Sometimes it is good to just watch the clouds.
“
I am well aware not only of the importance of children — whom we naturally cherish and who we also embody our hopes for the future — but also of the importance of what we provide for them in the way of art; and I realize that we are competing with a lot of other cultural influences, some of which beguile them in false directions.
Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe, and unlike science, which often gives us the illusion of understanding things we really do not understand, it helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life. Art also stimulates the adventurousness and the playfulness that keep us moving in a lively way and that lead us to useful discovery.
” —William Steig’s Caldecott Award Acceptance Speech, 1970, for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble.
Via our friends at The Wooden Wagon, and found in full at Letters of Note.
And last but most importantly, Monaco’s ‘Saga of Cactus Flats’. The poster refuses to provide embed code….. so jump to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyygvy7aMro
“You have tracks inside a city. You build from wherever your center is. Wherever you sit your ass, wherever you put your drink, the place you eat in or a house or an apartment, you build your tracks from here to there. If you’re going shopping, you find your stores; you usually even go to those stores a certain way. You follow certain tracks through the city. You might even work it into a sense of birth. Constantly, you’re moving toward something, but you always return to wherever your womb is, whether it’s McSorley’s bar or you know. Just put me on Second Avenue; I can hang on. I’m driving down this ugly street again and like I know where I am. I know where the parking places are, if there are any, or what streets they’re likely to be on. And it’s get out of the car and get into a subway and go where you’re going—that’s much more sensible. But you immediately move into a whole new set of grooves, your head turned around, and you’re moving places. You have friends here. It’s easier to walk over to Carmine Street or to Van Dam Street than it is to take any kind of transportation whatsoever from the Lower East Side. You have a fifteen or twenty-minute walk, but it’s much simpler than taking any transportation. And not only that, you can vary your routes. There are all sorts of channels inside a city, ways of doing things, going places….” —
Paul Blackburn, interviewed on 25 May 1971 by L.S. Dembo in Contemporary Literature v. XIII n. 2. Read in full.
