A Page From The Books Piled Up Next To My Bed

Jim Morrison, of The Doors, was brilliant. As a teenager he spent most of his time reading by himself. His room was filled with piles upon piles of books and the story goes that friends could pick up any one of those books and turn to a random page and read a paragraph and Jim would instantly be able to tell you what book it was and who the author was. I am no Jim Morrison but I am a book lover and as anyone who has been to my apartment will say..."Dude, you have a lot of books." Turn off your TV, quit surfing the internet, sit back have a cold one and dive into that summer reading....here is some of what is rotating in the piles next to my bed:

"We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition. So I beg you to recall in detail any times when you were alone and discover your exact response at those times. I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone, that you give up having pets and unnecessary companions. You will find that the fear that we have been taught is not just one fear but many different fears. When you discover what they are they will be overcome. Most people have never been alone enough to feel these fears. But even without the experiences of them they dread them. I suggest that people who like to be alone, who walk alone will perhaps be serious workers in the art field."

-from Agnes Martin's "Writings"