Sunday Scraps #122

I woke up at 6am so here’s a quick link dump before I head out to work.

On existential cringe / reading another Ben Lerner book and one of the characters talks about milieu therapy / Slavenka Drakulić was pretty kick ass and I hope her last book comes out in English some day / on colours you can’t see on screens / putting a hat on a hat is a terrific expression / my friend Scott wrote an excellent essay about trillionaires / if i could afford the time off, I would run a temporary department / unit.d gallery looks lovely and i should try to make it to their next exhibition / i love libraries so Biblioteka at the AA is my cup of tea / dragging a couple of friends to Vienna next weekend and going to go look at some Papyrus /  Climate + Cities have published their latest project on the manipulation of climate data.

Added to my commonplace book:

An elegant woman who dressed often in amethyst silk jackets with matching nail polish, as a politician she would drum those manicured nails on the table to make her point. Like others of her generation in intelligence, she never married – until 1973 it would have meant immediately leaving the service – commenting casually once that it would be difficult to explain at home the broken fingernails caused by “things that you do with machinery or guns”. (Met Ramsay’s obituary)

He was only interested in a technique as long as it provided resistance. (BBC Radio 4’s Front Row special on David Hockney)

Trauma is the ultimate experience of ‘this will last forever’. (re-listening to The Body Keeps The Score)

Escher, this utterly traditional artist, makes you see that we walk a world we don’t understand. We are his funny little people, going up and down the stairs, thinking we ascend or descend when we’re on the flat, propping up our everyday lives with cosy assumptions to hide from the infinite, the impossible real. (Unusually flattering review by Jonathan Jones)

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed – by doing nothing. (from On Chesil Beach)

I’m now running late. Happy Thursday.