how essential is femininity

"The most signal omission of feminist art history to date is our failure to analyse why modern art history ignores the existence of women artists. Why it has become silent about them, why it has consistently dismissed as insignificant those it did acknowledge. To confront these questions enables us to identify the unacknowledged ideology with informs the practice of this discipline and the values which decided its classification and interpretations of all art."

Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker, "Critical Stereotypes: The essential femininity or how essential is femininity" Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology, 1981

When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still

"Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting."

Willa Cather, "Book 2, The Hired Girls: Chapter VIII" My Antonia

I knew that I should never be a scholar

"Although I admired scholarship in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and the people of my own infintesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the plough against the sun."

Willa Cather, "Book 3, Lena Lingard: Chapter 1," My Antonia

bridled by caution

"On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their store windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all."

Willa Cather, "Book 2, The Hired Girls: Chapter XII" My Antonia

The Perfect Day

The Perfect Day

You wake with
no aches
in the arms
of your beloved
to the smell of fresh coffee
you eat a giant breakfast
with no thought
of carbs
there is time to read
with a purring cat on your lap
later you walk by the ocean
with your dog
on this cut crystal day
your favorite music and the sun
fill the house
a short delicious nap
under a fleece throw
comes later
and the phone doesn't ring
at dusk you roast a chicken,
bake bread, make an exquisite
chocolate cake
for some friends
you've been missing
someone brings you an
unexpected present
and the wine is just right with the food
after a wonderful party
you sink into sleep
in a clean nightgown
in fresh sheets
your sweetheart doesn't snore
and in your dreams
and old piece of sadness
lifts away

- Alice N. Persons

"like my heart's going to cave in"

"Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in."
Ricky Fitts, American Beauty

Ordinary Human Life

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
George Eliot (or Mary Ann Evans)

Marriage

"The great secret of a successful marriage is to treat all disasters as incidents."
Harold Nicolson

Maison Ikkoku

"The woman I love burns with jealously, leaps to conclusions, cries, and turns to ice... but when she laughs... the world is mine."
Yusaku Godai, Maison Ikkoku

"Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!" France, 1968, situationist inspired graffiti

Notes on Site Specificity

"Significantly, the appropriation of site-specific art for the valorization of urban identities comes at a time of a fundamental cultural shift in which architecture and urban planning, formerly the primary media for expressing a vision of the city, are displaced by other media more intimate with marketing and advertising." - Miwon Kwon, "One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity"

Feminist Postmoderism

“Ultimately, the task for a feminist postmodernism or a postmodern feminism is to remain self-aware and self-critical – to be theory, in the strongest definition of the term. Theory, however, as we know, is notoriously susceptible to putting on airs, to assuming master status, and beyond that, to erasing its own tenuous location.”

"Why Are There No Great Black Artists?"

"As we all know, the mind, even the black mind, is not made up of just literacy and intellect. It has not finished its work or fulfilled itself even if it can sing like Mahalia Jackson or dance like John Bumbles. It goes on fucking us up and throwing us back, and it must be listened to."
Michelle Wallace, "Afterword: "Why Are There No Great Black Artists?" The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture"