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March 14, 2007
TT: Elsewhere
I haven’t been surfing the Web nearly enough in recent weeks, but I do have three things to share with you today.• Ms. Kate’s Book Blog has bought herself a manual typewriter:
I don’t have the option of reclaiming all my time for writing but I thought that if I got a typewriter for my office at home, even just as a decorative object, it would be a way of symbolically reclaiming the space for writing. It would mark a rebalancing of my priorities….
What a lovely gesture! I’d like to do the same—I miss the wonderful old “acoustic typewriter” on which I wrote so many of my early articles—but I don’t have enough horizontal space in my tiny New York apartment to display such an objet d’art. So much the worse for me.
(While we're on the subject of typewriters, take a peek at the cover of Prog, the new Bad Plus CD.)
• Mr. Modern Art Notes recently paid a similarly lovely tribute to his mother, from whom he inherited his love of art:
Mom painted watercolors. My grandmother's house is full of them: colorful, twisted trees on the California coast and brushy abstractions of the cats next door, especially the fat one, Big Bertha. The paintings I like best are her Sierra Nevada landscapes.
Something occurs to me as I write this: I don't remember seeing Mom paint. That's not to say that she only painted in the absence of us kids, or when my father wasn't around. It's just that I remember the family experiences that surrounded her painting instead….
Read all about them here.
• Can critics and artists be friends? Alex Ross weighs in:
The irony underlying this discussion is that some of our strongest prejudices—favorable or unfavorable—are directed toward people we've never met. Lack of contact lets us idolize our heroes and demonize our foes. The advantage of meeting people within the profession is that you see them as they really are. The danger is that you may end up liking a lot of them, tolerating most of the others, and madly loving rather few. For myself, I want to preserve at least some of the fantasy of fandom….
Alex says that he “generally avoids” meeting the people he writes about. Should he? Watch this space for further details....
Posted March 14, 2007 12:00 PM
