After the Alphabets
W.S Merwin

I am trying to decipher the language of insects
they are the tongues of the future

There’s no rational explanation for how much I love frogs. I mean, there might be a rational tidbitual oddment I could lay down for you  but all the tidy, comprehensible bullet points in the world wouldn’t do justice to how deeply fascinated and charmed and shivered I am by those little half-blood princes, those darling swimmers who leave the water to tuck the soft green of themselves into the grass so they can lie in wait for me, so they can leap in ambush and make me bark a laugh of surprise at their ridiculous bodies, hurled up from the grass, bounced high, airborne.

It’s still in my head, the image from a lot of years ago, the image that came to me one day when I was sad and angry and roiled with all the awfulness of what had happened, when my worklife had become void, when the job I loved had been lost to me by bad behaviour not my own. Smashworld came and I fell down until the moment I got up and thought to make my own way, which I did and am doing and will do.

Swarm
by Cheryl Coon

Humanity is bad and terrible and capable of the most horrific acts of cruelty and venality. But oh my god, when a beautiful brain does beautiful brain things, it makes me remember that some of us are not only unbad and unterrible, but really fucking wonderful. What I’m thinking of here is this thing I found on the webs that are inter, this fabulous wonderful thing. To be precise, this thing:

I don’t know how it works, how to do the math, but it’s like every emotion I’ve ever felt somehow gets wrapped up in trees. Trees become some kind of conduit for thought and feeling, for understanding, for epiphany, for optimism, for love.

I think I think too much about clothes — mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, whoever’s. Because really? I think an awful lot about them. Like, an AWRFUL lot. Thing is, when the world is being beautiful, I don’t want to be a blight on it and when the world is being unbeautiful, I don’t want to add to the ick, so I end up thinking a lot about my clothes. And in my thinking, I also think this: I think style is an act of generosity. I think fashion is just merchandising. I think one is qualitatively superior to the other, by a lot, and in my mind it’s clear that the superior one is style.

You know, when Tiger Woods apologised to me, I didn’t get it.

I make playlists on my iPod and they’re often very theme-y because I am nothing if not a theme-y woman — I like to group and organise. I like to find patterns, or, in their absence, make them. Maybe that’s the curatorial urge. Or the librarian’s urge. Anyway, I have a playlist on my iPod called “river” and I listen to the songs on that playlist a lot, especially when I am despairing because those songs are very cathartic to hear and especially when I am all joyed-up because those songs are very cathartic to hear.

And again I love the internets with mighty might because here I am unrulying away in Toronto and all the way over in the Czech Republic Akile Nazli Kaya is making films and sending me nifty pics of her studio space at the Film School Zlín.

If you take away my periodic PMS madness and my 92%-of-the-time short fuse, I’m a pretty fun gal.

I am interested in the connection between the physical and the mental, in the connection between a crisis of the body and the germination of an idea.

Do you wanna know a thing I really like? A thing I really like is when people who make things make things that mess with form or boundary, or our expectations. Needless to say, then, I am smited with smittenness for Scott Hove’s Cakeland project, not only because boys who sculpt a million jillion foofy pink cakes are boys I wanna know and go out for drinkies with, but also because hey! hello! domestic-arts-fucking-around-with, right there, woo-hoo!

The backbone of the backbone.