Meryl Streep

I come to every project thinking I don't know anything ... It serves me to begin blank and to try to forget the 900 other movies, and my reputation, and the training, or whatever horrible obstruction there is to creating a new character. I put myself in a state of anxiety - to become blank and to start by starting.
-Meryl Streep

Moose Antlers

. . . help them hear.

Nature

Lily, Bill and I were walking along the pond on Monday when we saw four baby wood-ducklings drop out of a huge tree and land smack in the middle of the road. They waddled around, stunned. Bill guided them across the street, and mama duck, responding to the peeping, appeared from behind a house. They all made it safely to the pond.

Then on Wednesday we were walking Lily along the pond upstream of the causeway, and we saw a painted turtle on the path. Lily was very intrigued, and we had to hold her back. Bill picked the turtle up, and we saw that she had been laying eggs. They were like large white jellybeans in a hole she had dug in the sandy soil with her back legs. So we put her back so she could finish her work.

William Blake

Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
―William Blake

Modern Times

A painting of mine called Modern Times has been accepted into a juried show called Statewide: Works From RISD Rhode Island Alumni. The show runs from Thursday, June 14, through Sunday, July 1st, at the Jamestown (RI) Art Center. There will be a reception Thursday evening, June 14th, from 6:30 until 9 PM. Come and celebrate!

You can see the painting here.

By the way, check out the work of poet Nin Andrews. She has been creating a series of writings inspired by my paintings, including Modern Times.

John Muir

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
-John Muir

I Dreamed

I dreamed I was visiting a sculptor friend. I was wearing a long brown skirt and I was standing outside. I noticed the bottom of my skirt was burning. It had caught fire from a nearby candle. I was alarmed but managed to stop the burning by dipping my flaming hem into a pail of water. My friend asked me if I would like to meet his friends from the Dominican Republic. Three people with exquisitely black skin showed up and sat in aluminum beach chairs. They were each wearing a small live alligator on top of their heads. Then it was a party and I saw a friend of mine lift her four-year-old daughter up by her two long braids. I thought, oh no! She's living through her daughter!

Thomas Moore

Simplifying the externals allows us to create a rich inner and outer life. A cluttered existence may keep us busy, but busyness doesn't mean that we are fully engaged in what we are doing.
-Thomas Moore, Original Self

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Under every deep a lower deep opens.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wendy Wasserstein

Maybe producers as well as audiences need to be reminded that attending the theater is an inimitably life-affirming experience, especially during difficult times. In England, for instance, most of the theaters famously remained open during the Blitz. In 1941, Noël Coward wrote ''Blithe Spirit'' in a week, and it ran longer than any of his previous plays. There is nothing like a catharsis in times of high anxiety. There is also nothing as humane as sharing a laugh with strangers in the dark.
-Wendy Wasserstein, Where You and I Become Us, NYT Spring Theater

Doc Watson

Doc's first guitar was a Stella, which he got at age 13. He called it "one of those ten dollar guitars - a pretty good thing to learn on, but hard to fret as a barbed wire fence." (Gary Govert, Carolina Lifestyle, August 1983). At 17, he purchased a Sears Silvertone mail-order guitar with money he earned chopping wood with his brother. A year later, he traded up to a Martin D-28 with money earned by street busking.

Robert Benchley

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.
-Robert Benchley

Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other.
-Robert Benchley

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.
-Robert Benchley

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.
-Robert Benchley

We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.
-Robert Benchley

We call ourselves a free nation, and yet we let ourselves be told what cabs we can and can't take by a man at a hotel door, simply because he has a drum major's uniform on.
-Robert Benchley

Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?
-Robert Benchley

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.
-Robert Benchley

Sheri Moskowitz Noga

As our economy struggles to recover and many people learn to live with less, we are offered an opportunity to develop a more normal range of wants and a deeper appreciation of what we have. The insanity of excess has caused many adults to feel unfulfilled as they get caught up in the cycle of working to buy things they don't need, possessions that will not bring true happiness and satisfaction. Many people have bought into the lie that more is better and are raising their children with that same empty notion.

...in teaching your child to be grateful and responsible, you will equip them with the tools to create a meaningful life. It is through our sense of accomplishment and connection with others that our eyes are opened to all the world has to offer. Whether getting a paycheck at the end of a hard week's work, walking through a forest, or sharing a meal with a friend, it is by bring present to ones self and another that life take on meaning.
-Sheri Moskowitz Noga

Audio Moiré Patterns

Woke at 3 am to the sound of banging. It was incorporated into my dreams until I woke up and realized it sounded like someone was sledge-hammering down a door in the neighborhood.

Then, wide awake I kept hearing sirens and when I would turn off the fan there was complete silence. This happens every summer, I hear what I call audio moiré patterns from my fan. Speed two seems to prevent the imagined sirens.

Natalie Goldberg

I've never met a writer who wanted to be anything else. They might bitch about something, they're writing or about their poverty, but they never say they want to quit. They might stop for a few months, but those who have bitten down on the true root do not abandon it, and if they do abandon it they become crazy, drunk, or suicidal.

Writing is elemental. Once you have tasted its essential life, you cannot turn from it without some deep denial and depression. It would be like turning from water. Water is in your blood. You can't go without it.

Sometimes people say to me, "I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents," and on and on.

I say to them, "There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week."
-Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind

Potato Salad

This recipe is a 33 year old favorite. It was in a little yellow cookbook that came with my first Presto pressure cooker. I still have my beloved cooker and I still make this potato salad a few times a year. It is good hot, cold, and lukewarm. Double the recipe - you'll want leftovers. This is always a hit at summer picnics too.

4 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon prepared mustard
1/2 teaspoon celery seed (optional)
1/4 cup vinegar (I like red wine vinegar)
1/2 cup water
1 large onion, chopped
6 large potatoes diced (red potatoes or Yukon gold are my favorites)
Add a few ribs of chopped celery and raisins if you have them handy.

Add ingredients to cooker, mix well, close cover and cook 3-5 minutes with the pressure regulator rocking gently. Cool cooker at once. If you don't have a pressure cooker I'm sure you can bake this in a Dutch oven or cook it on the stove top in a heavy lidded pot. Save the leftover flavorful liquid and keep it mixed in with the potatoes. REFRIGERATE for best taste.

Rollo May

What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to the world; thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history.
-Rollo May from The Courage to Create

Cheap Travel

Listening to French talk radio.

Soup

by Charles Simic

Take a little backache
Melt some snow from the year of your birth
Add the lump in your throat
And the fear of the dark

Instead of oil a pinch of chill
But let it be northern
Instead of parsley
Swear loudly into it

Then stir it with the night
Until its fins and penny-nails
Are blended.
* * *
On what shall we cook it?

On something like a cough
On the morning star about to fade
On the whisker of a black cat
On an oval locket with a picture of Jesus
On the nipple of a sleeping woman

Let's cook it until we raise
That heavy autumnal cloud
From its bowels
Even if it takes a hundred years.
* * *
What do you think it will taste like?

Like barbed wire, like burglar's tools
Like a word you'd rather forget
The way the book tastes to the goaty
Who is chewing and spitting its pages
Also like the ear of a girl you are about to undress
Also like the rim of a smile

In the twentieth century
We arouse the sun's curiosity
By whistling for the soup
To be served.
* * *
What in the world shall we eat it with?

With a shoe that left last night
To baptize itself in the rain
With two eyes that quarrel in the same head
With a finger which is the divining-rod
Searching for its clearest streak
With a hat in which the thoughts
Grind each other into black pepper

We'll dive into the soup
With a grain of salt between our teeth
And won't come up
Until we learn its song.
* * *
And this is what we'll have on the side:

Lust on halfshells with lemon wedges
Mushrooms stuffed with death and almonds
The bread of memory, a black bread
Blood sausages of yes and no

A hiccup in aspic with paprika
Cold wind fried in onions
A roast of darkest thoughts
Young burp with fish ears
Green apples glazed with envy

We'll wash it all down
With the ale brewed from the foam
Gathered at the mouths
Of our old pursuers:
The mad, god-sent bloodhounds

Julia Butterfly Hill

As I started to picture the trees in the storm, the answer began to dawn on me. The trees in the storm don't try to stand up straight and tall and erect. They allow themselves to bend and be blown with the wind. They understand the power of letting go. Those trees and those branches that try too hard to stand up strong and straight are the ones that break. Now is not the time for you to be strong, Julia, or you, too, will break.
-Julia Butterfly Hill