even*cleveland

'as if a swan sang'

Hao Boyi, "Love for the rinsing," 1991. Woodblock print. Via le jardin robo.

John Scholl, "Snowflake" on stand.⁠ Germania, Pennsylvania, circa 1907-1916. Via David Schorsch.

Photo of the swan-bedecked ceiling in the Palacio Nacional de Sintra's Swan Hall by Katie Armour.

John Hollander's "Swan and Shadow" shape poem, 1969. Via Anabela.

Hans Christian Anderson paper cut-out of Pierrots balancing on swans, 1820-1875. The Met.

Girl feeding swans in the Bois de Bologne, Paris, ca. 1930.

Anna Stokes, "White Wall-Mounted Swan," in the collection of CoCA/York Gallery.

Swans covering Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

... Come, then, and let us walk
Since we have reached the park.
It is our garden,
All black and blossomless this winter night,
But we bring April with us, you and I;
We set the whole world on the trail of spring. ...

Look at the lake —
Do you remember how we watched the swans
That night in late October while they slept?
Swans must have stately dreams, I think.

Sara Teasdale, from "A November Night."

Me elsewhere: Delighted to be among these seven swans on Catbird's site.

sunday tune: portishead - roads

Oh, can’t anybody see?
We’ve got a war to fight
We’ve never found our way
Regardless of what they say

do what you can / what you can do is enough

If you are watching the news right now, and you are feeling overwhelmed by all of the constant headlines ... first of all, know that you are not alone. Second of all, know that this is exactly what this Administration is trying to get you to feel ... The first order of business is to self-regulate. What authoritarian regimes try to do is that they often try to what is known as "flood the zone"—to do so much at once that you feel overwhelmed and paralyzed. It's important for you to understand that the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point. They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public, so it is of personal importance for you, and it is also of political importance, to take a breath.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from her 2/3/2025 Instagram Live. The post title also comes from this video.

The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Ezra Klein, "Don't Believe Him." The New York Times, 2/2/2025.

Helplessness is a current that drives you hard and tries to drag you under. If you fight it, you will drown. But you can swim with it. And by swimming with it, you can find the little gaps that separate "almost powerless" and "almost nothing" from "powerless" and "nothing." You can focus on those hard, and you can make the absolute most of them.

Many have described Trump’s repeated policy blows as a “shock and awe” strategy. While the description is apt, it’s important to remember the objective of shock and awe attacks: to overwhelm a target, distort their perception of the battlefield, and destroy their will to fight.

When your enemy wants you disoriented, your ability to focus is an important means of self-defense. What matters to you in this moment? Most of us can meaningfully dedicate ourselves to one or two causes, at the most. What can you commit to doing something about? Where do you get trustworthy information about those subjects? Who do you connect with when deciding what to do about what you’ve learned? Is there an organization whose resources you will employ or whose calls to action you will answer? Do you have a friend group or solidarity network that will formulate a response together? Answering these questions is key to steadying yourself in these times. Remember: Vulnerable people don’t need a sea of reactivity right now. They need caring groups of people who are working together to create as much safety as they can. We need to create a rebellious culture of care. That will take focus and intention. It will take relationships and a whole lot of energy.

Kelly Hayes, "A Brutal Beginning: Orienting Ourselves Amid the Shock and Awe." Organizing My Thoughts, 1/21/2025.

We’ve seen people rich and powerful enough to stand on principle cave and kiss the ring, seen huge corporations who likewise have the resources to have some integrity knuckle under, seen universities choose to veer right to please the incoming president, seen news organizations soften up outrageous violations and cruelty with bland and evasive language.

They’re cowards. They’ve chosen craven advantage over courageous principle. But they alone cannot legitimize and normalize this regime. What will normalize it is if we all go along with it. Not going along with it, not pretending this is normal, not pretending human rights violations are anything but, not forgetting that the regime is attempting to make epic and unprecedented changes that dismantle our democracy: that’s up to us. Not only with how we organize and act, but how we talk and how boldly we talk.

I learned something new about animal behavior last week, and it seems really timely. A reindeer cyclone is when a herd of reindeer facing a predator put the calves in the center and whirl around fast, making it difficult to impossible for the predator to pick off one reindeer. The more of us who speak up the harder it will be to persecute any single person who says trans rights are human rights or what’s being done to immigrants is terrorism. It’s not the only example from the animals. When threatened, musk oxen likewise circle up, facing outward with their huge horns, calves again in the middle of the ring.

Some say that murmurations—those beautiful flights of thousands of starlings undulating and pulsating as they whirl through the sky together—create flocks that are hard for predators to attack. There’s safety in numbers, which is why a lot of prey animals move in herds and flocks and schools. For those who dissent from what this new administration intends to do, we may sometimes be able to surround an Ice van or march by the thousands, but every time we dissent we make room for others to dissent. Courage, like fear, is contagious. For a lot of us, right now, we get to choose, and what we choose has an impact on what others choose.

Rebecca Solnit, "Fighting for justice doesn't have to be a big dramatic act. It can be small." The Guardian, 2/2/2025.

"Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts—and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change."

the eye of the duck

I saw this interview in 1999, around when "The Straight Story" came out, and it totally changed how I look at/understand art/the world. I am always looking for the eye of the duck.

Rest in peace, David Lynch.

imaginary outfit: perpetual flurry

It's been snowing a little every day, and when I look outside, I see stories being rewritten. Or maybe what I am seeing if forgetting. Over and over, paths soften and blur; the cuneiform prints of small creature feet disappear. Almost every trace of where we've been is gone. But because we have been in a cycle of freezes and thaws, and because we've only gotten an inch or two at a time, it's never quite a clean page. Under the fresh fall, crusted ice captures yesterday's footsteps, frozen into trip hazards, marked by gentle dimples.

I've felt low-key disoriented since the election, like I've somehow gotten lost in a familiar place. If I keep my focus very close—birds at the feeder, faces at the dinner table, pen on paper, the river freezing, snowflakes falling—I know where I am. But then, I read the news, and the nausea comes, because the bigger stories are splintering, and things that should be remembered are forgotten, covered over by the relentless more, more, more of the present.

Once, in a very different context, my friend Abbey wrote about her grief about losing the adults in the room—the calm voices and wise minds of earned authority, the trusted experts, there to offer a hand up to understanding. They are almost impossible to find now, lost in a blizzard of takes and anxious posturing and calls to subscribe and junk misinformation and vacuous AI content. It's a perpetual flurry.

But the real snow still falls, for now, at least. And each time it falls, I fall under its spell, enjoying the illusion that the old world can be made new. When I took the dog out the other night, the snow was coming down heavy, and even though the sky was dark, the air was white: there was a strange light, and because I could feel the flakes coming down, icy feathers brushing against my face, my awareness of my body in space was heightened. It was like being in water, that swirl of white darkness. And when we walked back to the door, the dog stopped, so I stopped, too. Through the scrim of snow, I could just see the smudged shadow-bodies of two deer, running through my neighbor's yard. I imagine they were looking for somewhere safe. The coyotes are out.

Is the new year a clean page? Not really, I think, but it not a bad excuse for trying different things. I'm practicing French verbs, making Victorian puzzle purses, and reading massive Japanese crime novels.

Knitbrary cardigan (past season; I am hoping one turns up in my size resale one day) / B Sides Lasso jeans in black (got a pair on super sale over the summer, and golly, I love them) / Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass (have been listening to P.G. nonstop this month; "Mishima / Closing" every day) / Ersa Dandin Mini Torso pearl earrings / Composition ledger notebook from Choosing Keeping (if I write in a notebook adorned with Renaissance angels will my words be heavenly?) / lucky gold pencil (I will take all the luck I can hold) / Jamie Haller oxblood Belgian loafers / Christina Iversen Shell cup (found at Bona Drag; no. 1 on my coveted-item list) / Valda mint pastilles (because January air is dry) / Daiyo rice bran candles (this post brought to you by my new painfully twee/self-indulgent practice of lighting a tiny candle and writing whatever comes to mind until it burns out.)

odds and ends / 1.9.2025

Alice Neel, "Snow in Vermont," 1975.

Beguiling grainy image of a pinecone mobile found on Pinterest; I can't determine the source, but I'd like to make one.

Garry Knox Bennett, "Granny Rietveld." Via Commune Design.

Ivor Cutler, "A Clock." Via stopping off place.

Snowy scene by Wanda Gág, captured by Claire Zarouhee Nereim. (I wish I could have seen the exhibit at the Whitney.)

Frances Palmer's bulbs.

It’s winter now, some months after the phoebes outside have built their nest, raised a family, and moved on. Bitter cold, snow on the ground, blue jays crowding the feeders clownishly while the little birds—chickadees and nuthatches and tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers—wait anxiously for the bullies to leave so they can begin their own meal. You might think you know something about me now from the highly redacted scraps of personal anecdote I started with—but really, I could have written anything, shaped those glimpses however I wanted, and you wouldn’t know.

You know far more about me from how I’ve been writing here ... You know what books I’ve loved and why I love them. You know I like birds, you know I watch them, you know I live in a place sufficiently rural to have trees and phoebes. You know many of my days resemble one another, and that I have a house, and that I must not be commuting daily to a job—which in turn suggests I have some other way to make an income. You know I have enough free time to look outside and note down what I see, and that I value both actions.

And beyond those relatively simple facts, you have a sense of my sensibility: my emotional makeup, my responses to the world, my obdurate insistence on revising and revising again. What I notice, what I pay attention to.

Andrea Barrett, "Energy of Delusion," excerpted from Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact and Fiction in Harpers, January 2025.

The inside covers of the notebooks were used to save a substantial collection of news clippings, an off-beat record of the world through those years of writing the book. There are pressed leaves, wildflowers, feathers of owls and colourful parrots and lorikeets, swans, finches, cockatoos, picked up on walks, hundreds of walks, of walking alone while deep in thought, that in the end, amounted to much of what went into creating this book. The feathers alone form a catalogue of walking through many seasons in different parts of the country.

You will find in these notebooks: broken wings of butterflies, such as the brown forest butterflies found in the summer months when the woods were abundant with their dance; travelling beetles crawling in their hundreds in the leaf litter. This collection was a part of much more. All these objects were studied and, if not intentionally, were thought about as works of scale as were the patterns on a butterfly wing which are composed of millions of scales, grandiose designs developed over aeons of time. All of these collected objects were a reminder of being grounded while facing the realities as we have done in the past, and will do so in the future in dealing with other major concerns which hold no beauty, nor added comfort to our combined humanity.

Alexis Wright, "Dream Geographies." HEAT, Series 3, number 16, September 2024.

Friends have begun to call, and tell us they’ve lost their homes. One said he had forgotten his passport, but he had the family dog, and he’d managed to save his child’s beloved stuffed walrus (named “Walrus”). They’d rebuild with that, he told me.

Looking out the window into the snow and thinking of Los Angeles.