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Henceforth this shall be the page for archived readings, since it's getting a little unwieldy.
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UPCOMING MEETINGS:
Brooke Lanier Fine Art
820 S. 4th Street, Philadelphia, PA.
NO MEETING DECEMBER 20th.
Friday, January 3rd at 5 pm
Friday, January 17th ant 5 pm
PREVIOUS READINGS:
August 28th "Safe Passage" by Ramona Ausubel. This proved so popular that group members requested to read more of her work. We'll be reading other stories from the story collection, A Guide to Being Born.
September 6th Wassily Kandinsky Concerning the Spritual in Art
is available online, and I've also ordered a couple of copies at Brickbat Books for those who wish to read a printed book.
Written in 1910, this collection of short essays revolutionized thinking about modern art and has impacted generations of artists.
It's a short book, and there are lots of illustrations. It is broken into two parts, "About General Aesthetic," and "About Painting."
We will be discussing first two essays in the second section, “About Painting,” which are “The Psychological Working of Color” and “The Language of Form and Color.”These introduce ideas about the psychological impacts of color, the interplay between form and color, composition, harmony, and discord. Throughout the whole book, there is a fascination with the relationship between visual art and music.
For comparison to Kandinsky's ideas about color memory, read the brief essay below.
September 6th: Josef Albers, Color Recollection – Visual Memory
a brief essay from The Interaction of Color
"If one says “Red” (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.
Even when a certain color is specified which all listeners have seen innumerable times—such as the red of the Coca-Cola signs which is the same red all over the country—they will still think of many different reds.
Even if all the listeners have hundreds of reds in front of them from which to choose the Coca-Cola red, they will again select quite different colors. And no one can be sure that he has found the precise red shade.
And even if that round red Coca-Cola sign with the white name in the middle is actually shown so that everyone focuses on the same red, each will receive the same projection on his retina, but no one can be sure whether each has the same perception.
When we consider further the associations and reactions which are experienced in connection with color and the name, probably everyone will diverge again in many different directions.
What does this show? First it is hard, if not impossible, to remember distinct colors.This underscores the important fact that the visual memory is very poor in comparison with our auditory memory. Often the latter is able to repeat a melody heard only once or twice. Second, the nomenclature of color is most inadequate.Though there are innumerable colors—shades and tones—in daily vocabulary, there are only about 30 color names."
Reading for September 27th:
This is the 2nd story in the book A Guide to Being Born, a collection of stories which is organized by the phases of life. Everyone liked "Safe Passage," which is the first story. I ordered 6 copies of this book for group members to purchase at Brickbat Books. It is also available via Kindle and Audible, so the reading is accessible for visually impaired people.
Note: I picked this reading before reading it solely because it was the 2nd story in the book. Some people may find the subject matter challenging. It is written from the point of view of loving parents who are considering medical treatments that have serious ethical implications for the future of their severely disabled daughter.
If you prefer to have the story read to you, here is a video with some background about the story by the author.
Reading for October 4th:
The Fluted Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Y'all asked for October horror stories, so here you go! This piece is part of the collection Pump Six and Other Stories, which I highly recommend. Several of the stories in it were nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards. The entire series does an excellent job of world-building, describing morally complex characters from different strata of society in a dystopian future. This particular story centers around a young musician whose patron controls every aspect of her life.
Reading for October 18th:
by Joyce Carol Oates
I think the scariest horror stories are the ones that involve dynamics and events that feel familiar. If there's something plausible in the plot, it's way more terrifying than encountering a mythical beast. I'm very curious to hear if this story resonates with male-identifying people in the same way that female-identifying people connect with it.
Reading for November 1st:
"Against Access" by John Lee Clark
Essay published online in McSweeny's and in print in the collection of essays Touch the Future.
The author of this essay is a DeafBlind man and challenges concepts of accessibility that are devised by non-disabled people. He's a leader of the Protactile movement, a modification of ASL developed by DeafBlind people which includes touching as part of the conversation.
"When the word access comes up, it usually refers to tools or avenues that complement the sensory experience people already enjoy. Captions for movies, TV shows, and videos are excellent examples." In it, Clark poses some excellent questions about what makes the best, most useful form of translation, including examples of objective vs. subjective ASL and Protactile translators. This essay is very thought-provoking and has guided me while I recently wrote some audio descriptions of the show "Slow Motion" at Grounds for Sculpture.
I highly recommend the book, which I read as an e-book via the Philadelphia Public Library's Libby app using iPhone VoiceOver dictation software to turn it into an audiobook. The print copy is only available in hardcover and is $25.
Reading for November 15th:
"Shipping Out," by David Foster Wallace
The holidays are coming! Escape on a luxury cruise in 1996!
On a recent tip to Maine, I saw multiple cruise ships, which are like McMansions of the Sea, devoid of coherent architectural design or concern for aesthetics. It made me think about David Foster Wallace's article he wrote for Harper's about taking a week-long luxury crusise. It was republished under the title "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." This is an interesting look at all of the terrible and appealing things about the luxury cruise industry.
The link above is to a PDF, which is not accessible to screen readers. The following video is an amateur audiobook recording. Though the reader has a few mispronunciations early on and low production value, overall he does a good job of capturing the tone of the essay and it is easy to hear.
Readings for December 6th:
Our Favorite Poems
Poems Suggested by the Group:
"The Fly" by William Blake
"Forgetfulness" by Billy Collins
"Poems on Privacy" by John Kropf
"First They Came" by Martin Niemöller
"Her Kind" by Anne Sexton:
Brooke's Picks:
"Your Catfish Friend" by Richard Brautigan
"My Father's Coat" by Marc Kelly Smith (additional video)
Readings Suggested by Group Members:
Disclaimer: I have not personally vetted all of these readings yet.
They Were Horrible Cooks: Poems by Allison Whittenberg
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
The Story of the Eldest Princess by A.S. Byatt
Excerpt from There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories by Richard Matheson, who wrote scripts for the Twilight Zone.
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
In response to "Where are you going? Where have you been?"
Antarctica by Claire Keegan
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
"Clean Teen" by Francisco Gonzalez
Stuff I Read In Grad School and Want To Revisit
Are these too long, dense, eye-roll-inducing, or insufferable to read? I don't know. I'm putting it here partially so I remember to check those aspects before assigning segments of these essays as readings.
Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime by Immanuel Kant
"Learning from Las Vegas" aka the essay about the duck and the decorated shed by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi
"Avant Garde and Kitsch" by Clement Greenberg (amateur audiobook on YouTube)
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