[basicreader]

On Saul Steinberg

His work had a life of its own after his death. Prudence and I and John Hollander and the people we hired, Sheila Schwartz and Patterson Sims—everybody that participated in the foundation, we all see him as a major twentieth-century artist and much funnier than most of the Abstract Expressionist painters he hung out with. But, because he drew rather than painted and because he didn’t fall into a clear category, people have been tempted to overlook his work. When we were just starting the foundation, we called an expert in, and he said, “Well, Saul Steinberg is not on the same level as Miró!” And I said, “He’s a hundred times funnier than Miró!” So it was just a different way of looking at what a great artist is. I still believe that he will be recognized as a great twentieth-century artist.

— The New Yorker

[basicreader]

On NFTs

The new forms of image-making of the last couple years seem pitched against nature, against beauty, ugliness, taste, aesthetics, against the real. I don’t think the artists behind the most popular PFP series have much interest in aesthetic judgments of any sort, or in representing anything. Likewise the scenes conjured by word-to-image models like Imagen are generated by written phrases, and so can only illustrate concepts and sometimes styles, and cannot depict anything happening in the real world: they are indifferent to reality and also to Platonic forms; rather they are a distillation of all the images in their dataset, the images under which the world is disappearing, the rising tide of images that once gave Karl Ove Knausgård his feeling “of the world disappearing, that our lives are being filled with images of the world, and that these images are inserting themselves between us and the world, which for that reason is becoming lighter and lighter and less and less binding.”

— Spike

[basicreader]

Big Night

Other restaurateurs, however, are natural-born Secondos. Take Mario Carbone, who in 2013 opened Carbone, a throwback Italian-American restaurant in the West Village that looks like a high-end version of Paradise, complete with tuxedoed waiters and Louis Prima on the sound system. Carbone’s a total Secondo, his partner Rich Torrisi a Primo.

“Rich is the one who wants to know who ordered risotto while they want spaghetti,” Carbone said. “I’m like, ‘Can you just fucking give it to them, please? Just give them the spaghetti.’ That is my relationship, me and my other business partner. He would totally agree.”

[...]

And Carbone wants all meals to feel like the movie’s climactic feast. “I give oranges and nuts at the end of the meal here,” Carbone said, “because I want it to be a total shitshow. I want wine stains, I want orange peels, I want nut cracks, I want crap everywhere. When someone leaves, it should look like a bomb went off at the table.”

— How Stanley Tucci's Big Night helped kick off an American dining revolution

[basicreader]

Walker Martin on Singing

"I realized that a lot of my favorite singers are bad singers. Like Randy Newman, or Jonathan Richman, or Michael Hurley," Martin told VICE. "I was like, 'You know that the people that you like the most, you like them because of their personalities. You like them. And the fact that they can't sing like Pavarotti, you don't think about that when you listen to the music.' Part of it was convincing myself that I could make something like that, that was true to me. And the fact that I'm not a great singer—it doesn't fucking matter."

— Walter Martin

[thotlibrary]

[thotlibrary]

You contribute writing and painting to the magazine. How do they complement each other when you search for ideas?

They don’t. I don’t search for ideas as if I’m searching for apples. Illustration has its own style; so does writing. The sensibility may be “the same,” but the process, and, ultimately, the content, are not. I’ve never produced a painting based on an idea for a piece of writing (or the other way around).

Bruce McCall’s “A Brush with Greatness”

[basicreader]

“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.”

— Jack Kerouac

[basicreader]

Ross Gay on Joy

“It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness? Is sorrow the true wild? And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that? For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation. What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying. I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

— Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

[basicreader]

Ross Gay on Delight

“I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon, or now. Good as now.”

— Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

[basicreader]

The personal card is in a measure an index of one’s character. A fantastic or garish note in the type effect, in the quality or shape of the card, betrays a lack of taste in the owner of the card.

— 10. Cards and Visits. Post, Emily. 1922. Etiquette (via bigdumbmanreferencelibrary)

[basicreader]

On Killer Bunnies in Medieval Art

Jon Kaneko-James explains further: "The usual imagery of the rabbit in Medieval art is that of purity and helplessness – that’s why some Medieval portrayals of Christ have marginal art portraying a veritable petting zoo of innocent, nonviolent, little white and brown bunnies going about their business in a field." But the creators of this particular type of humorous marginalia, known as drollery, saw things differently.

"Drolleries sometimes also depicted comedic scenes, like a barber with a wooden leg (which, for reasons that escape me, was the height of medieval comedy) or a man sawing a branch out from under himself," writes Kaneko-James.

This enjoyment of the "world turned upside down" produced the drollery genre of "the rabbit's revenge," one "often used to show the cowardice or stupidity of the person illustrated. We see this in the Middle English nickname Stickhare, a name for cowards" — and in all the drawings of "tough hunters cowering in the face of rabbits with big sticks."

— Open Culture

[basicreader]

On Commonplacing

Popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a “commonplace book” was a notebook used to gather quotes and excerpts from one’s literary wanderings — a kind of personalized encyclopedia of quotations. In “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”. The English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was all too aware of the grip of amnesia and the shortness of memory. In his seminal Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he wrote of his rival Blaise Pascal, who he named as the “prodigy of parts”, who “forgot nothing of what he had done, read, or thought.” Locke, in reaction, attempted to simulate Pascal’s “hyperthymesia”, not in the mind, but upon the page: through the construction of a system of “commonplacing”, as a form of what Swift called “supplemental memory”.

— Public Domain Review

[basicreader]

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.” ― Martin Buber

[basicreader]

What it Takes to Put Your Phone Away

Odell brings up a famous redwood in Oakland called Old Survivor, which is estimated to be almost five hundred years old. Unlike all the other trees of its kind in the area, it was never cut down, because it was runty and twisted and situated on a rocky slope; it appeared unprofitable to loggers. The tree, she writes, is an image of “resistance-in-place,” of something that has escaped capitalist appropriation. As Odell sees it, the only way forward is to be like Old Survivor. We have to be able to do nothing—to merely bear witness, to stay in place, to create shelter for one another—to endure.

— The New Yorker

[basicreader]

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

—Blaise Pascal, Pensées

[basicreader]

Rick Steves Wants to Set You Free

Steves is deeply indifferent to creature comforts. When I visited him, the back seat of his car was covered with a greenish slime, practically disintegrating, because of a mysterious leak. He just cracked the windows to try to dry it out. Steves prefers to spend his money on his favorite causes. His activism can be quirky and impulsive. In 2011, after hearing that his local symphony orchestra was struggling, he stepped in with a gift of $1 million, spread over 10 years, to help keep it operating. (This, pointedly, was how much money he would get back from President George W. Bush’s tax cut over a decade.)

“If I was trying to build a career on the speaking circuit — if I was struggling, and I needed these gigs — I would not talk about that stuff,” he said. “I could just talk about light stuff, and everybody would love it. But I’m not working right now to do that. I’m not trying to get anywhere that I’m not already. I don’t need to be anything I’m not. I’m 63 years old. I could retire now. But I’m ramping up.”

[...]

At some point, he looked up from the journal. “To me,” he said, “this is a precious thing. Because this is me.”

He kept reading.

“Time spent socially is time spent at the expense of personal betterment,” he said.

He shook his head. That’s how he had thought when he was young. “That’s my problem,” he added ruefully. “I work all the time.”

Then he kept reading.

“When I die,” he read, “scatter me all over the budget hotels of Europe.”

— The New York Times

[basicreader]

Jacques Touchet

Ridendo (derived from the French verb 'rire,' to laugh) was a medical and humor magazine distributed to French physicians from 1933 to 1977, reaching around 450 issues. The first 139 covers were made by illustrator and commercial artist Jacques Touchet (who also published several books in the early fifties, and worked with another french magazine called L'illustration). The covers always picture a physician along with a sympatethic version of Esculape, Latin god of medicine.

— 50 Watts