The other day I blew some kid’s mind by informing her that the internet did not exist in an accessible form when I was a child, I was a year into college before cell phones became common among my peers, and Facebook and texting didn’t become ubiquitous until I had nearly graduated. I told her these things because she’d mistakenly identified me as a peer and I wanted to establish the age difference in order to shut down a conversation that I wasn’t in the mood to engage in. It worked a little too well. In response to that information, I was given a long pause followed by an awed “…how old are you?”

So, feeling like some ancient relic, I returned to reading Paul Bowles and just had to find myself pickup up right before this famous passage:

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

So now I’m all wrapped up in the existential thrill of an all too keen awareness my own ephemeral nature. Haha.

Whatever, I have a date with Annie Clark tonight. That will make everything better.

I’m revisiting Anne Karenina right now, and I’d just like to double check something: Was Tolstoy always so sexist? Did I read some sanitized translation in high-school? Because it’s difficult to imagine some of this stuff flying over the head of even my teenage self.

The offending remarks only occur a couple times every 100 pages, but some of the instanced are very pronounced. Such as when Tolstoy states that the process of deceiving ”…held great charm for Anna, as for all women.” Really Tolstoy? All women be lyin’ hoes?

Then there’s the character of Dolly, whom the plot often requires to make choices which don’t make sense for her established character. When these oddities of action come up, Tolstoy always explains them away with the same five words: “Because she was a woman.” Keep in mind, this is a book which routinely spends multiple paragraphs detailing character motives for choices as small as where they ate lunch.

Wasn’t Sofia Tolstoy transcribing all of Leo’s work by the time this novel was being written? What kind of conversations came up when they were writing these passages? I’d love to see that scenario given the Kate Beaton treatment.

The world’s greatest songwriter has made an upbeat and humorous rendition of one of his best known and most somber songs, and given it an absolutely delightful music video.

I don’t think anyone who follows me needs reminded, but, just in case, here’s the original.

Send Jason Kofke to the arctic circle.

He’s already raised a quarter of his goal in just a couple days, so he’s certain to succeed, but it’s still a good way to purchase some original art from him.

Click through to view the uncropped version.

There’s an interesting implication that comes from the size restriction of displaying your work on the web. Some compositions can read very different depending on the size they’re displayed and, traditionally, artists plan their compositions around a set scale (canvas size/print size). However, if you are also displaying your work online, there’s an added pressure to make sure your compositions still work well when reduced.

That can be a big problem when your composition is based around very dense textures, because scaling them down often make the image become an unintelligible wad of visual junk. That issue is a problem with both series I am currently working on, especially the image which the crop below is taken from. This particular image doesn’t really work at anything less that 25% of full-res.* So, again, please click through to view a larger and uncropped version.

*You still lose a little detail in the extremes though (The hair is not actually clipping in the full-res or physical print). Eventually I’ll need to make a web version where the luminance is adjusted for the format.

Over years I have done an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins. In the course of this reeducation I have become suspiciously articulate and opinionated about things no doubt best left to the unself-conscience regions of the mind.

-Marilynne Robinson

Haha, yurp.

(Also, this guy probably feels the same way!)

I think it is a universal sorrow that society, in every form in which it has ever existed, precludes and forcloses much that we find loveliest and most ingratiating in others and in ourselves. Rousseau said men are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the Hebrew prophets it has been the role of the outsider to loosen these chains, or lengthen them, if only by bringing the rumor of a life lived otherwise.

That said, I must say too how beautiful human society seems to me, especially in those attenuated forms so characteristic of the West — isolated towns and single houses which sometimes offer only the merest, barest amenities: light, warmth, supper, familiarity. We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates, or in Eden. At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity - as of piety - to contract and of grace to decay into rigor and peace into tedium.

When I Was a Child - Marilynne Robinson

One of the primary mistakes people make is to take peoples’ spoken language to be equivalent to their level of thinking. I think it’s one of the oddest errors.

-Marilynne Robinson

When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés.

-Terrence Malick