102 books
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“
Doesn't have to be useful,' my mother pressed. 'Art means not having to be useful! In West Africa, for example, a hundred years ago, there were some village women, they were making these strangely shaped pots, impractical pots, and the anthropologists couldn't understand what they were doing, but that was because, they, the scientists, were expecting a quote unquote "primitive" people to make only useful things, when actually they were making the pots just for their beauty - no different from a
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― Swing Time
― Swing Time
“
...that, to repeat what I heard for years and years and suspect you’ve been hearing over and over, yourself, something’s meaning is nothing more or less than its function. Et cetera et cetera et cetera. Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? What does she use now? No. What she did with me--I must have been eight, or twelve, who remembers--was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more
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― The Broom of the System
― The Broom of the System
