What I must say first about the show “Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco is GO TWICE. There are quilts from the Amish communities of Lancaster, Pa., and Holmes County, Ohio. Most were made before 1940. A couple pieces are completely insane. Old Maid’s Puzzle (maker unknown) c.1930 from Holmes County, Ohio has a black circle in the center like a dilated pupil. The pattern uses small blocks bisected by curves to send a ripple out from that center point that looks like a diagram of radiation spreading out from a toxic event. Or, to read into the name of the pattern – a diagram of the fear of single girls. As with any established pattern, it’s the particular rotten sherbet palette of this piece that makes it scary. Also see a five-star version of Tumbling Blocks with a black and cornflower blue border, where the blocks are lit with lavender light coming from two directions at once. It makes you want a stabilizing drink, now. Clean living does weird things to people. Check it out.
Blogging, Cronicas-style
Hi everybody. I have been reading Selected Cronicas by Clarice Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. These were Sunday columns that this super-genius Brazilian novelist produced for Rio de Janeiro’s major newspaper, Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973. When you read these you will not believe they appeared in a regular newspaper.
They could also be really instructive for writers who are coming up and finding their voices as bloggers. The Cronicas have all the casual style of a blog but can then go ahead and get quite complicated and obscure. You can, as Lispector does, variously muse about the little girl from next door who comes over and murders her kids’ pet Easter chick in the kitchen or toss off a one liner like “A Challenge for Psychoanalysts — I dreamed that a fish was taking its clothes off and remained naked.”
In another column she basically asks “Hey guys, do you know what’s really interesting about Thoreau?” Where would you see that in today’s media landscape? (I never really liked Thoreau, and I found her angle persuasive.)
Bloggers, let’s use Clarice Lispector and her country’s weird newspaper genre as a call to arms. This is a short format, but it can hold anything we want. Narrow branding is so unappealing. We can be catty, familiar, obtuse, preachy, and write tiny little poems — and we can blame a magnificent woman who didn’t mind a little format surfing.