This image is from the residential page of Ilse Crawford's design website, Studioilse. If I were a room, this is the room I would be: filled with light and shades of green and books and treasures. And a hammock. Crawford's work and philosophy is featured in the eighth installment of Netflix's new series, Abstract: The Story of Design, the first exposure I've had to this artist whose approach to design inverts the poetic logic of the Old English term for the body, the bānhūs ‎(“the body, the chest, breast”, literally “the bone-house”). Her spaces are meant to imbue the sensual body with well-being, with nourishment. And at the heart of her creative process is her studio's "materials library," a catalog of textiles and stone, skins and colors, where objects are brought in relation to each other. I couldn't help but think of an externalized creative process model that emphasizes curatorial judgement (which requires access) and a facility with stringing words together to form constellations with Calderesque proportions. 

In the pages of Margaret Anderson's The Little Journal, the poet Mina Loy's ekphrastic poem "Brancusi's Golden Bird" appeared. I was reminded of it this week when I read about Princeton’s Blue Mountain Project making available an entire digital library of modernist avant-garde literary journals. I’ve only just begun to imagine all of the ways I could use these in classes. For now it’s enough to peruse from it and from Brown University’s similar collection that includes Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, in whose pages I discovered how Loy used fragments of language from Ezra Pound's review of Brancusi's work in her poem, which I argue challenges male theories of genius that were circulating at the time.