woobiquity

Wordy people of the world unite

Is there anything better than a small, quirky shop with a whole wall of oddly shaped drawers and cabinets to explore? Okay, maybe there are one or two better things, but not many.

These particular drawers are at The Regional Assembly of Text, a stationery shop in Vancouver's trendy South Main neighborhood. Their website includes an online shop, which is lovely but no substitute for physical rummaging. Or indeed for the letter-writing parties held at the shop once a month, nice text-conscious people clacking out notes on vintage typewriters while chewing on yummy cookies and presumably talking to one another in hushed, happy voices.

It seems clear that this type of regressive behavior is in fact the brave new wave of word-people congregation. Bringing it back into a realm of physicality after too long in the sense-starving void of online unity. A word is an object after all. So where is London's equivalent to this place?

Also: at what precise point in human history did letter writing become a potential subculture activity? 1998, or was it earlier than that?

A life in retrospect (an encouraging thought)

I caught Tate Modern's Cy Twombly retrospective a few days before it closed. It included many of the artist's early paintings, most of which were not unlike this one:

Yes, it's a plain white canvas with childlike scribblings on it. Some of the markings are crayon, in fact. And though I know (or at least assume) that these were works that made Twombly's reputation, his legend even, in the 50s, 60s and 70s, I have to admit that seeing them didn't do much for me. It could be that something's lost without the socio-political tension of the times. Or indeed maybe you have to know about the artist's sexuality. But whatever the reason, these paintings left me cold.

The very large and colorful Four Seasons canvases, on the other hand, were - are - transcendental. Masterpieces. They were painted in the mid-1990s. Being in a room between the Tate-owned set and the MoMA set (identical in concept, very different in the execution) was like standing in a portal of Meaning Beyond Words.

So my thought is: Twombly couldn't have made the latter without the long labor of the former. In an age when almost everyone is fixated on the "one day you're in, and the next day you're out" school of success and failure, how refreshing to look at the work of an artist who started from a point that allowed for decades of growth and exploration. An artist, incidentally, who has spent most of his life in remote places, getting on with his work. This is why going to art exhibitions is good for us. It gives us the long view. (Next up: Rothko.)

And my question for you is: as you look back over the last two, five, ten years, are you better at whatever you do than you were then? If so, isn't that a comforting thought?

The first rejection hurts the most?

I don't know. I'll let you know when the 20th one arrives. That should be a statistically significant sample. Or 40. Forty should be enough to judge.

Thanks very much for sending us your work. We have now had a chance to read it, and feel that it is not right for (IMPORTANT AMERICAN LITERARY JOURNAL, TITLE TYPED IN ALL CAPS). But we appreciate your thinking of us. -The Editors

Actually... I'm over it already. But thanks for listening.

And is that comma after 'read it' only there for dramatic effect or what? Oh well, there could be no better time than now, to link to this.

A picture of London doololly

Juan Fontanive makes 'paper films', using spools of paper and mechanics for short bursts of storytelling.

These mechanically animated dots are in the window of his current show at the wonderful Riflemaker Gallery on Beak Street. With the street reflection and a taxi blasting through, it's almost a story told in a single frame. A story of happy madness. Soho, this afternoon.

The politics of darkness

No wonder we crave an entertainment like “The Dark Knight,” where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion.

-Jonathan Lethem, who, like me, finally got around to watching the movie of the summer, and saw nothing in it but the autumn of our times.

'The ever elusive muse (that bitch)'

Litro has a new blog. And a tongue-in-cheek fundraising plea.

...George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter is up for sale. Do you see where we’re going with this? George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter. Think of the superstitious possibilities. For a mere $8,417.44 (about £4500), this Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter, on which the author of Pygmalion is likely to have prepared many a manuscript for publication, can be yours. Or ours.

What we can't see

Red lights at the dead-end of Metropolitan Line tracks, Farringdon Station, last Tuesday evening. On the platform behind the camera, a bald-headed man in a tired suit pulls a large, very old filing cabinet toward home, while a man with a guide dog approaches an arriving Circle Line train. Boarding, he inadvertently pets the shoulder of a young City-type, who skedaddles, maybe seeing, maybe not that the blind man has no eyeballs, just dark, monsterish craters above a seemingly genuine grin.

What not to do

“Don’t spend time reading blogs, don’t watch cable news. Just remember what this campaign is about.”

-Barack Obama, addressing the Hollywood faithful yesterday. I'm sure he didn't mean this blog.

'The Depressed Person'

For she had discovered, the depressed person confessed, that when she took her daily Quiet Time now, during the grieving process, and got quiet and centered and looked deep within, she could neither feel nor identify any feelings for the therapist as a person, as a person who had died, a person who only somebody in truly stupefying denial could fail to see had probably taken her own life, and thus a person who, the depressed person posited, had possibly suffered levels of emotional pain and isolation and despair which were comparable to or maybe even exceeded the depressed person's own.

- from a story by David Foster Wallace. In response to news of the postmodernist writer's suicide last week, Harper's has compiled PDFs (and a video) of his contributions to the magazine over the years.

Update: The articulate critic Michael Silverblatt paid tribute to DFW on a KCRW radio show yesterday (with links to intelligent interviews with the author, discussing each of his books).

Looking up

The best thing about this picture, taken last Saturday at the rear of the Royal Festival Hall, is that you can't see any of the infuriating Thames Festival crowds that swarmed the entire South Bank all weekend. What's that strange thing in the bottom left corner? You mean you don't know? Find out here.