December 2010 Archives

There are so many gems on every page of this book by Tim Siedell I'm thinking of mounting it on a piece of silver and giving it to my wife as an anniversary ring.




UPDATE: This post originally and incorrectly referred to the author as Balthazar the Magnificent Trombonist Siedell, but that's not his name. It has been corrected to prevent further confusion.

In Time's Person of the Year profile, Mark Zuckerberg explains his facebook status which is 'Eliminating desire for all that doesn't really matter.' That's his approach to life: "I think it would be very easy to get distracted and get caught up in short-term things or material things that don't matter."

Who can disagree with him? Though I find that I'm often thinking that I'm letting myself be distracted by things that don't really matter when I'm on facebook.

One of my favorite quotes from Richard Hugo is about risking sentimentality: "If y ou are not risking sentimentality you are not close to your inner self." He was actually quoting Bill Kittredge, a colleague of his. He was talking about poetry and writing but I came across an analysis of Edward Hopper that made the same point:

"Hopper paints that situation. He paints individuals of great inner depth with the full knowledge that that inner depth itself can never be painted. Because he is painting people as surfaces, he is going to flirt with cliché constantly. When he gets it wrong, when he tries to be too evocative, too objective, the whole thing falls apart. It gets corny. Like the clown. But that is the danger of painting surfaces that only hint at the underlying depths."