FALL SALE!

The annual Fall Sale is here! Please email me for more information if you are interested in attending at backpockets at gmail dot com

Local take on America's Food Revolution

Interesting article (with some great tips on DC restaurants).

Ceramics

"Early humans shaped and scraped clay to make vessels, cooked in them and realised they hardened, learned to make them impervious to water, and also to decorate them, with incisions and with glazes made from salts and metals. All pots are different, and all resemble each other (except for some defiant modern monsters). They are made elementally, using earth, air, fire and water. They represent the arts of peace, domestication, and elegance, whether of pure simplicity of form or of bravura demonstration of difficult mastery of techniques and images. They are where art meets craft, the useful meets the beautiful."


-- AS Byatt, "The Wonders of Porcelain", The Guardian. October 10, 2009.


For more reflections on ceramics, art, and life in general, my mother, potter Jennifer Coffin, has started a blog. 

There's No Place Like Home

An article from Newsweek suggests that there is evidence that Americans are finally settling down, and moving less. This is great! Hopefully it is a sign of a resurgence of family and place loyalty.

The Tate and Wallace and Gromit!

The Tate Museum in England and the animators of Wallace and Gromit are getting together to create a movie about the artworks in the Tate for children. It should be released by 2012. How fun is this?!

Wandering Mind

"Clive Thompson on Why Mind Idling is Mother of Invention": Schooler suspects that research like his explains why so many “aha” moments occur when we’re drifting — like Archimedes in the tub.

Evolution and Concept Art

This fascinating article by Denis Dutton from the New York Times, "Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank". Dutton fairly recently published The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.


"We ought, then, to stop kidding ourselves that painstakingly developed artistic technique is passé, a value left over from our grandparents’ culture. Evidence is all around us. Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

"The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist."

Henri's Walk to Paris

I wish I could find a copy of this book!

Planner has a name!

La Belle Revue

A blog with limited entries, but a very nice selection of magazine art and advertising from 1880-1930.

Two Children's Literature Resources

The International Children's Digital Library : According to blogger Jessica Palmer, "The mission of the Children's Digital Library is to give children of immigrants all over the world access to children's books in their native tongue. But it's not really surprising that English books constitute the majority of the collection, or that older (and thus out-of-copyright) books predominate. It may be unintentional, but it makes the Children's Digital Library a bonanza for those of us who miss old cloth-bound children's books like the Oz series."


Evidently the digital books include the original illustrations as well. 


The Reading Spot, is an Australian online collection of children's literature. Unfortunately, the site is not up right now. I will provide a link when it works again. 

Bembo's Zoo

Thanks to Babyology I have just learned about this great illustrated alphabet book, Bembo's Zoo. It's written/illustrated by Roberto De Vicq De Cumptic It's not just another illustrated alphabet book either, the author uses the letters of the words to create the illustrations. So fun. The Flash website is really neat too, and fun to play with (for kids too!)

It's not in available right now, but it looks as though Amazon is getting more in soon. 

The Children's Book Pt. 2: Dissection

Byatt's capacity for creating a slow (470 page) lead up to the perfect scene is both frustratingly deliberate and then suddenly, inexorably impressed on your mind. There were so many in this brutal book, that I am going to restrict myself to one. Often bizarre, and, in anyone else's less capable hands, these scenes are almost comical in their blatant imagery.

"Quite suddenly and farcically, she fell in love. She fell in love with a demonstrator, Dr. Bart, during a dissection class. He was showing her the human heart, and how to extract it from the cavity where it lay and no longer beat. There was a smell - a stink - of formaldehyde. The room was ventilated by a small opening in the end wall, with a gas jet burning to draw up the heated air. The hospital was a converted house - the space was cramped and full of women, twenty living, one dead, soft and leathery. Dr. Barty asked Dorothy to make the cuts to extract the organ, a cross-shaped cut in the pericardium, then, with a larger scalpel, slices through the six blood vessels going into the heart, and the two that went out. Dr. Barty - a muscular, youngish man, in a green buttoned overall and surgical cap - congratulated Dorothy on the precision of her work. He told her to take out the heart, and place it in the tray for another student to continue. Dorothy put her hands round the heart, and tugged. She looked up at the bearded, severely smiling Dr. Barty, and saw him. It was as though time stopped, as though she stood there for ever with another woman's heart in her hands. She saw every lively hair of his black brows, and the wonderful greens and greys of his irises, and the dark tunnels of his pupils, opened on her. She saw the chiseled look of his lips, in the fronds of his rich beard, reddish-black, curling softly. His teeth were white and even. She must have been studying him for weeks, quite as much as the inanimate fingers and toes, tarsals and metatarsals he exposed to her.
   "Her helplessness made her furious. She took in a deep breath of tainted air and fell unconscious to the ground: the dead heart rolled damply beside her."

AS Byatt
The Children's Book, p. 470

People

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously--no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner--no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

CS Lewis
The Weight of Glory, Theology, vol. XLII (Nov.  1941), pp. 273-74

Old Jeans, New Blanket

I love this traditional African American quilt idea of making a quilt from old jeans. This one is nicely modern and abstract, and not at all "country".