so totally sick and rad.com

You must MUST check out this dude’s work.

Ron van der Ende

It’s so sick I can’t even talk about it. I’ll never do it justice.

I used to struggle with stuff that was too nostalgic / sentimental (ironic because I am so much both).

The peeps at Uppercase Gallery threw this flickr set out there and it totally resonates with me.

I found an old mechanical pencil sharpener the other day – the grey cast ironish and aluminium [sic] kind that mounts on the wall and cranks – and I stole it. As soon as I saw the thing I dredged up the smell of freshly sharpened pencils from the meatlocker of my mind.

One of the most influential books I have read is The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.   Bachelard dissects the influence of space — in particular, our childhood spaces / home — on memory, perception, and the subconscious.

It’s pretty intriguing.

Some Bachelard quotes:

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

…when we discover a nest it takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had. For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.

I also just read this passage from Martha Grimes’ book Foul Matter

Imagine how you’d feel if I were, say, an oncologist telling you you only had a couple of months to live. You’d be shocked out of your mind not just by death but by the realization you’d squandered a big part of your life. Think about that. It’s my theory that none of us really believes he’s going to die. We think we believe it, given all the evidence, but we really don’t. Freud said a man can’t imagine his own death. Probably, we think there’s something more due us, and maybe that’s the reason immortality is such a popular idea. What we really want is another chance, and we think we’re going to get it–hte chance to straighten out everything, to get it right.