Another book to remember...

On Prayer...from Auden's Commonplace Book

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention [...] that he completely forgets his ego,his praying. Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. The primary task of the school teacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

(A Certain World, 306)

After Sinclair Lewis

Some time ago, painter Matthew Sepielli mentioned the Temporary Allegiance project at UIC (started by Philip von Zweck) and it has stuck with me for a while.

Now that the exhibit project is suspended, I finally have followed through on an idea. The banner is 4x6 feet and digitally printed on nylon (I had them made by Humphry's Flag Company in Old City Philadelphia, whose store is right across the street from Betsy Ross's House). The text reads:

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross

I am planning to offer a limited edition of them...

Concordances, continued

Some years ago I was at LACMA looking at some amazing examples of Kuba cloth they have...(here is what turns up in their collection search). There was one (not like any of those...sorry) that completely mesmerized me....it was something like this:

So I was superinterested when I came across a tweet (which may have appeared on the feed of poet Christian Bok, which is a fountain of interesting stuff....) about generating Hamiltonian cycles in rectangular grid graphs. I didn't even know such things existed, but I was delighted by the images provided by the blogger, Pascal Sommer:

I hope try this one out soon...

Another image/emblem

More repair

"For many, replacing a broken object with something new is often the faster and cheaper alternative to fixing it, but a group of neighbors in the small borough of Willimantic, Connecticut, decided it didn’t have to be that way. Three years ago, they started a program to keep salvageable goods from landfills by harnessing the community’s collective skills to fix them"

The article is here, with photos...

More mending

Another post on mending...this one from the Cooper Hewitt...so cool.