I reckon — when I count at all — Hair Shirt Chronicles

Reading prison novel in a blizzard. Were I a twitterer, I would have pithy quotes to send out into the ether. Instead, into this echo chamber, striding like a colossus in my own mind, go I.

A section from emmanuel carrere’s the kingdom reduces the gospels to the words Jesus spoke directly, which appear in both Luke and Mark. Having read them twice last night and again this morning, it’s possible I know not a single Christian.

Maps and art about maps predominate in my ever-revolving canon. Qui Zhijie and his total art work are on the playlist on a weekly if not daily basis. Last night I revisited a monograph on Jasper Johns by Michael Crichton (yes, that one) and came across this quote from Kozloff:

[the artist is] playing with the notion of measurement, in which the locked-in, diagrammatic in-scale dimensions of map images are contrasted with the virtually gratuitous dimensions of painterly gestures, the two being mutually usurped.

Crichton goes on to gloss the point:

Another way to say it is to observe that the artist produces an isolation between the map (an abstraction representing something) and the painting of the map (an abstraction representing an abstraction) in such a way that multiple ways of looking are simultaneously apparent.