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May 25, 2012

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I do keep everything: journals, notebooks, scraps of paper, sketchbooks, rough drafts of all sorts. My graduate training taught me how important all those things might be to later scholars. But going back through them--that's the part I never quite manage, and certainly not on a regular basis.

Thanks for the reminder!

Years ago i started keeping moleskin journals,writing down quotes and poems i found i liked, excerpts from books and magazines, and journal entries usually on trips. I have found if i am mulling over a problem, usually a friendship or relationship issue, i sometimes write down the problem which sometimes somehow makes it manageable or a solution presents itself.I take one with me as moleskins are easy to carry to lots of places like pubs and restaurants and refer to it if i am sitting by myself.Its a blessing

I find that my own sketches and journals always look better with age. I think I'm so "glad to see them" as a reminder of lost time, I look at them far less critically than I did when I made them.

It's like seeing an old friend: you're so happy to see the person, you don't obsess over the flaws.

I never, never dump anything remotely perceivable as creative. I still have files full of hair-raisingly awful poetry and prose from my teens and way beyond. There's a palpable continuity embodying traceable change and growth across the decades that is invaluable in these later years. And how right you were, Beth, to keep this drawing!

I,too save stuff of all kinds -- drawings, started and abandoned journals, old exams. I find that looking at old exams can be surprising and sometimes kind of sad when I ask myself in astonishment, "Did I really know all that?"

Your drawing is full of energy, but I find that energy in general in your work which is one of the things that makes it so appealing.

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Who was Cassandra?


  • In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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