If only Blue Note Records had limited edition prints....

Found these, and others, over at an incredible Japanese website while researching images for the poet Major Jackson's favorite poetry covers. Click over and you'll find a treasure trove of Blue Note album covers, and others. Just an incredible resource. I'm dazzled, and longing for images big enough to frame.

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If it's crumbling....

While researching the covers that David Lehman chose for the feature on poetry cover design that I'm doing at the Best American Poetry blog, I came across this wonderful image that has absolutely nothing to do with Kafka, but turned up on the Google image search: "Kafka" "Castle." (It's from a NYTimes article in October '08.)

Don't you just love the cheerful curtains that turn a wreck of a room into something altogether cheerful?



PS: The image it comes to us from BLDG BLOG, a great looking architecture blog that now has its own book. Possibly not for those who come to Silk Felt Soil via the glam, effervescent likes of Oh Joy, perhaps.... but if you're interested in contemporary architecture and surrealist wit, take a look.

writing on book design at Best American Poetry this week

This ravishing smudgy birthday-card painting is by David Lehman, poet and founding editor of the Best American Poetry series.... click on the image to see it up close. so good. (notice how words always somehow sneak into poets' paintings......!)

I mention this today because I'm visiting as a guest blogger at the poet-painter's Best Am Po blog this week, writing about book jacket design, and interviewing poets on their favorite cover designs. so much fun!

come visit!

bacci,
p

the english for "elaichi gulab" is "cardamom rose"

if you would like to practice your hindi, this is a good place to start: "ek glass cardamom rose cocktail milega?" which means, "may i please have a glass of that stunning pink drink?"

neckware

I "Lova" this tie.

"I will really feel like celebrating when they are here on earth again"

I'm perennially fascinated by our human longing to see vastly, and the artist's interest in recording that longing. See here for another post on this.

Today, the New York Times has collected some incredible images of July 20, 1969 in honor of the 50 year anniversary of mankind's first walk on the moon. It is really moving to see and read of the exhilaration that people were experiencing that day. This woman's postcard, above, is one example: "The moon's surface is so interesting. I can't wait to see color pictures in Life magazine etc.... What a fantastic thing to see on live TV!... What a day!"

Someone else wrote in about what it was like to be a little boy at the time: "I was only 7, but I did not sleep the whole week! My eyes were trained on Neil Armstrong the whole time."


Photographs taken by the then-22-year-old photojournalist David Burnett; more about his prescient choice to take shots of the onlookers, here.