Transport...

I'm sitting in my little South Philly efficiency... traffic passing by, glass of wine in hand at the end of the day... taking in a recent visit to Japonisme... Emily Dickinson's word... transport. Transported to wonder.

You really are finding your way, Lotusgreen, to something special here--the marriage of commentary, images, research.

And Clavdia Chauchat of Letters from a Librarian. In her most recent post, she reflects on what I think of as the aesthetics of process. Both of you illustrate brilliantly what can happen when an intelligent, creative sensibility begins to discover the possibilities of a new medium.

I think of Walter Benjamin... collector, connoisseur of intellectual bricolage--you two strike me as unanticipated descendants blossoming from seeds accidentally sown in the wake of his passing.

I can't open one of your latest offerings without being struck by the strangeness... how ephemeral--like dreams, but dreams that we have dreamt in common... hevel.. the Hebrew word translated in the King James as "vanity" ... mist... like the fog that dances over a lake at dawn, and vanishes by full light of day. There is something of the awareness of how elusive, how impermanent what your are making... in both of your web logs... and this makes them all the more...

full of wonder...

Wonder... the reward we will not know without pressing to the limits of what we can do and discover... wonder, that belongs, never to what we have won, what we have learned, what we have accomplished.. but always to what remains before us, beyond us... just beyond our reach.

... even the fashion.. .no, especially the inclusion of those images... which is perhaps why I'm holding your two web logs in a single thought--what is fashion... but a loveliness that will not last beyond the season, how we array ourselves in a beauty that must always vanish--an acknowledgment that whatever beauty is, it is nothing we can ever own, and never possess.