imaginary outfit: painting shadows on the longest day

 


So, hey, hey, we've made it to the longest day, and here's what I'd like to do: load up an insulated basket with sandwiches (some with soppressata sliced very, very thin, thickly stacked on very white, very soft bread, and nothing else; some with tomato and Kewpie), cherries and nectarines packed on ice, matchstick shards of crisp carrots and celery, a jar of olives and a jar of pickles, lots of potato chips (flat, not ridged), sugar wafers, bottles of extremely fizzy water, and mini cans of Coca-Cola. My dearest friends would not be scattered far and wide; they'd all be here, and we'd all troop off, bumping baskets against hips and shins, to find a particularly splendid tree. We throw down a blanket and after feasting and gabbing, I'd unroll long sheets of paper and weigh them down with rocks and empty bottles. We'd fill the olive jar with water and pull out a set of paints and trace the shadows of leaves and branches, marking the places where we cannot see the light. And then it would be time to pack up and find some ice cream and wait for the fireflies to come out. I saw the first ones of the summer this week, in between the thunderstorms. 

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Labo.Art Camicia Leva top in sushi / Toast macro gingham lightweight linen pants / insulated Bondi picnic hamper by Woven / Golden Rabbit marbled enamel plate / Irodori Kobako watercolor set in graphite / Melin Tregwynt blanket in Catkin / Cirque NSFW jelly polish / Moonstar "Lite Prim" sneakers / Ted Muehling onyx acorn earrings / Dezso gold wire necklace / Victorian engraved foliage ring / Le Sibelle micromosaic butterfly ring.



no kings / 6.14.2025


The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.

Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.

M. Gessen, "Beware: We are entering a new phase of the Trump era." The New York Times (gift link), 5/28/2025.

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In a post-reality environment, it turns out, the president didn’t need to wait for a crisis to launch an authoritarian crackdown. Instead, he can simply invent one. ... If you saw all this in any other country—soldiers sent to crush dissent, union leaders arrested, opposition politicians threatened—it would be clear that autocracy had arrived. The question, now, is whether Americans who hate tyranny can be roused to respond.

Michelle Goldberg, "This is what autocracy looks like." The New York Times (gift link), 6/9/2025. 

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In a remark that has since gone viral, Conor Simon, a resident of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, observed:
It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armour to take him away is somehow the good guy.
Trump may spin spine-tingling tales of ‘bad hombres’, but videos of recent ICE raids tell a different story. The mother of a newborn is handcuffed and shoved, head down, into an unmarked vehicle, her family screaming, the neighbours filming, her baby cradled against a weeping woman’s shoulder. A young boy wails as his father is thrown into the back of a van. Children whose parents have been taken into custody sob on the floor of a school gym, not knowing if they will ever see their families again. The raids have not been on drug dens or sex-trafficking rings. They have been on restaurants and schools, hospitals and court houses. ICE’s war is not simply at home, but on home.

Anahid Nersessian, "ICE’s War on Home," LRB Blog, 6/10/2025.

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Remember that studies of social movements worldwide show that it takes just 3.5% of a population engaging in sustained peaceful protests to topple an authoritarian regime. ... The Women's March in January 2017 was the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. Between 1% and 1.6% of the U.S. population participated. Double or triple that scale would approach the 3.5% threshold.

That's our mission: doubling or tripling the size of the Women's March and engaging 3.5% of the U.S. population in mass, sustained protests to stop authoritarianism in America, which is here, at our doorstep, right now. 

MoveOn, 6/10/2025.

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On June 14, 2025: No Kings. Over 2,000 peaceful, nonviolent protests against Trump's authoritarian actions are planned in all 50 U.S. states (the map is pretty awesome—see above); there are also protests happening worldwide. (The Associated Press has a good explainer on No Kings here.)

I have been to many protests, from the very small (a handful of people standing alongside a road) to the very big (the Women's March in Washington, D.C.). And while I am not a person who loves crowds (pro tip: stand at the edge) or noise, I always come away feeling glad that I went, and humbled, too. It is a powerful thing to stand in community with other folks who care, to see that none of us are alone in our outrage, that we can show up for each other. 

There are many good and valid reasons folks can't attend protests, but for those of us who can, we must. We can't cede space; we have to make it known that we do not stand for the rampant cruelty, idiocy, and greed of this administration. So on Saturday, my family will go to a local No Kings event in the morning. Later that night, we'll take our signs and march up and down the sidewalks of our village, just to bring it home to those of our neighbors who prefer to pretend none of this is happening. Every action matters. 

flowers for mothers (not medals)




























A piece of art you make by tracing flower shadows.

Pansies for thoughts: Anntian g-mallows t-shirt.

A blank journal by IDEA, with photographs of Shozo Sato's ikebana scattered throughout to encourage words to bloom, or a book about finding flowers (a favorite).

Nonfiction "Open Arms" perfume, "an interpretation of a healing moment, nurtured with elements of nature’s vitality and caring gestures. Ripe fruits, sweet flower blossoms, fresh green leaves from nascent branches, and crushed peels are condensed to create a fresh, bittersweet essence." (A fresh, bittersweet essence is exactly how I'd describe motherhood.)

Garden notecards by Jane Ormes at Bari Zaki.

John Julian x Sarah Lucas classical mug, for coffee flavored with whimsy.

length of floral embroidered ribbon from Minnieolga, to tie in her hair or use as a bookmark.

A long basket by kaaterskill market and a pair of snips, for bringing home bouquets. 



Spiritual Objects golden flower necklace, for everyone and anyone called to mother, in whatever form that takes.

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(This is the medal I am talking about; absolutely repugnant.)

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Other gifts some mothers may enjoy: 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024

imaginary outfit: a rainy saturday walk in paris

 


I spent the last two weeks of March in Paris—one week with my mom and sister, one week with Sean and Hugh. On the Saturday that fell in the middle, my sister and mom woke up early to leave for the airport, and Sean and Hugh were scheduled to arrive sometime later that afternoon. So after I got the rental apartment in order, I dropped my bags at a luggage locker. Then, the morning was mine. 

I needed to cross the river to get where I was going: the Musée de Minéralogie, a 200-year-old wonder-cabinet of rocks, gems, and minerals tucked inside the École des Mines, and the Jardin des Grands Explorateurs. After a cold and sunny week, the rain was falling light and steady, but the air was warm. As I walked, I looked. I saw a woman in a boldly striped ankle-length grass-green and navy slicker chatting with a butcher in a shop aglow with pink neon. Nearby, a masted ship carved in stone was frozen in full sail above the door of a boy's school, a comic book shop promised stories for heros, and ancient saints with woebegone faces leaned on each other in the arch around the doors of a weathered church. Tucked in a little alley I looked into shop windows full of glass-tipped pens and prune-colored ink, rings heavy with old intaglios, and silvery Japanese papers. There was a poetry bookstore with simple wood shelves that I coveted (I went back later to get a closer look at those). 

I kept walking, headed toward the flower market. I saw a man riding a bike with two umbrellas open; one over his head, but the other angled over the handlebars, like some sort of mutant turtle. I passed the big old clock; blue, spattered with gold, with a face like the sun and two serene women presiding over the time, wielding sword and scale. I passed lines of people waiting in the rain, patiently waiting to see splendor, and walked on along the wide streets. I passed through a small park littered with the remnants of an old church; it's there you find the oldest tree in Paris. I wandered through a cold, clammy church, dark with stone pillars, then past big bookstores promising sales and high street shops with rainwashed fronts. I saw the backside of a medieval garden and walked through a market with bricks of nut-studded nougats stacked like cinder blocks. I saw a second clock, much smaller,  behind a fogged pane of glass set into an alcove in the thick, creamy walls of the Sorbonne; it was near a statue with a lipsticked mouth, garish against the stone. And eventually I found where I was going, after entering a glassed vestibule watched by a friendly guard and wandering austere school halls marked with noticeboards. I turned a corner and found myself facing a startlingly grand staircase surrounded by murals depicting ice caves and other geologically sublime places. I rang the bell and bought my ticket. I spent longer than I expected looking at the specimen samples, but also at the beautiful blond wood cases, with slanted glass tops, some protected by lids, that stretched on from room to room to room. Tall windows overlooking the Jardins du Luxembourg were thrown open and the rooms smelled of rocks, rain and wood; I caught glimpses of the Eiffel Tower behind a scrim of cloud. 

As I was leaving, I found a locked door—through its glass pane, I could just see a peek of the skylit library, closed that day.  I walked out through the gardens; by then, the sun had appeared, and the famous pale green chairs scattered throughout the grounds were filling up. The air smelled like hyacinths. I made it to the Jardin des Grands Explorateurs and ambled all the way to the massive bronze turtles sunning themselves in the dry fountain bed. Then it was time to meet my guys, so I turned back. But I made sure to visit the bees along the way; I first stumbled across them by accident more than twenty years ago and hoped that I would find them again this time. It felt good to know that they are still there. 

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Rachel Antonoff Marie the Baguettes Madison slicker / ventilated Calzuro clogs / Two New York sweatshirt / COS slouchy pants / Kathryn Bentley fish studs / Sapir Bachar gold eternity beads necklace / Manicurist nail polish in Hollyhock (I bought this in Paris and have been impressed by how well it holds up) / Nizū Kanū x Niwaki rucksack / The Common Toad and other Essays by George Orwell / Bresciani socks, colored like the iridescent oil slick on a puddle.

odds and ends / 3.31.2025

 





Frank Wilbert Stokes, "The Sun’s Rays, Sidney Herbert Bay and Joinville Land, South Pole, Feb. 10, 1902." Via subterranean thunder.

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Found text via stopping off place.

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What was being contrived at the time was the abolition of all dissent or nuance, with narrow-mindedness elevated to a universal principle, and betrayal the new public morality.

W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling. From Silent Catastrophes (excerpted in Book Post). 

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Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how—it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable—radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it—they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water—because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.


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Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed . . . by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli . . . We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made? 

Paul Valery, quoted as the epigraph in Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity.

To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal—no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. ...  
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." November 19, 2014. Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin.

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A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being. 

Sam Kriss, "Alt Lit." The Point, 2/4/2025. 

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chronoclasm
(plural chronoclasms). From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), and κλάστης (klástēs, “a person who breaks something”); from κλάω (kláō, “break”).

 1. The intentional destruction of clocks and other time artifacts
 2. (politics) The desire to crush the prevailing sense of time, due to a conflict regarding the fixation of linear time in a community

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Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. 'While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,' she writes, 'it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.' She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our 'time-givers' instead.

David Farrier, "Wild Clocks." Emergence, January 23, 2025. 

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What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.'

Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters

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Saturday plans:
Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!