Down with DOMA: Edith Windsor’s Historic Call with President Obama, Illustrated by Debbie Millman

“Hello, who am I talking to?”

UPDATE: Now available as a print.

Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed DOMA unconstitutional June 26, 2013 and made marriage equality a reality, reconstructionist Edith “Edie” Windsor, who had bravely pushed her case through the justice system to the very top and eventually changed the law that had subjected her bereavement to unacceptable injustice, received a phone call from President Barack Obama, delivering the happy, historic news. Obama himself had spoken up against DOMA over the course of Windsor’s years-long case and proclaimed the ruling a “victory for American democracy” after the Supreme Court decision was announced.

In our latest collaboration, modern sage, author, artist, and interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman captures Windsor’s heartfelt response when the President called, per the New Yorker’s report, in her signature style of artfully abstracted hand-lettered poetics:

The piece is available as a print on Society6.

De-abstracted transcript:

Hello, who am I talking to? Oh, Barack Obama? I wanted to thank you. I think your coming out for us made such a difference throughout the country.

See the first two installments of Debbie’s Brain Pickings Artist Series here and here, and celebrate Edie’s extraordinary story here.

Official White House photograph of Barack Obama by Pete Souza

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Barthes’s Likes and Dislikes, Illustrated

Champagne over strawberries, Glenn Gould over Vivaldi, romantic music over fidelity, and no telephoning.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about Susan Sontag’s meditation on why lists appeal to us, which included her quirky stream-of-consciousness lists of personal likes and dislikes. One reader — Australian illustrator and graphic designer Lynore Avery — was moved to draw some of Sontag’s favorite things, while another pointed out that French literary critic and philosopher Roland Barthes had written a similar list of likes and dislikes, which probably inspired Sontag’s. This, in fact, makes perfect sense: Sontag mentions Barthes frequently in her later journals, always with admiring and aspirational remarks like this one jotted down on a November afternoon in 1977, the year Barthes’s original list was published in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (public library):

Imagine having such a mind as Barthes has — that always works …

On March 26, 1980, she notes with forlorn dryness:

Barthes died.

It is the only death of a public intellectual she notes in this diary. Several days later, Sontag dedicates an entire journal entry to him:

People called him a critic, for want of a better label; and I myself said he was “the greatest critic to have emerged anywhere …” But he deserves the more glorious name of writer.  

His body of work is an immense, complex, extremely discreet effort at self-description.  

Eventually he became a real writer. But he couldn’t purge himself of his ideas.

Such a celebrator was Sontag of Barthes’s legacy that in 1983 she edited an anthology of his selected writings and penned the introduction to it. It comes as no surprise that it included Barthes’s own list of likes and dislikes, originally titled J’aime, je n’aime pas (I like, I don’t like).

So, the only natural thing to do was ask Lynore to bring the same illustration magic to Barthes’s lists — which she kindly did:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

Like previous Brain Pickings Artist Series collaborations, both of these gems are available as prints in Lynore’s Society6 shop — enjoy. Find more of her wonderful work on Behance.

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Marguerite Duras on Immortality, Life & the Art of Seeing, Illustrated

“The art of seeing has to be learned.”

“Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie,” Stephen King proclaimed, and a beacon of this conviction is The Lover (public library) — a short and stirring 1984 autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, with a cover as iconic as the book itself, designed by the inimitable Louise Fili.

For this latest installment in the Brain Pickings artist series, designer and artist Kerri Augenstein has illustrated some of my marginalia from this masterpiece, including a poetic meditation on the recently explored question of immortality, in the style of her magnificent Dumb Dots Figure Studies series. Each is in reality a 10-foot drawing, so the screen does it little justice, but their elegant beauty still mesmerizes:

It’s while it’s being lived that life is immortal, while it’s still alive. Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the pursuit of the void.

The art of seeing has to be learned.

Both pieces are available on Etsy as limited-edition 5.5″ x 9.5″ prints in Kerri’s Etsy shop. You can find out about the philosophy behind her Figure Studies series here.

The Lover is a sublime and timeless read that, though semi-fictional, offers keen insight into the complex machinery of love on par with these 5 essential books on the art and science of love.

Previous artist series have included Susan Sontag on art and on love illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton, Anaïs Nin on love and more love illustrated by Debbie Millman, Salvador Dalí’s creative credo illustrated by Moly Crabapple, and Anaïs Nin on life illustrated by Lisa Congdon.

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Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

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Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman

“Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

To celebrate beloved author and dedicated diarist Anaïs Nin, here is the second installment in my ongoing collaboration with author, artist, philosopher, design interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, based on a 1941 entry from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library). Like our first collaboration, this beautiful typographic collage drawing is based on one of Nin’s most timeless insights on love, culled from her many volumes of diaries and her love letters with Henry Miller. Like last time, the artwork is available on Society6, with 100% of proceeds benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women writers and artists. Enjoy:

Complement this beauty with Nin’s timeless meditations on the meaning of life, Paris vs. New York, embracing the unfamiliar, and why emotional excess is essential to creativity.

See more of Debbie’s beautiful visual essays and poems online and in print, and follow her on Twitter.

Previous Brain Pickings artist series have included Susan Sontag on art and on love by Wendy MacNaughton, Anaïs Nin on life by Lisa Congdon, and Salvador Dalí’s “My Struggle” by Molly Crabapple.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.