protect the vulnerable and speak the truth / the scene is not desolate

You know, I was speaking at a college a few days ago and someone asked, “What will be your mindset if Donald Trump wins?” And I think of it as having two real components: Protect the vulnerable and speak the truth.

When you think about Trump’s declaration of vengeance, he wants to pursue his political enemies. He wants to pursue deportations at a scale that would be terrifying. So you can already see that there are vulnerable populations that will need protection. That includes political dissidents, political opponents that might be vulnerable to a vengeful Department of Justice. That includes immigrants and others who—you know, think about it this way, you’re talking about people who have said, “Hey, look, if there’s a person who is an illegal immigrant, but they have children who are citizens, well, so what? So what? Just sweep them out.” Right?

So there’s going to be this real need to protect vulnerable populations, protect vulnerable people. And then the other thing is, if there’s one thing that we’ve learned, it is very, very difficult to combat large-scale lying and defamation from people who have an immense amount of power and privilege. That is just very difficult because people who come into politics sort of more casually don’t know much about it—they don’t know if someone says yes and another person says no, if one person says up and another person says down—they don’t know how to adjudicate these disputes. And so I think about it in these two ways: protect the vulnerable, speak the truth, and I think of it in this moment as this is a real clarion call moment. At some point we’re going to have to sort of continue to put aside many of the differences that have divided sort of the different elements of the anti-Trump coalition.

I think it’s totally fine to grieve this. It’s totally fine to lament that this has occurred and to grieve that this is where we are as a country. But that’s got to be short, because if we care about justice in this country, there’s going to be a lot of work to do.

David French, "It's Time to Admit America Has Changed," The New York Times (gift link), 11/6/2024.

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North Brooklin, Maine,
30 March 1973

Dear Mr. Nadeau:

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,
E. B. White

Via Letters of Note. 

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uncanny materiality

Andrew Wyeth, "Perpetual Care," 1961.

... [T]he pale, strained face of a girl dressed in white once seemed to Wyeth to be looking out of the high rear window of the Baptist Church across the St. George River. Wyeth, through binoculars, had been studying this church—an echo of Cushing with its frame structure and cemetery monuments mottle orange by lichen. He investigated and found nobody there. But the powerful impression remained.

Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth, 1968, pg. 104.

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The Sibyl's Leaves, a set of 46 fortune-telling cards published by William Stoddard of New York, 1833, with a lithographic witch illustration by Edward Williams Clay. Via American Antiquarian.

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Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891), "Young watermelons and vine," from a group of six lacquer paintings. Via le jardin robo.

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19th-century Appenzell whitework embroidered cloth, via Newlyn Lowly.

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Hallway decorations by Nicolaas Maritz in the London home of Anthony Collett, photographed by Michael Sinclair for House & Garden, October 2021.

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Vernacular owl-shaped birdhouse, ca. 1900. Via David Schorsch.

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Edgar Allen Poe, from "The Bells," in The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allen Poe, with illustrations by Edmund Dulac, 1912.

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Jell-O jack-o-lantern from It’s Dessert Time!, 1953. Via Weird Old Food.

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A young priest called Walchelin, returning home one clear night in Normandy around a thousand years ago, heard a great clash and din of an army approaching; he assumed it was the soldiers who followed a local warlord, and hid himself in fear behind some medlar trees. But what he saw, instead, was a ghostly troop: first the lay folk, on foot, weighed down by terrible burdens; then the clergy, bishops as well as monks, all black-cowled and weeping; another black-robed, fiery army of knights then rode by, on black chargers. All these numbers of the dead were suffering horrible tortures, the women especially, for they were riding saddles of burning nails, and were being lifted in the air by invisible forces and dropped down again onto the points. Walchelin recognised the procession: it was the familia Herlequini, or Hellequin’s rabble, the grim and unquiet crowd mustered by the lord of the dead, about which he had heard many stories.

The account is dated 1 January 1091 and is the earliest extant literary telling of this phantom army, taken down by Orderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman monk, from the report of his colleague, the eyewitness. Walchelin related how he thought he wouldn’t be believed if he didn’t bring back proof, so he left his hiding place and tried to catch and mount one of the riderless black horses going by: the stirrup burned his foot and the reins froze his hand. Fifteen years after his experience, the scars remained, the authenticating brand from the other world: Walchelin showed them to the chronicler.

Marina Warner, "Suffering Souls." London Review of Books, June 18, 1998.

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Human and puppet limbs are entwined, and there is a sense, both comforting and disconcerting, of a group-individual, like the shadowy figures who merge with the dark in Goya’s Black Paintings. Each puppet is both itself and a small society, and even the puppets’ materiality is uncanny—they are floating, airy creatures weighted by earthly human spirits. The puppeteers are not the only artists giving the puppets life. On a separate platform to the right of the action, three male chanters sit in a neat row, next to men playing the shamisen, a stringed instrument with a raw and piercing tone which is often used in vocal accompaniment. The chanters give the puppets voice with intense and compressed screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, and remorse—but they themselves slip from our awareness. Their disembodied voices operate like a soundtrack, synchronized with puppet gesture and emotion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, a feverish shake.

Jennifer Homans, "The Puppet Masters." The New Yorker, 11/4/2024. 

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But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty.

Virginia Woolf, "A Haunted House." 

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Fear seemed to exude from the walls, to dim the mirrors with its clammy breath, to stir shudderingly among the tattered draperies, to impregnate the whole atmosphere as with an essence, a gas, a contagious disease.

Ella D'Arcy, "The Villa Lucienne."

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The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn't see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs' bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones.

Hilary Mantel, "Destroyed."

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Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition: Being demanded, whether a good Spirit, or bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and most melodious Twang.

John Aubrey, Miscellanies, 1696.

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sunday tune: hen ogledd / trouble

A grinding jaw
A frantic clawing at the door
A twitching nostril
A nail protruding from the floor
A puff of black smoke
A natterjack croak from the splashing reeds
A string of red beads

Trouble with a capital T ...

circling the sun / birthday gifts some 46-year-olds might enjoy

Wearable October color: Anntian woolskirt in print C. Styled by Judith with a Studio Nicholson Gomes sweater and Caron Callahan Margaret platforms.

Iitala Taiko Sato dinnerplates, designed by Klaus Haapaniemi and Heikki Orvola.

A table-top reflecting pool: Debbie Carlos pond vase.

Shaker-style glasses box.

Adalbert Stifter, The Solar Eclipse of July 8th, 1842, handset and printed by Brother in Elysium.

Mints infused with blessed water. (I will take all the blessings I can find.)

A recording of Charles Ives' "Universe Symphony," "Orchestral Set 2.," and "The Unanswered Question."

Eatable of Many Orders Tin bag.

A wearable, seasonless garden by Kathryn Bentley.

A handful of swallow patches, to give something a little worn new life.

Asparagus candles. (The hazelnut cake with concord grape jam buttercream and filling that I spent the last two days making was a total bust BUT I am still gonna blow out some candles tonight!)

Bumper sticker by Nate Hooper for Working Loose, because to live is to spiral.

a handful of apples / october

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Cypriot limestone hand holding a piece of fruit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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A photograph of unpeeled apples by Richard Tepe, ca. 1900-1930. The Rijksmuseum.

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Bruised stone apple, from the archives of criticalEYEfinds.

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"Apples," folio 48 (verso), from Florilegium (A Book of Flower Studies), 1608. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Doris Ulmann, "Women Gathering Apples," ca. 1930s. Ogden Museum of Southern Art. 

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Italian marble half-apple bowl.

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James Nasmyth,"Back of Hand & Shrivelled Apple. To illustrate the origin of certain mountain ranges by shrinkage of the globe," ca. 1870 (in or before 1873). From The moon : considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite.

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The composer's white summer suit rests on a hanger in his study; his broad-brimmed Borsalino and stick are on a nearby table. Here is the Steinway grand he was given on his fiftieth birthday (though he composed in head, not on the piano); there is a run of the National Geographic Magazine covering the last five years of his life. On the Russian oak desk at which he worked from the time of his marriage in 1892 lies the wooden ruler Aino carved for him, with which he ruled his scores; also, an empty box of Corona cigars, and an elegant Tiffany photo frame, containing a portrait of Aino, through which the light streams. Open on the desk is a facsimile score of his greatest symphony, the Fourth. But the homely is never far away: in the kitchen, screwed to the wall, is an apple-coring machine Sibelius brought back from one of his trips to America. Made of black cast-iron, it is a Heath Robinsony contraption of prongs, screws, and blades that will peel, core, and slice your apple at the turn of the handle. From the same trip he also brought his wife a Tiffany diamond; but it is the apple-corer that sticks in the mind.

Julian Barnes, from "Ainola: Music and Silence." The Lives of Houses, ed. by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee. 

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The apples are everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an orchard. You pick them up from under your feet but to bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarming for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe.

Henry James, from New England: An Autumn Impression, 1905. Via The New York Review. 

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The white October sun circles Kirchstetten
With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens,
And bronze and golden under wiry boughs,
A few last apples gleam like jewels.

Stephen Spender, from "Auden's Funeral."

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I always think of those curious long autumn walks with which we ended a summer holiday, talking of what we were going to do–‘autumn plans’ we called them. They always had reference to painting and writing and how to arrange social life and domestic life better … They were always connected with autumn, leaves falling, the country getting pale and wintry, our minds excited at the prospect of lights and streets and a new season of activity beginning–October the dawn of the year.

Virginia Woolf, writing to her sister Vanessa Bell, ca. September 1927.

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thursday tune: futureheads - hounds of love

odds and ends / 9.6.2024

Andrew Cranston, "The Invisible man," 2024. 

From Terry R. Myers' review of "One day this will be a long time ago," Cranston's show at Karma: 

The 'time' of painting has always moved in multiple directions, and all of that movement (not to mention what we call memory) is incapable of being anywhere except the present.

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Bee-shaped woven palm bag.

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Cody Hoyt, "Square Chair."

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Walter de Maria, "Boxes for Meaningless Work," 1960.

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Gena Rowlands, in a still from "A Woman Under the Influence."

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The universe that Dante inhabited was orderly, complete, and completely known. The universe we inhabit is 95 percent dark matter and dark energy, about which we mainly know what they are not. The more precisely we are able to measure and analyze, the more mysterious everything becomes. We are the first humans to realize that our stomachs are incredibly complex ecosystems whose ramifications we barely grasp. To put it another way, here we are in the vastness of the cosmos, and we don’t even understand our own stomachs.

Eliot Weinberger, interviewed by Jack Hanson for The Yale Review.

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'I’m not chasing utopia; I’m chasing wholeness and power. Every narrative I explore, no matter how far back I go, involves catastrophe. But what I’m really interested in is what comes next—how we survived. We’re still here, so what happens after the disaster?'

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Sevigny knows what she’s supposed to say about aging—that it’s a wild ride into uncharted territory, that older women and the natural changes that come with the passage of time deserve to be represented onscreen. But honestly, she’s annoyed by the whole thing: “The second adolescence or something? There’s some term. But it seems more difficult than adolescence because I’m menopausal and all that. Hormonal changes.” (And in case you’re wondering, no, she has not read All Fours, Miranda July’s perimenopausal novel. “Sounds intolerable,” she says when I describe the plot.)

Emily Gould, "A Suitable Change for Chlöe Sevigny," New York Magazine, 9/4/2024. 

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"It’s like, stand up, sister! Use your human mind!"

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The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Ted Chiang, "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art," The New Yorker, 8/31/2024.

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How much of my time is spent thinking about style, fashion, clothing, decorating, fabrics, pattern, quilting…. So what if those are ungrand concerns, “feminine” concerns…. the visual statements that have moved me—many of them—were made from small ideas, unpretentious ones that were big after all.

Christina Ramberg, in diary entry from 1979 quoted by Susan Tallman in "The Sneaky Sublime," The New York Review, 8/15/2024.

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She wore an oversized olive-green sweater, wide-legged black satin pants, and chunky pale-pink sneakers; her hair was white and cut in a blunt, chin-length bob with a center part, and around her neck she wore a gold chain with a pendant of green glass. She was chic and easy in her manner, but life at her age is far from effortless, she said. Since Vicky’s death, Ducrot has been increasingly dependent upon Wijesundara, who has worked for her for forty years. 'She washes me,' Ducrot told me at one point. 'I am completely in her hands.' As we sipped our champagne, Ducrot explained that the happiness she felt was not unqualified. 'I am terrified also, naturally, because friends of mine, old people, are dying,' she said. 'But happiness is another thing. I think I am helped by the words that come to me—words are more generous with me now.'

Rebecca Mead, "An Artist Flowering in her Nineties," The New Yorker, 7/22/2024. From the same profile (which is an absolute gem): 

Her treasures range from seventeenth-century Tibetan prayer shawls to fragments of Egyptian cotton dating possibly to the ninth century. Vicky collected Indian miniature paintings, becoming a self-taught expert. On their travels in Yemen, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, the Ducrots gathered cuttings of wild roses—transporting damp stems in their suitcases before planting them at their country house, in Umbria, where they tended a garden exclusively dedicated to the genus. It still supplies flowers for Isabella’s apartment.

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Useless pennies.

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The Book of the Queen’s Doll’s House contains a fascinatingly weird essay by the engineer Mervyn O’Gorman on the 'effect of size' on the dollhouse’s world. It’s a known bugbear in miniature-making that certain materials don’t perform well at scale: an inch-wide cotton coverlet sits on the dollhouse bed like a piece of cardboard, for example. But Mr. O’Gorman must have been the first writer to seriously consider the physics of the miniature. According to his calculations, the little people living in the dollhouse—he called them 'Dollomites'—would have the strength of ten men. They’d eat six meals a day, leap staircases in a single bound, and have hearts like hummingbirds. Their voices would be inaudible to us; the gramophone and working pianos in their house would cause more pain than pleasure to their tiny ears. To the Dollomites, the paint on the walls would be a half-inch thick, and a single drop of water from the tap the size of a pear. Every glass of wine would be so viscous they’d have to suck it down. And forget about soup. 'Cream or thick soup,' O’Gorman warned, 'would be so sticky that the soup spoon would be found to lift the plate with it from the table.'

Claire L. Evans, "The Queen's Dollhouse," Wild Information, 7/2/2024. 

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Artists' kites for Gaza.

a shell collection

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Syrinx aruanus (Australian Trumpet shell), ca. 1950s.

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Shell lamps from Tennant New York.

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Alyssa Goodman, "Crooked Tree." Watercolor on seashell.

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19th century shell-work figure of a lady, from Doe & Hope.

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Marsden Hartley, "Three Shells." Oil on board, ca. 1941-1943. Via Peter Shear.

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Earrings by Alana Burns/la ma r.

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1920s shell-art work in Davenport, Iowa. Via Anonymous Works.

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18th-century scallop-shaped marble sink, via The Marble Dog.

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Ca. 1900s-era glass-plate x-ray of shells, via wilds.things.

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Engraved 18th century Turbo Marmoratus shell, from the V & A. 

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Superfolk "Shells in my pocket" print.

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Photo of an Ordovician fossil bed in Ohio by coryfinds. 

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Nagasone Tojiro Mitsumasa, "Helmet in the form of a Sea Conch Shell," 1618. Via sacredgrounds_.

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Edward Weston, "28 (Cross-section of a nautilus shell)."

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On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells...

John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid.

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Erasmus Darwin's bookplates bore the motto E conchis omnia—"everything from shells."