2. Because we were in Harvard Square and this is what I do there, I bought books today, from both the Harvard/MIT COOP and Harvard Bookstore. Two YA (PAPER TOWNS!!!), a writing book and Art as Experience by John Dewey, part as research for the WIP and part because I have--thanks to certain professors--become seriously interested in the way we experience art, both as viewers and creators.
3. I love how accessible-to-everyone books are. I'm in a specialized program now, so can no longer take art history or philosophy on a whim. But I can read about them. I can research online and talk with people about all the random things that fascinate me. And I can, eventually, put my opinions and thoughts on these things into words and characters and premises. The world--literary, intellectual, social--is one huge conversation, building on others.
Isn't that incredible?
4. I finished reading Pablo Neruda's 20 Poems and a Song of Despair. My first reaction was that he was at times overly-sentimental and often superficial in a sort of "black wires grow from her head" Shakespearian way. Then I read that he was twenty when he wrote some of the poems and this made sense. The copy I have has illustrations from Picasso. I'm not sure if these were printed in the original. They were contemporaries so it's entirely possible. But it made me think, these illustrations are from the beginnings of Picasso's work, before Dadaism and Impressionism took hold, and I imagine the poems are the beginnings of Neruda, too. The modeling off the masters to jump into experimentalism.
Conclusion? I need to read some of his later work, because he's part of the generation that so fascinates me. Woolf, Eliot, Picasso. Everyone trying to make sense of the world after the first war. But the fact that it took the Picasso drawings to make me see this makes me consider the way the poems and the pictures relate--how they are art as a whole as well as separately--and what this says about name association and selling things and interest and--
4. Sorry, sorry my liberal arts is showing,
Kitten?
