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A set of Monday links to get the bells jingling

By Barry Johnson
December 19, 2011
Culture, Featured

Vaclav Havel and the Velvet Revolution/Credit: Blue Mass Group

Today’s harvest of links all appeared this weekend on the ArtsWatch Facebook page. Which you can join!

Vaclav Havel, the playwright/president is an ArtsWatch hero — integrity, courage, intelligence, compassion. In memory of his death Sunday, here’s a link to excerpts from his book “Disturbing the Peace,” thanks to the New York Review of Books.

Still not convinced that the arts are important to kids at the most basic levels? A little ammo from Australia

And speaking of Australia: ‎”…The watershed was a Japanese watercolour at risk/Of running off the canvas,the big water carrying its muted palette/Down to the sea and taking a good part of me with it…”

That’s from the poem “Walking Underwater,” by Australian poet Mark Tredennick, which won the Montreal International Poetry Prize, and it’s about hiking in the Columbia River Gorge (presumably with Kim Stafford), among other things. Our place starts to make better sense to us the more we talk about it… Here’s the poem in full.

Since Bob Hanson’s death on Friday, we’ve been pointing everyone to a wonderful interview he did with artist Anne Johnson for PNCA’s online magazine: “When I taught drawing, one of the things we dealt with was structure and seeing relationships between forms that are more or less “correct.” I was showing students how to put together a form, that it’s a series of relationships based on landmarks on the page you can refer to once you get a few down. In my recent drawings, I’ve really gotten away from that. This is nothing I’m thinking about logically, it’s just something that happens.”

Our anticipation for Fertile Ground reached new heights, once we saw the list of projects… and those were just the words!

Today in logograms: Poets & their obsessive use of ampersands.

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