clippings

on art, childhood, exploration, pace, efficiency, vitality, beauty

[austinkleon]

“How to sleep through the winter (hibernate)” from The Animal Fair

[meredithpco]

If only...

[meredithpco]

from George Dennison’s The Lives of Children

[meredithpco]

So much fun, from Matt Parker.

[meredithpco]

In the latest issue of Orion magazine (May/June 2016) the image of this collage by Ron Bimrose jumped right out at me.  I’ve seen map-collage before, but this I just love for the just-enough color and spare stems.  He has several, here on his website, under Planting Series. 

[meredithpco]

So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.

Rebecca Solnit, in The New Yorker a few years ago:

[meredithpco]

Three levels of knowing: SIMPLICITY is the world view of the child or uninformed adult, fully engaged in his own experience and happily unaware of what lies beneath the surface of immediate reality. COMPLEXITY characterizes the ordinary adult world view.  It is characterized by an awareness of complex systems in nature and society but an inability to discern clarifying patterns and connections. INFORMED SIMPLICITY is an enlightened view of reality.  It is founded upon an ability to discern or create clarifying patterns within complex mixtures.

Matthew Frederick, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

[meredithpco]

Educability, humanity's species characteristic, is not simply a matter of learning the answers to old questions, but, more importantly, the increasing ability to ask new questions that may lead to new answers.  There is always the danger that old answers will discourage the raising of new and appropriate questions, with the result that the error becomes institutionalized, often as a way of life.

Ashley Montagu, Growing Young

[robertogreco]

We need a space to be unpredictable, for knowledge to be emergent not algorithmically fed to us.

Audrey Watters (via robertogreco)

[migurski]

Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, “Nationalities Map No. 1,” from Hull-House Maps and Papers, 1895. (Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library)

(via Historical Maps Made by 19th Century Women Cartographers - CityLab)

[meredithpco]

I’m such a sucker for orange and blue. And also, maps, I guess.

[thenearsightedmonkey]

[meredithpco]

To this day, when I speak, I find visual input to be distracting.  When I was younger, if I saw something interesting I might begin to watch it and stop speaking entirely.  As a grown-up, I don't usually come to a complete stop, but I may still pause if something catches my eye.  That's why I usually look somewhere neutral - at the ground or off into the distance - when I'm talking to someone.

John Elder Robison, "Look me in the Eye"

[meredithpco]

We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. ... Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community.

bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats, and Loving Blackness

[meredithpco]

In fact, I believe that properly conducted language learning is one of the few occasions in which an adult can go through a deep experience of poverty, of weakness, and of dependence on the good will of another.

Ivan Illich, in Celebration of Awareness

[meredithpco]

Nature’s imagination, as Freeman Dyson likes to say, is richer than ours, and he speaks, marvellingly, of this richness in the physical and biological worlds, the endless diversity of physical forms and forms of life. For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life. Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its “creative” potential, that forms the central theme of this book.

Oliver Sacks in An Anthropologist on Mars

[meredithpco]

I love bicycles and I love Antje Duvekot, so this is pretty much my favorite thing so far this week.

[meredithpco]

I’m always wrestling, when I’m doing credits for the projects I do, I really struggle with a word like “student.” I’d really just rather call them “youth-artists” because that’s what they really are. When they’re engaged in this project with me and when they’re making art week after week, day after day, they are actually engaged in art practice..." "And of course, there are things that I am teaching them, but because I work with so many people outside of a school situation, I am like, “You are not in school right now, you are working with an artist, you are working with me who lives life as an artist, as a teaching-artist at that.” So that’s what makes it matter to me that they are not called students, that they’re not just called passersby, because they’re hanging out with artists, they’re keeping company with artists over the course of a project, they’re part of the community or club of artists. I don’t want to say, “I’m the artist and you’re the student.” I would rather say, “we’re making art together, so we’re artists.” Even if it’s for a finite amount of time. I feel better giving them that title, even if it’s not with a Capital A. If we’re going to shoot hoops, we’re going to play basketball, we’ll be basketball players for the day.

artist Alexis Iammarino, in conversation with Douglas Milliken

[meredithpco]

We’ve overdone it,” Rogoff said. “We wanted to protect kids from working in factories 100 years ago...but we have excluded [them] so much from the life of the community that they don’t feel like they have anything to contribute, and they don’t have as much opportunity to learn

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/08/30/what-age-segregation-does-america/o568E8xoAQ7VG6F4grjLxH/story.html