November 8, 2023
Taking five from Janey’s artist’s residency and my Wordfest Conference at Banff. Lake Louise behind us and the ground a solid nine-degrees F. Met Anthony Marra for the first time at Wordfest who commented that we have all betrayed or been betrayed enough by the time we’re twelve to write a pretty great novel. Also, Eleanor Catton read from her recently Man Booker awarded “Luminaries.” Later that night, she and I shared some stories and laughs over a couple beers.
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A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. – John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) (Sojourner Truth from Pinterest) We hope that artists pre-dating photography were really good at their art and had some sense of historic integrity—that Gilbert Stuart caught Dolley Madison’s early 19thcentury likeness and Washington’s army really did get horses onto
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“Tonight you’re mine, completely You give your love so sweetly Tonight the light of love is in your eyes But will you love me tomorrow?” Imagine two sisters from the same parents: one sister brunette, the other blond. They arrive on the West Coast and one settles in The North, the other in The South.
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“Ooo, the stove, the stove and the water. Boil the water, boil the water, and the paper—somebody get the paper. Up-down, up-down, sit, sit, sit, up-down and the stove, the stove and the water. Boil the water, and the…” When she was awake, she was talking. In the psych ward, in her bed, and when
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Marco Cochrane is the sculptor behind the forty-foot Bliss Dance, which was originally built for Burning Man before it was relocated to SF’s Treasure Island. Born to American artists in Venice and raised in Berkeley, Cochrane has crowd-funded and completed another sculpture. Like the sculpture I saw on Treasure Island, it depicts the same woman,
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It’s a huge two-door Chrysler Cordoba, creamy white and a matching vinyl top. Intimidating parked next to any of the current satellite-tracked and climate-controlled livery, it floats there like The Enterprise next to the mailbox where Kev parked it. Pointed uphill, its rear end lifted in a slight California slant on bead-blasted mags, it sits level.
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Little Walter. Paints a picture, doesn’t it? How’d you see it, just then? Maybe a snorting Pug chewing up and snotting all over a living room pillow? The checkout guy at Trader Joe’s? Your goldfish? Little Walter? How about this? A guy smaller than most and a giant among stars—Marion Walter Jacobs, a blues artist
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“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction,
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Tics are where lines intersect and the current time shows up. Between the tics are tocs. Tocs are messier – hoarders among other things – and represent elapsed time. In the tics, opinions and observations are expressed as read/write functions like, “Keep Tina, dump Ike.” In the tocs, operations happen, like “Rollin, rollin, rollin on the
HJ Brennan 