“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.  That, indeed, is nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.  Millet had done a hundred sketches of peasants sewing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable.  All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying and sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves, for one that was better and more universal.”

Willa Cather
 

Pretty Cool! -- MV

I’m not a violent person, but given the chance I’d hang the men who invented the Internet and the leaf blower.  Subtract these two things from my life and my days would be a marvel of efficient, peaceful productivity. 

Instead the World Wide Web sounds its siren call the moment my mind butts up against a sticking point.  One little click and I’m caressed by endlessly seductive distractions.  No need to toil Odysseus.  Join us.  Stay a while.  Stay longer. 

By the time I stop clicking through Yahoo’s top ten destinations for a mid-winter get-away, ten years have passed and I’m still staring at the same paragraph I clicked away from, staring so hard and so long that after another ten years the words might order themselves like hard working ants back into whole thoughts.

But wouldn’t you know it.  The moment thoughts start to form the leaf blower man flicks his switch.  Goodbye ants.  Goodbye thought. 

Seriously, how is the leaf blower an improvement over the rake?  I get the Internet.  It has its uses.  But even the leaf blower man must prefer a rake to that roaring contraption strapped to his back.  There aren’t leaves enough to justify that sound.  What harm are those leaves doing anyway?  If they are such a nuisance, then, (forgive me mom….you know I don’t really mean it!), but cut down the tree: a crash, bang, one-shot-job with a chainsaw.  Imagine how much fuel we’d save in the long run, and any depletion in ozone would be surely be balanced by considerable loss of noise pollution. 

Then, you see, then I could get back to work.   Then I would be able finish this paragraph, line, scene, story...

*Cartoon Above: Copyright © 2009 BECK*Cartoons | All rights reserved
http://newtoonsontheblog.info/?tag=man&page=12

Washington Nugget: Huge piece of gold up for bid--SF Gate


Yes, there’s still gold in them hills, still speculators and miners, still a few who get rich quick on the strength of luck, or divine intervention.  One hundred and sixty-three years ago, another gold strike created a migratory frenzy that opened the west and laid bare a wagon and then a railroad track across the continent.  It was the hope of instant riches that first drove the mostly young men and a few women to California.  They would come, find their fortunes, return to New York, to France, to China with new futures defined by their effort instead of by the social standing of their fathers.  A great many never returned.  Some died in route; others, only momentarily disillusioned by their failure to find that lucky strike, that motherlode, settled into the satisfying work of cultivation, and up grew the farms and ranches of the San Joaquin valley.  Long after alluvial, or river gold, had been snatched, people kept coming to California, lured by the audacious optimism that still, even in these horrid economic circumstances seems to rise from the very earth.