You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
JAMES BALDWIN
Ephemera
A commonplace book for michaelhughstewart.com
“The flying Dragon is somewhat troublesome to compose…”
From The Mysteries of Nature and Art (1634) — an illustrated manual for building devices relating to water works, fireworks, drawing, painting + miscellaneous experiments “confusedly intermixed”: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-mysteries-of-nature-and-art
Chris Marker’s workbook for the creation of La Jetée (1962).
Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words (2015)
dir. Stig Björkman (Documentary)
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark”
…
Note:
There seems to be a consensus about Henry Holiday being the creator of the famous map of the Bellman, the “OCEAN-CHART.” That probably is wrong.
What can memory be in these terrible times?
Only instruction. Not a dwelling.
Or if you must dwell:
The sweet smell of weeds then.
The sweet smell of weeds now.
from “Weeds” by Diane Seuss
Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
Vladimir Nabokov
[“Speak On, Memory”]
Holograph notes on index cards, ca. 1969
Berg Collection
Student explaining to me (after getting 55) that when reading a novel (Ulysses in this case) he likes to skip “passages and pages” so as “to get his own idea, you know, about the book and not be influenced by the author.”