merry measure

 

A postal gift dating to sometime between 1932 and 1958, when 

for 26 years - ! - the rate for letters was three cents an ounce. 

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across sunset

Mallowy red in the night sky tonight, just before dark, brilliantly offset by what can only be described as a stripe of pistachio green.  I can think of any number of abstract painters who might have longed to re-create such a juxtaposition -- it was gone within seconds.¹

Kenneth Noland, Across Center (1966) ²

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                                            ¹  William Boyd, Any Human Heart, (Penguin, 2010), 456.  First published 2002.
                                            ²  Twenty feet across, according to Rosalind Krauss in her early 1966 essay, "Allusion and 
                                            Illusion in Donald Judd," reprinted in Perpetual Inventory (MIT Press, 2010), 99-100. 

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poppy day

Allusively red.  Perhaps a hybrid red-for-remembrance and white-for-peace poppy.  Photographed in Hampstead this past June.

On Armistice Day I always find myself thinking about living memory, longevity, and the wavering personal connections humanity has to its own history.  It is amazing to me to be alive in the same world as veterans of the first world war -- to share time with people who attest to the incredible length life can achieve, when given the chance.

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~ T w o    m i n u t e s ~

• Two minutes' silence on the UK singles charts.  At guardian.co.uk
• Cognitive visualization of the structure and progression of time.  At scienceblogs.com

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