“The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”

— from The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

“In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”

— from A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis

“My mum was fond of reminding me, ‘Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we’re here, we should dance.’ I always found this analogy strangely callous, as she knew full well I simply cannot dance.”

— from Babble by Charles Saatchi

“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.’”

— from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes

“I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don’t know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida—the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets—as a kind of coping mechanism. Despite my best efforts to avoid them, I was often dragged along on Sunday afternoon antiquing expeditions, down dim and dusty aisles crowded with needlepoint portraits and moth-eaten sport coats—a hell-scape for any boy of thirteen—were occasionally, while my grandmother hunted for bargains, I would find caches of old snapshots. They were photos of strangers, of weddings and funerals, family vacations, backyard forts, and first days of school, all torn from once-treasured albums and dumped into plastic bins for strangers to paw through: communal graves of a sort, the anonymous dead shuffled into ersatz families of the unwanted. I spend hours sifting through the bins, the faces blackening my fingertips.”

— from Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past by Ransom Riggs

FRANKIE #53 is out!

Now available at BooksActually!

“Katri was silent. When her silence continued, Anna understood that she’d said something important. She repeated it. ‘One for me and one for you. We’ll share. We’ll share Central Europe.’ It sounded adventurous. She said it again. Katri drew a deep breath and said, with a certain chill, that it was out of the question. But if Anna had no objection, they could assign half the royalty from United Rubber to Mats.

‘Do so,’ said Anna. ‘That’s fine. And not another word about United Rubber, ever.’

Katri opened the black notebook and, in her own sweeping hand, wrote, ‘Mats 1%’.

‘Is there anything else of importance ?’

‘No, Anna,’ Katri said. ‘We’ve done what matters most.’”

— from The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY Spring 2013 :
Animals

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
— Samuel Butler, c. 1890

Gift Ideas for Christmas 2012 № 9 :

for the COLLEAGUES —

BooksActually Writer’s Pack + What Gives Us Our Names by Alvin Pang

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BooksActually Writer’s Pack : A perfect inspiration to bring out the writer in you. Every cover is unique. Hand-stitched and manually typewritten with famous quotations from philosophers, artists, and thinkers (nonfiction) or the first paragraphs of famous works (fiction) like Miranda July’s No one belongs here more than you. Each Writer’s Pack has one Marginalia Cahier (the quotes are chosen at random), one Author Pencil, and one Postcard ! :)

What Gives Us Our Names by Alvin Pang : He’d gotten the idea from a book, not unlike the one you last read and loved, whose lurid covers you have already forgotten. For a canvas, he used not his own skin but his very life, spending his days as if he were made up of the most telling bits of other people. To do this, he learned to watch quietly and look deeply, past the busy surfaces until he could discern the colours beneath, the ones that did not change. One by one he would name them as he wove them into his heart in the deep of night. He touched you once, borrowing pieces of your story in passing. They are here still, in case you wish to look.