Who would you like to design something for?

I don’t have those kinds of fantasies.
I like to design something for institutions that did no harm and for personalities that I feel comfortable with.

~ Milton Glaser

MEARCSTAPA is an organization committed to the scholarly examination of monstrosity as an area of social and cultural interest to past and present societies. Our inter/trans/post/pre-disciplinary approach allows us to explore the significance of monstrosity across cultural, temporal, and geographic boundaries. We are interested in a multivalent approach using materials on monsters and monstrosity from literary, artistic, philosophical, and historical sources.

I will be in Chicago May 23-25 for the Pilcrow Lit Fest. If you’ll be there, too, get in touch.

I put on my anorak
and a cd of Dvorak.
A Jesuit
appeared in an apesuit.

~ Caroline Knox

My two favorite photos on flickr today are this one and this one. I’m all about the juxtapositions, apparently.

What I should be doing with myself is buying a pub, maybe this pub, and naming it “Plan B.” That, or “The Drunken Pony.”

It was an incredibly long time since anyone had been filled with wonder in Kadis. When the absurd became the normal they’d had to get used to being ashamed of feeling a sense of wonder. All their misery was no less wondrously natural and self-evident. God knows what might have happened long ago if they had had a sense of wonder. Those who don’t have a feeling of wonder live for the most part in serenity and feel secure in their state of trance. The act of waking up, any kind of wakening, consists of feeling of wonder and nothing else. Babies feel a sense of wonder when they are born and see their first daylight; and those who have lain paralyzed like a bird feigning death and are then cured feel a sense of wonder; and those who arise the dead feel a sense of wonder[…]

It can also happen that one single occasion of wonder can be a feeling so intense that it lasts a person for the rest of his life. he never again wants to raise his eyes even fleetingly. That was the case with Ädla, who on one occasion had been so filled with wonder that she thought she was going to die.

~ Torgny Lindgren, Light

When I was a boy, each Sunday, my father would take my brothers and me into the woods. Sometimes we hated it, of course. But I learned to love it eventually. We became great observers of the changing seasons. You must realize that each big or small city in Norway is surrounded by forests or mountains or the sea. There is no escaping nature.

So, when some reviewers suggest that I use the forest or the sea (as in To Siberia) as symbols, that is not so. It is simply there. I never consciously used a symbol in my life. What I really do not want to do when I write is what the romantics did, and that is to infuse the human soul into nature. You know, the sky is crying and all that stuff. I think it is the other way around. Nature seeps into us, changing the way we observe life. Humankind tries to avoid this, of course, by destroying nature.

~ Per Petterson

The chainsaw is a Jonesred. Not that I think Jonesred is the best brand, but they only use Jonesreds round here and the man I bought it from at the machine workshop in the village said they wouldn’t touch any other make if I brought him a broken chain and wanted it repaired. It’s not a new saw, but it has been overhauled recently and has a brand new chain, and the man seemed quite determined. So Jonesred rules here. And Volvo. I have never seen so many Volvos in one place; from the latest luxury models to old Amazons, more of the latter than the former, and I saw an old PV model, too, in front of the post office, in 1999. That ought to tell me something about this place, but I’m not sure what, except that we are quite close to Sweden, and to inexpensive spare parts. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

~ Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

I’m not actually that interested in wildlife or having encounters with wild animals. I am interested in how language constructs nature and how the stories we tell about nature — whether this be in the vein of “frontier gothic” or the ol’ chestnut — create patterns of meaning in which we position ourselves as humans in relationship to the wild. I’m not sure exactly what this position is. I think it shifts quite a bit according to our purposes in telling stories — the first poem of Bear Stories, let’s say, in comparison with one of the later poems is a good example of what I mean about shifting positions.

~ J’Lyn Chapman @ Bookslut