Mountains/Movement.

Conrad Jon Godly makes mountains of oil paints and turpentine, with ridges and shadows so rich and realistic they appear to be made of soil and ice, moss and mineral. See more, here. (Thanks, Colossal.)

Three more things, just because: 

-Why we need #YesAllWomen.
-Ballet dancers show off their most challenging moves in slow motion.
-Lastly, from Maya Angelou: "Have enough courage to trust love one more time. And always one more time."

New POV post tomorrow. Until then!

Inventory.

A big thank you to Megan for introducing me to Chelsea Hodson's Inventory, a blog chronicling the writer's attempt to catalog every one of her possessions. She posts photos of each item alongside a short reflection or a quote. As shown below, for example, there's a tube of illuminator, a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's, a hairbrush, riding pants. 

Of the pants, Chelsea writes: "This path will lead us home, I say. What path? You say. This path, I say, taking your hand & pointing it to the left.There is no path but I'd like for you to believe in something right now. If I can keep you believing then I can keep neglecting my faith, I can keep dragging it on a leash, we never have to go home."

As a writer, I love this idea as a form of daily practice. "When I moved back to Brooklyn from Los Angeles earlier this year, I thought, why not make a list of every single thing I'm taking with me?" Chelsea tells The Missouri Review. "Writing about each item seemed like a good opportunity for an exercise: I put something online every day no matter what. Even if I can't write well that day, it's just about completing the list I started."

Visit Chelsea Hobson's website, here, and her Tumblr, here.

Additional inventories:
-What Did You Buy Today? 
-A self-portrait a day.
-Finishing salts and heirloom cowpeas: pantry staples of top foodies.

Holiday Gift Ideas 3: Foxes, Feathers, Beauty Every Day.

Tis the season: every day this week, I'll be posting ten holiday gift ideas - fifty total by Friday. This year, I aimed to feature items from small businesses (Etsy and otherwise), or my favorite local  shops here in NYC. Other items are things I own and love.

Day 3: Foxes, Feathers, Beauty Every Day.

-Sailing Ship Kite, $40. As magical for adults as it is for children. Made in New York City.

-Hand-stitched baseball, $39. I once asked during a high school baseball game whether there were two balls in play - which pretty much says it all about my knowledge of sports, both then and now. Still, I think these baseballs, handcrafted and stitched in waxed linen, are gorgeous.

-Cat paper doll, $8. This cat is tiny and adorable and ballet-slipper pink - and he couldn't care less about any of it.

-Antique astrology chart, $65. For astrology addicts and stargazers, a map of the sky that dates back to 1873. 

-The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4, $17.96. Anais Nin has felt like a spiritual guide to me this past year. I have this line taped to my wall.

-Della MacBook case, $38. Handmade in Ghana, using local, sustainable, vegan materials. (Della is an amazing company that offers education and skills training to its employees in West Africa. Read more, here.)

-Feather tattoo, $5 for 2. To encourage free spirits.

-Honey Maple Cream, $13. Made in Pennsylvania using fresh milk, butter, maple syrup, and vanilla. Indie food website Mouth suggests pairing it with almond butter for what sounds like the most astoundingly delicious sandwich of all time.

-Anthony Burrill print, $75. For your bedroom wall, because what better words could there be to wake up to?

-Woodland socks, $38.63. To ensure warm toes when doing this.

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More tomorrow! For Monday's and Tuesday's guides (and other gift ideas from my archives), click here.

Becoming.

Below, wise words for the weekend, from Kurt Vonnegut to a group of NYC high school students who'd written to ask if he'd visit their school. (Ms. Lockwood, in case you're wondering, is their teacher.) Vonnegut very graciously declined, offering this sweet suggestion instead:

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK? Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow. God bless you all! 

Beautiful. Thank you to the excellent Letters of Note for sharing. Photo credit unknown - please share if you can! Any plans for the weekend ahead? I'm heading to New Hampshire with a dozen others to celebrate a friend's birthday on a farm. Can't wait!

Water.

Megan and I recently reread David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech "This Is Water" - whether you've read it before or are seeing it for the first time, I thought I'd share an excerpt today. I remember reading this bit for the first time years ago and thinking, someone just explained the meaning of life.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing...The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness."

Read the full speech, here, and have a wonderful Wednesday. (See also: George Saunders on kindness; Jonathan Safran Foer on being attentive.)

Photo by Max Wanger.

Thoreau Throw.

New from Colorado-based quilting company Comma Workshop, whose work aims to preserve the "time-honored traditions of quilting and storytelling": a series of literary quilt collections, each featuring the celebrated words of a different author. The first in the series? This quilt, stitched with the chapter "Solitude" from Thoreau's Walden. "Imagine," writes founder Kerry Larkin, "being nestled in a sea of beautiful words as you sleep..."

Kerry has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of this quilt, and there are only three days left to back the project - show your support and offer a donation, here. Good luck, Kerry!

In the Direction of Kindness.

George Saunders's Syracuse University convocation speech - published three days ago in The New York Times - is one of the best things I've read all year. Possibly ever. It may be old news by now, but take a look if you haven't already. It's brilliant and thoughtful and funny - the perfect way to start a weekend, a new month, a new adventure, a new life. Below, my favorite bit, toward the end:

"Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.  Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.  That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been.  Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Theresa’s.  Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place.  Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been.  I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful."

Read the full speech, here, and have a beautiful, happy weekend. See you Monday.

Photos by Max Wanger.

Live, Love, Say It Well.

Ryan Sheffield's collection of writers' quotes on Etsy is so rich and well-curated, I had a hard time narrowing down my favorites. I love Nabokov's line about a scientific imagination, and Bukowski's thoughts on art and tacos, but the best of the best might be this one from Denis Johnson, whose book Jesus' Son I read last summer and loved: "English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows."

See more and purchase prints from Ryan Sheffield on Etsy. Visit Sheffield's website, here.

Fiction & Fromage.

For literature lovers and dairy devotees (and who among us isn't at least one of the two?), an article that pairs various types of cheese with literary equals. There's Tom Robbins's "raunchy" yet "unmistakably delicious" taleggio, and Virginia Woolf's Bayley Hazen Blue ("it's a mix of narratives - the Mrs. Dalloway of cheeses, if you will"). 

For Amelia Gray, there's a sheep's milk concoction studded with flowers and herbs; for Joyce Carol Oates, there's Humbolt Fog. Says author and cheese enthusiast Freddie Moore, "In the gourmet cheese canon, it's like the inevitable English class discussion of 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.'" Wow.

Read more at The Airship, here. Found via The Paris Review.

Good Blazing Fires.

As a fan of both lists and letters (and words in general), I'm a devoted follower of Shaun Usher's brilliant blogs, Letters of Note and Lists of Note. (I've got the former to thank for introducing me to this life-changing letter by Ted Hughes, which I wrote about here.) In today's letter, which dates back to the early 19th century, English writer Sydney Smith offers Lady Georgiana Morpeth a list of tips on how best to tend to her depression. It's a wonderful list and a wonderful letter; below are the first five suggestions. Find the full text on Letters of Note, here.

1st. Live as well as you dare.
2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you the slight sensation of cold,  75° or 80°.
3rd. Amusing books.
4th. Short views of human life - not further than dinner or tea.
5th. Be as busy as you can.

The 18th, however, is my favorite: Keep good blazing fires.

I also love this (unrelated) quote from Smith: "Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything."

Visit Letters of Note and Lists of Note for more. I'll be taking tomorrow off to celebrate the Fourth, but will be back with a new POV post on Friday. Have a lovely holiday!

Photos by Max Wanger.

Writers, Weddings, and the Wild West.

This week in words: childhood drawings by e.e. cummings, whose poems I Will Wade Out and You Are Tired (I Think) are two of my favorites,

a round-up of writers' weddings, including - as pictured below - those of Hemingway, Styron, Raymond Carver (at 19), and Arthur Miller, 

and this spectacular sentence. Wow.

e.e. cummings drawings via the Massachusetts Historical Society. Have a wonderful Wednesday! 

Writers On Writing.

As part of Shared Worlds 2013, literary luminaries share their best advice for fellow writers. According to the website, "some days...you simply need to know that someone else has been there before--behind a different keyboard, holding a different pen." Below, some of my favorites:

Writers, from top to bottom: Lev Grossman, Scott Eagle, Garth Nix, Karin Lowachee, Tobias Buckell.

On a related note, a tip I like to keep in mind, from Henry Miller's work schedule commandments: "Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is at hand."

Find more advice at Shared Worlds, here. And have a wonderful weekend!

Welcome, Spring.

At long last, it's the first day of spring. It's still just 35 degrees in Brooklyn as I write this, but I'm set to take a long walk in the sunshine to Greenpoint this morning. (I figure by the time I get there, I'll be warm enough to believe winter's over.)

 

How will you spend your day? A few ways to commemorate the new season:

-Read a poem.

-Eat something sweet.

-Put flowers on your head.

-Dance.

-Sing.

-Start over.

Happy spring, everyone.

Top photo by Robert Triscoli. Bottom by Zag via Crissie Fuller.

Living Forests.

Beautiful words to start this very lovely Friday.

It's been an especially word-y week here; I love it. Wishing you all a very happy weekend. Any plans? 

Top image via Modern Hepburn. Bottom photograph by Max Wanger.

Nosy Animals.

I posted an image by Stoic Mike a couple of weeks ago as part of an Equals Record teaser; since then, I've had the opportunity to scroll through the rest of his delightful Tumblr, which features artwork that combines words and pictures in curious, quirky ways. A few favorites:

Especially love that jackrabbit - what a wise little guy. See more at Stoic Mike, here. Thanks again to Maya for the introduction!