No.134

I had planned for this newsletter a week ago, but work interrupted girl and so here we are. The reasons for delay are mainly good ones, spoken of a little below, but time is still clipped and therefore a couple of additional things will appear next time instead of now (namely some notes on illustration process as the photographs taken to accompany this section were not suitable on account of strange evening light).

For now, now.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

Two Tuesdays ago I had a call with an organiser from 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, a Tokyo gallery-museum that will be displaying a collection of illustrations from my book Lost in Translation during their ‘Translations: Understanding Misunderstanding’ exhibition, which opens October 16th, and this is very wonderful.

I then spoke with my literary agent this Tuesday, having sent over a new book proposal the day before, and we both think there is something very inherently good about this one—for me, it feels like a good that has been missing for a while. The idea grew from a note I scribbled down in the middle of the night the week before:

Everything I could find that was beautiful

And now I am less grieving for something to wrap paint around. I’m making some edits and alterations to the proposal, to nudge it towards what we thought would be the better direction, and then that will be it, or it will be something.

BOOKS THAT I RETURN TO:

It is somewhat difficult to describe the work of Maira Kalman. A person quite unlike any other person, her colourful paintings have a tendency of sitting down exactly where you were planning on sitting yourself, making a sweet kind of sense in doing so. I return to many of her works when in different moods, but this book is the most-returned-to.

Almost entirely defying any sort of artificial categorisation, The Principles of Uncertainty is a personal narrative, a gentle but pressing investigation of life and its meaning, and within it Kalman manages always to be irresistible:

Many times it can feel pointless to try and explain why things mean something to us—although I personally do not think of books as things so much as paper hymns—because it can be like trying to explain why the sun means something to you. I do not include this ‘Books That I Return To’ section in order to send you immediately in their direction, but rather so that you might know a fraction more of me, and in turn perhaps a fraction more of you if these books do end up resting in your hands.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Peculiarly beautiful drawings by Claudia Schmid, which were brought to my attention by a very dear person (the last drawing quite perfectly describes the relationship between me and my planet of feelings lately).

I finished reading Maria Popova’s yellow-brick-book Figuring this week. Not having realised the depth of my trench after five hundred or so pages, it was a fair surprise to find myself submerged in a historical-weight emotion after the last two chapters. The fingers of my left hand were a nice aching from the holding-up, but my mind ached more, with the sheer chance of everything, with the silencing of people, with how different everything could have been, and aching with the audacity of today.

At some point during the last pages are these two lines, clipped from a poem by Adrienne Rich:

“No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen”

And that, I suppose, is it.

The end.