Random journal entries from last year. Watched Aranyer Din Ratri – one of my favorite Satyajit Ray films – and read a bunch of Emily Dickinson.
Design after all is a process of inquiry…
Tag Archives: sketchbook
Find little spaces inside of you and tease them open
After Lonely City I read Crudo, of course. More qualified people have written about it so I won’t go into that, but I enjoyed it immensely. It was funny, raw, and brilliant.
“When she was young, she’d sliced up her own flesh at the blink of an eye, she loved to get truly abject, but now she’d dried out…not appetising exactly, not desirable, but fodder for someone, a pigeon, at least. Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she couldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable.”
It takes place over a few days in her fortieth summer, and she’s about to get married. It’s not often that we see ourselves reflected so accurately in literature with all our fears and pimples and headaches, and Olivia Laing as Kathy Acker was spot on.
Take a look at the covers too: The UK paperback edition which I read, and here’s the US paperback one.
Title & this quotation from Crudo
Back again
I never left drawing, but I did find it difficult to share drawings after my pregnancy. Not sure where that came from. Was it a loss of self, a disconnect from the past, a need for solitude?
Perhaps I’ll never know for sure. But here’s the latest sketchbook:
More people
Like most people who draw, I look for opportunities to draw from life – mostly at airports, in the subway, wherever I’m waiting.
Here are some recent ones from last month.
Tomorrow is our permanent address
While going through my archives, I found these pages from a 2004 journal. The brown boy and I had just gotten married, and I was resisting all the extended family’s combined pressure on me to start propagating the species.
In this angry book it seems that while I did not want to have a baby, I knew all about the details of bearing one. What a know-it-all I was.
Getting where we’re going
[Sometimes in the living of every day
I often forget about the life of it
the intentionality, “the composing of the life”
that I once set out to do. The daily bustle,
that once emerged from me –
often swallows me up
until all I can do is hold on for dear life
to banal rituals
so that I don’t lose myself.]
For pacificleo.
Some days
My relationship with Mondays have changed multiple times over the years –
Blue Monday (2014)
Conversations with the Anteater, part V (2009)
If you’re one of those people who suffer from Monday blues, here’s a hug from the anteater.
Fragile the minutes
I wanted rest but what I got was work. And in between there were whispered wisdom from far and wide.
