Clockwise from top left: Werner Herzog on chickens in the New Yorker and on video, "The enorminty of their flat brain" ; from Tinker, Tailor and the smell of damp tweed ; Fred Stoller in My Seinfeld Year ; My essential writing gear. Jonathan Frazen wears them. Clive Holden's are green.

From top: From Vigil by Nancy Friedland, which is on February 2-26, 2012 at Katharine Mulherin's gallery ;  A Different Kind of Delirium, Charles Baxter on Don DeLillo by way of Marina Abramović.

Clockwise from top left: Georgia O'Keeffe Blue Lines X, 1916 from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and found in The New York Review, January 12, 2012 ; the dietary regime of Balzac, from The New Yorker (password required) ; a strip of a painting by Sarah MacCulloch ; excerpt from The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt.

Clockwise from top right: A line I wrote on a post-it ; great first line from Katrina Onstad ; a Swedish theory of Love? ; a card I bought in the parking lot of the Safeway in the Castro, San Francisco in 1997 ; women's necks from my grandmother's notebook; from an interview with Maureen Sabia.

 
Clockwise from top: a nice 'r' ; Maev Beaty in Now Magazine ; The Unappreciated Benefits of Dyslexia ; a sampling from a review of The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem reviewed by Zsuzsi Gartner ; mind tricks. 

From top: Man with Bandage (1968) from Fred Herzog: Photographs ; Kotjebi "fluttering swallows" children in North Korea. 

Clockwise from top left: A photo of a line from my Grandmother's notebook ; excerpt from a 28 page internal memo sent by Jeffrey Katzenberg and distributed to his fellow executives ; The Genre Games by Kim Wright ; Kind of Blue, a review of Joan Didion's new book Blue Nights ; a tea house built overlooking South Korea's boarder with North Korea.

Clockwise from top left: assorted quotes from Anthony Lane, Around the Bend: "Speed Racer" and "Turn the River" and Off the Rails: "The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3" and "Whatever Works", Sunstruck: How Norsemen found their way around in cloudy weather, Celia Franca.

Clockwise from top left: Monica Proietti aka Machine Gun Molly ; the last stanza of Desert Places by Robert Frost ; Seven percent of bank robbers in Canada are women according to the November issue of Report on Business Magazine ; definition of Justice ; Dany Chiasson is my Joan of Arc ; Mark Schatzker is existentially conscious ; a lovely description of a moose from the Globe & Mail.