Diary pages from LouLou in England

I love these images of diary pages, from the website of Louise Best, aka LouLou, who loves (and makes) books and lives behind a hedge in a village in England.

She has a website here, and a blogspot there, and even a shop over at Etsy. Take a look...LouLou loves yoga, too, and has written some long blog letters from a trip to India. She's the adoring mother of two daughters.

We are both fans of the Garden and Cosmos show, put together by the brilliant people at the Freer and Sackler Gallery on the Mall in Washington, DC. My dear friend Deb, who works there (toiling long hours in the warren of museum tunnels under the Mall) found LouLou for me...a birthday gift from a fellow Leo.

There's a photo of postcards LouLou/ Louise has made, inspired by the glorious Garden and Cosmos. And the lovely diary pages offer mind mapping of yet another kind.
LouLou has a nice name for this place where you can sometimes locate fellow blogartists – the "interwonderweb"....indeed!

"Garden and Cosmos" Embellished Clothespins

Consider the humble wooden clothespin: one of the great little inventions. I got pulled into a new little crafting obsession with this stumbled-upon tutorial from Pin and Paper (who endearingly describes herself as "mother, crafter, knitter, reader, writer, procrastinator. Sarcastic, self-deprecating, exhausted yet inspired"). It's very easy, and before I knew it we had a crowd of embellished clothespins, perfect as magnets or an alternative to paper clips.

My first batch was made with beautiful postcards from my friend Deb, from the Garden and Cosmos show at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C., where she works. Here's a glimpse. I loved seeing that show last November, and the images continue to haunt and inhabit – now they are hanging from their own clothespins. The photos aren't fabulous, but the clothespins really are!

25 Random Things: Funding for the Arts

I feel very passionate about the need for funding for the arts.

Mike Wilkerson, who used to manage Ragdale with writer Deborah Galyan, now teaches arts management at American University, writing blogposts to a site called 1/2 Mile Outside the Beltway. There is a sequence of messages there now on the subject of arts funding, including this one from February 12th:

We need new arguments

The elimination of the arts from the stimulus bill -- and the chorus of "who needs the arts" that followed even on liberal sites like Huffington Post and Daily Kos, suggests that we have so spectacularly failed to make our case that the arts are important. The popular imagination doesn't buy the "arts create jobs" concept, even though it's true. People generally understand roads, rails and buildings as ways to employ people. They support (sort of) education, especially when the President talks about crumbling school buildings and the need for science labs.

One of my students last night rather brilliantly linked the beleaguered cause of the arts to the sciences, which, under the previous administration and in the chorus of global warming-deniers, has become a somewhat partisan cause. Who knew that the search for objective truth would become a liberal cause, when even many if not most scientists aren't liberals?

Artists, academics, humanists, scientists -- we're all in the same boat, drifting further and further from the mainstream's perception. Obama's election helped, but we have to row this boat on our own, not wait for his administration's solutions. How shall we speak up for the arts?

You'll find an interesting comment at Mike's site by poet Lyle Daggett, who writes a blog about poetry called A Burning Patience. Lyle brings together a remarkable collection of voices and views – you'll find an extensive list of links to other writers and magazines at his site, as well as timely posts about specific poems, events and publications.

The image above comes from Funding the Arts, the brainchild of Joanne Deutch. One of the best ways to help fund the arts? Buy small press books, tickets to plays, pay attention to what is happening at the margins of our culture. To keep the arts alive, we need better arguments, better critics, better infrastructures for their survival, and audiences that are engaged.