Water is the Medium

Solnit: "Counter-Criticism"

"There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art."

"This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective."

--from Rebecca Solnit's "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable"

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me,
Chicago, Il.: Haymarket Books,
2014

The Journey

Sculpture mix, unfired.

I am yearning for kelp.

Time-Travel: Take Four

Photo of a photo.  1965 vintage, perhaps.
Between more formal posturings, wouldn't you say?
Or after.  Mostly candid capture here, though one fellow is tracking the camera still.

(Me? The small fry in front.)

"The Carpet-Bag": Sentence #1

"I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific."

--Melville's Ishmael.

Classic chapter opener; such an easy, sweeping sentence.

Melville does this again and again, but in a big book like Moby Dick, you've got to stop and just look, every so often, sentence by sentence, to feel the poise and power.