Art Wortd Coop

For constructing any work of art you need some principle of repetition or recurrence: that's what gives you rhythm in music and pattern in painting. A literature, we said, has a lot to do with identifying the human world with the natural world around it, or finding analogies between them. In nature the most obvious repeating or recurring feature is the cycle. The sun travels across the sky into the dark and comes back again; the seasons go from spring to winter and back to spring again; water goes from springs or fountains to the sea and back again in rain. Human life goes from childhood to death and back again in a new birth. A great many primitive stories and myths, then, would like to attach themselves to this cycle which stretches like a backbone through the middle of both human and natural life.

Mythologies are full of young gods or heroes who go through various successful adventures and then are deserted or betrayed and killed, and then come back to life again, suggesting in their story the movement of the sun across the sky into the dark or the progressions of the seasons through winter and spring. Sometimes they're swallowed by a huge sea monster or killed by a boar; or they wander in a strange dark underworld and then fight their way out again . . . Usually there's a female figure in the story.

Northrope Frye, from "The Educated Imagination"

I know this feeling very well--even now, I have been experiencing it lately: everything seems to be ready for the writing--for fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that is impossible to invent. And it's impossible to begin without it.

Tolstoy
(qtd. Viktor Shklovsky in The Energy of Delusion)
(bold mine)

All his life, at every moment, he possessed the faculty of seeing phenomena in the detached finality of each separate instant, in perfectly distinct outline, as we see only on rare occasions, in childhood, or on the crest of an all-renewing happiness, or in the triumph of a great spiritual victory.

To see things like that, our eye must be directed by passion. For it is passion that by its flash illuminates an object, intensifying its appearance.

Such passion, the passion of creative contemplation, Tolstoy constantly carried with him. It was precisely in its light that he saw everything in its pristine freshness, in a new way, as if for the first time. The authenticity of what he saw differs so much from what we are used to that it may appear strange to us. But Tolstoy was not seeking that strangeness, was not pursuing it as a goal, still less did he apply it to his works as a literary method.

Pasternak, from People and Situations (1956)
(qtd. by Richard Pevear in the Introduction to War and Peace)

Today I am working on Stumpy-Joe and a few other projects. When this adorable bulldog project came in I just laughed out loud. What a name!

I started thinking about a handful of the cool pet names we have seen over the years.

I'll list just a few here:

Bogey
Jean Clawed
Zaxby
Xena
Izzy
Tonka & Tini
Sirloin Theodore of Pugsylvania
Artimus
Kharisma
Ding-A-Ling
Kung Fu Fu

My own personal history of pets and names:
Juno ( white kitty of my teen years )
Demos & Phoebos ( 2 black kitties from college ...lived a long time)
Atticus ( First Scottie, husband named this special pup)
Nessie ( 2nd Scott ... I named this sweet girl)
Ajax ( 3rd Scott ... named with husband)
Big Tommy ( 4rth Scott name slightly adjusted from adoption ...we added the "Big")
Pixel ( 5th Scott ... I named her, but it did not take ...we call her Picky or Pickle)