I read Craig Thompson's Blankets somewhere around May 2021 and felt compelled to make these set of cartoons. One amongst the many that didn't even make it to this stage.

I stumbled up on these today and am glad these exist.

A few weeks before the pandemic, I was out on a cold Toronto February walking around the city. I had been watching a lot of Mekas's work, particularly As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. ^[1]

Two and half years later, with 🐣K. first birthday coming up, I am glad I made this tiny video that day.

There's a legend about a Chinese painter who was asked by the emperor to paint a landscape so pristine that the emperor can enter it. He didn't do a good job, so the emperor was preparing to assassinate him. But because it was his painting, legend goes, he stepped inside and vanished, saving himself. I always loved that little allegory as an artist. Even when it is not enough for others, if it is enough for you, you can live inside it.

ocean vuong

Someday I would love to get my garden close to this. A beautiful space to stay and explore.

https://barnsworthburning.net/

poem by mary oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Logged into my lastfm after ages, Riz Ahmed (introduced to me from the excellent ms marvel ost) has taken up most of my listening time. It's the one artist that K. jumps up and danced to irrespective of the mood he is in.

I couldn't have said it better:

There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.

This overlaps with a lot of what I aim towards. This one thing would stop us from performing for others and allow us the space to indulge in whatever fascinates us.

And, what fascinates us makes us who we are.

(source: Take Care of Your Blog)

Virgina Woolf paints a strong image of why cities are wonderful places to be.

I always felt this when I was in NYC. Where I could find myself when walking right in the middle of the manic, swirling madness of people.

Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.”

As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.

I enjoyed Thoreau's essay on walking, where he asks us to walk like a camel, for "it is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking."

Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. - Henry David Thoreau

“Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.”

Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.”

source

A few years back, I came across Walid Raad's website, The Atlas Project. A look at the contemporary history of Lebanon, where Raad put together an archive which plays with the thin line between fiction and non-fiction. I was introduced to a genre of photography, speculative documentary, that has since become an integral part of my own practice.

Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers and Tides is apparently a dreaded watch in Art schools. The YouTube comments for these videos were filled with kids complaining they had to watch this.

I, for one, loved his complete surrender to nature. His approach to making art, which recognizes the entropy^[1] in play for everything we create. ^[2]

At the genesis of my site is this article/how-to guide by Darius Kazemi, How to run a small social network site for your friends

It has also set in motion this thought in my head that has been brewing the last two years to build an alternative, small, community driven, federated and image centric social network of my own.

a small social network site doesn't need a huge complex network of computers. One computer can be enough. Often it's the kind of thing you can rent for $10 a month, or even run at home on an old computer you have lying around if you want.

(for the administrator) remember that your job is social first and technical second

If I make software that makes the lives of 50 people much nicer, and it makes 0 people more miserable, then on the balance I think I'm doing better than a lot of programmers in the world.

I searched and searched for this video of Alison Bechdel. She talks about how she has to photograph herself to draw her cartoons.

I can relate to her.

i found this in the deep crevices of my notes from 2021. it was right under my nose all along

I got a brief glimpse into the process of Joan Miro from one of the best books I read in 2021, I work like a gardner

In Taleb's The Black Swan, he talks about author Umberto Eco's library of 30,000 book. Eco stated he found he could only read about 25,200 books if he read one book a day, every day, between the ages of ten and eighty. A “trifle,” he laments, compared to the million books available at any good library.

Taleb called it an Antilibrary.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain **as much of what you do not know **as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary

There is a much more subtle word that gets to heart of this — tsundoku ^[1]

tsundoku is the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. Its morphology combines **tsunde-oku **(letting things pile up) and dukosho

Reading Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise and this poem took my breath away.

I was a thought, a dream, a fish, a wing
And then a human being
When I emerged from my mother's river
On my father's boat of potent fever
I carried a sack of dreams from a starlit dwelling
To be opened when I begin bleeding
There's a red dress, deerskin moccasins
The taste of berries made of promises
While the memories shift in their skins
At every moon, to do their ripening