Books I have enjoyed recently

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

This book spoke so directly to my current thoughts, feelings, experience. I found it incredibly moving. 

Here are two passages. One on bisexuality:

One on motherhood at this moment:

Film from Inverness - November 2021

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (1899-1944)

Gunta Stölzl (1897-1983)

Bauhaus weaver

A Proustian experience of green

It is fitting that on Father's Day I found a t-shirt (which I bought) that is of a green so exact and evocative of a green t-shirt my father had from his time as a student in Chicago, which he later gave to me and which I wore until it was full of holes. It was incredibly soft, made even softer by the years of use and thinness it has acquired as a result. 

We often think of smell or taste as the sense that most often acts as a catalyst for a nostalgia or recollection so vivid and visceral that it evades awareness or access, intellect or contemplation, or a considered approach to memory. I have had this experience most affectively through the happenstance collision of two smells that bind together: a certain kind of paper towel made of specific fibres and an equally specific soap, found always in a public bathroom. This olfactory combination takes me right back to the bathroom in my kindergarten, which I can still picture.

To have this Proustian experience not via smell or taste but rather, via colour, and then to consider this subsequently, further brings me back to being a scholar of art history, when I would not infrequently spend time thinking about colour intentionally, expansively, phenomenologically, aesthetically, politically, emotionally, and so on. I'm thinking of Malevich, Josef Albers, Marlow Moss, Agnes Martin - there are more.

Carla Badiali (1907-1992)

Mario Radice (1898-1987)

Felice Casorati (1883-1963)

Aldo Rossi exhibition at Museo del Novecento