Valentines

I’m thinking about the things that are good for my heart:

1)    My little frying pan that holds two eggs.

 2)    The #2 paintbrush and the way it toes the line.

 3)    Abstraction: its death-struggle with representational art and the notion that abstraction isn’t painted as carefully.

4)    Simone Weil—even when I don’t understand her she’s always a pleasure to read and then to try to follow.

5)    Everything hiding behind The Life of the Mind.

 6)    The realization that Europe, not Asia or Africa, is the strangest, most dysfunctional continent in human history.

 7)    Political candidates who refuse to put pomade on their hair.

 8)    Flourless chocolate cake.

 9)    The shift from the narrative being controlled by men with Billy clubs to women who can tell a good story from the perspective of the female gaze and without a beginning, middle, or end.

10)  The next-door neighbor’s windchimes.

 11)  The journals of Jules Renard and his invocation of Mallarme (p.235)—that Mallarme couldn’t ‘understand how anyone could write the words “God” or “heart’ in a sentence. ‘God’ creates the effect of a stone in a spider’s web. ‘Heart’ no doubt evokes too material an image. 

 12) Honesty as the best policy, and lying as the fall-back position.

‘‘Striped Abstraction”, oil, acrylic, Magic Marker, 24” X 24”. By permission of the artist.