waving guy, and a dog, and they have not changed over all these years. The only variation is that now and then the waving guy has a palm tree behind him, or something like that. Here’s a new example, he signs all his letters to his kids like this:

he's been drawing this since i met him in 1978

He and Marnie used to spend hours drawing together, filling up page after page with cartoon line drawings, fantastic creatures, all kinds of things. (I can hardly draw a breath, or a straight line with a ruler, so Marnie’s visual art talent didn’t come from me, that’s for sure!) So Marnie took this very small gift from her dad, and some other small gifts from me, and turned them into this GIANT thing. She’s creating a graphic novel now, and it’s staggering and will be staggeringly beautiful. Here’s a seed of it:

something marnie describes as a "sketch"

The link to her professional site is there to the right –> do check it out.

Life is really wonderful in this way, these tiny invisible threads and bonds gathering and growing over time, and changing by the aggregation. I love this stuff.

What a genius idea.

Of the myriad reasons I love the film, one is that he just is an artist, it’s not what he does it’s who he is, and you really get a sense of what the world is like for him. Plus, his work is just so beautiful. And of course it’s all about time, and permanence (i.e., impermanence), and the world, and Everything.

I was going to plop in a few photos of his work but couldn’t even narrow it to a few “favorites” because I love them all. Here’s the Google Images page for him, you’ll get a quick overview. This is the ‘works’ page on his website for another quick overview.  If you happen to live in my neck of the woods, generally speaking, you may know about Storm King Art Center; he has an installation there too. There are a number of books and other media about him and his work.

I love to share things with you – I hope his work makes you happy! (And on top of everything else, the tiny little cherry on the big gorgeous sundae, he has an adorable accent. )

Happy Friday, y’all.

even the BACK of the envelope is cool

remember the papier mache gannets she hung from the tent rafters? here they are again.

lovely graceful words on the right, out of sight, but look at her drawings of the dress and the shawl. she's always done this.

She specializes in artist’s books, letterpress, and hand-carved woodblock and linoleum prints. Her favorite is the artist’s book, I think. But if you like her style, she has an etsy shop – MonkeyRope Press. There might be a little gift for anyone who gets the reference in her store’s name. I’m just saying. Support artists! I know I’m preaching to the choir, with this crowd, but still.

.

beautiful, beautiful marilyn

From the NYTimes:  “There is a sublime silliness to Halsman’s images that can make you laugh or at least smile regardless of how often you see them. They may offer incontrovertible proof of Schiller’s claim that ‘all art is dedicated to joy.’ Evidently the simple act of getting off the ground requires giving in to something like joy. You have to let go.  One of the purest examples of this joy is an image of Halsman himself, holding hands with a smiling Marilyn Monroe several feet off the ground. Facing his partner, he seems ecstatic, as if he cannot believe his luck.”   Credit: The Estate of Philippe Halsman/Laurence Miller Gallery

Second: this line from Nabokov, which has haunted me since I read it yesterday.  “The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.”

And third, one minkey down, one to go:

one minkey down, one to go!

And a bonus thing that made me smile and feel all sorts of things, courtesy of an email from Marnie:

“have you seen marina abramovic’s endurance performance “the artist is present,” where she sits in chair for the entire length of her retrospective. there is a chair opposite her, and visitors sit and look at her and she looks back. the flickr group is so compelling: about 1/4 of the people are in tears.”

Here’s to an interesting Wednesday.