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."

imaginary outfit: rose-garden tourism

 

Last June, I was in Portland, Oregon, staying in a neighborhood of exuberant gardens. Plants spilled out and over the sidewalks, filling berms and medians and cracking pavements—heavy-headed rudbeckias and bright wiry poppies, stalky hollyhocks and elegantly gnarled Japanese maples, and everywhere, roses.  In the mornings and evenings, before and after work, I'd go get coffee and chouquettes and walk and admire. One house had tied a pair of scissors to a spectacularly thorny rosebush heavy with blooms, hung with a laminated sign that read "HELP YOURSELF."

Portland is an excellent city for roses—the International Rose Test Garden is there, with its more than 10,000 bushes. A heavenly place, truly, that you smell before you see, but I particularly love the tennis courts perched on the hillside above it. Some time ago, a rainbow array of roses were planted against its chainlink fence, and now it is encrusted with blossoms. Every time I visit, I curse dumb airlines that make toting my tennis things a costly hassle because hitting there would be a dream come true.

I thought the garden and the tennis courts were the rosiest places in town, but as I was ambling in my temporary neighborhood, I noticed a strong scent of rose. Following my nose, I came upon an unlooked-for delight: a diamond-shaped park densely planted with roses, nested right in the neighborhood. As I walked up and down, reading all of the roses' names, I noticed a sign: "South Rose Garden." The fact that "South" was specified made me wonder if perhaps there was a "North Garden," so I walked that way. Reader, there were FOUR rose gardens—one for each cardinal direction, each stacked with rows of blooms named after old movie stars, descriptive adjectives, and forgotten French ladies. I stumbled upon them all, one after the other, increasingly giddy. (I suppose I could have looked it up on the map, but I didn't and got to enjoy the absolute surprise of finding each one.) I had found Ladd's Addition Gardens; four rose gardens framing a central circle with camellias and rhododendrons.

I do not know if anyone would plan a neighborhood around a garden now, but I am so glad someone did, and that people still take the time to tend the roses so anyone who happens by can enjoy them. I'm headed west for work again soon, and I hope to find them blooming.

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Margaret Howell dense cotton shorts / Toast ribbed wool cotton Gansey sweater / La Botte Gardiane Alain shoes / Victorian lock bracelet (similar) / Beaufille abstract petal hoops / Vintage Seiko (similar) / Luzern La Defense sunscreen / Olympus XA 35mm  point-and-shoot camera / Graham Stuart Thomas's The Old Shrub Roses and Climbing Roses Old and New / Zilla rucksack / Photo of Portland's Washington Park tennis courts by Keri Anderson/Heels First Travel.

odds and ends / 6.21.2024

 

Albert Weisgerber: illustration for “The Seven Ravens” from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1912). Via The Public Domain Review.

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Ad from a catalog issued by The Keeley Stove Company for Morning Light Stoves, Philadelphia, 1889.

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Mosaic-decorated stove from La Maison Picassiette (The Plate-Stealer's House) in Chartres, created by Raymon Eduoard Isidore between 1938-1964; photographed by John Vere Brown for The World of Interiors, January 1982.

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Metalwork by George Greaves.

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Albert York, "Figures in a Field," 1963. Via Peter Shear.

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Cy Twombly's notes on George Seferis' "Solstice," via Edmund de Waal.

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At the heart of the mysteries of the Vedas, revealed by the people of India, lies the Altar of Fire: a sacrificial construct made from bricks laid down in precise mathematical proportions to form the shape of a huge bird of prey—an eagle, or a hawk, perhaps. According to Roberto Calasso, it was a gift from the primordial deity at the origin of everything: Prajapati, Lord of Creatures. When his children, the gods, complained that they could not escape from Death, he gave them precise instructions for how to build an altar that would permit them to ascend to heaven and attain immortality: “Take three hundred and sixty border stones and ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in a year,” he said. “Each brick shall have a name. Place them in five layers. Add more bricks to a total of eleven thousand, five hundred and fifty-six.” The gods built the altar and fled from Mrtyu, Death itself. However, Death prevented human beings from doing the same. We were not allowed to become immortal with our bodies; we could only aspire to everlasting works. The Vedic people continued to erect the Altar of Fire for thousands of years: with time, according to Calasso, they realized that every brick was a thought, that thoughts piled on top of each other created a wall—the mind, the power of attention—and that that mind, when properly developed, could fly like a bird with outstretched wings and conquer the skies.

Benjamín Labatut, "The Gods of Logic," Harpers, July 2024. 

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"I sometimes think," said Olivia, "from watching, of course, because I am not experienced, I think experience can be a—block." Again it was clumsy, but she knew what she meant.

"And why?" asked Angela, amused.

"Because if you think you know, you don't ask questions," said Olivia slowly, "or if you do ask, you don't listen to the answers." Olivia had observed this often. "Everyone, everything, each thing, is different, so that it isn't safe to know. You—you have to grope."

Rumer Godden, An Episode of Sparrows. 

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It’s a persistent human error; we cannot resist trying to understand what we are hardwired not to. If anything, the death of God has left a conspicuously empty seat in the rafters that we keep trying to inhabit—that purely transcendent, objective vantage outside the totality of things. Spinoza called it sub specie aeternitatis. Hannah Arendt named it “the Archimedean point.” Thomas Nagel termed it the “View from Nowhere.”

Meghan O'Gieblyn, "The Trouble With Reality." The New York Review, 3/21/2024.

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An ivory ribbon, a speckled lobster, blown poppies, a lascivious oyster. A hand mirror reflecting a whitish lake, a heavy key. These are seen to be her concerns, lacquerish, decorative, romantic. But the hand mirror fills with blood, the cabinet of wonders displays a skull. On the other side of the pomegranate, maggots like instinct pearls.

Patricia Lockwood, "Isn't that ... female?" The London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12., 6/20/2024.

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Stephanie remembered other libraries ... She remembered the sensation of knowledge, of grasping an argument, seizing an illustration, seeing a link, a connection, between this ancient Greek idea here and this 17th-century English one, in other words. Knowledge had its own sensuous pleasure, its own fierce well-being, like good sex, like a day in bright sun on a hot empty beach. She thought of these various lights, Plato’s sun, Daniel’s body, that first moment of Will’s separate life, herself in sunlight, and thought, as she had not thought clearly for some long time, of ‘my life’, of the desired shape of ‘my life’ as it had seemed so clear and so bright in that earlier library. She thought: this will not do, I must think about the ‘Immortality Ode’, I have no time, any more. And saw that she was thinking about the ‘Immortality Ode’, that the poem was about all these things, the splendour in the grass, the need for thought, the shape of a life, the light.

A.S. Byatt, Still Life. 

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"We should all be so lucky to have a cathedral that no one will see."

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imaginary outfit: summer trend report

 

Here, in no particular order, are a selection of key trends emerging for summer 2024, sample size (n) of one:

FASHION

Ratty Retired Banker: Well-worn khakis fraying gently at the seams; oxfords, tees, and sweatshirts laundered to within an inch of their lives; busted leather loafers; boat shoes and grubby canvas sneakers that were white once upon a time; rumpled hair a few weeks out from a trim; a penchant for carrying things around in reused plastic shopping bags.  

Garden Pajamas: Wearing whatever you slept in out in the yard to do a little light weeding amidst the morning dew.

Poplin: Crispy cotton ftw.

Tomato plant as color palette.

Enormous pants: Must billow, sail-like, in summer breezes. Small children and animals should be able to hide in their capacious folds.

Constant sunhat.

Bag-in-bag: A makeshift coping mechanism for an accessory category notable for a shocking lack of pockets.

Beaded flowers, as adornment and craft.

Silver nails, fingers and toes.

TECHNOLOGY

Single-Use Device Ascendency: Wristwatches, film cameras, turntables, print magazines, and old books in lieu of smartphone.

Phone calls > texts.

The mute button.

Suspended reality: Widespread adoption of hammocks and swings.

Endless scroll: Watching clouds and water move.

RETAIL

Opportunistic drive-by: Stopping at any sale indicated by a temporary yard sign, especially if hand-made.

Used book sales in libraries, cafagymnatoriums, parking lots, etc.

Shops in barns.

FOOD

Tomato sandwiches: Made with white bread, Kewpie mayonnaise, and copious amounts of salt and pepper. Influencer campaign led by Harriet the Spy.

Homemade pie.

Fruit on ice in silver bowls: Chill whatever fruit is in season. Pile ice in metal bowl, preferably silver. Heap on fruit in artful mountainous display. Serve.

Bitter sodas and salty crunchy chips: Every day at 5 o'clock.

Italian jujubes.

Everything in a tortilla. (The lazy person's preferred salad format.)

Abundant pickles.

MUSIC

Haunted hand-claps, doo-doo-dums, and sha-la-las: Songs with ghostly echoes of mid-century pop. (Ex: Cindy Lee's Diamond Jubilee, Jessica Pratt's "World on a String," and Amen Dunes' "Purple Land.")

Ecstatic Eno + Cale/"Spinning Away."

Guitar solos.

Scuzzy shimmer.

Outdoors listening opportunities.

FILM

The death-rapt (and life-filled) films of Alice Rohrwacher: Namely, La Chimera, Happy as Lazzarro, and The Wonders.

Italian neorealism.

Movies watched in movie theaters, as often as possible. Popcorn (butter mandatory), Coca-cola mini-cans smuggled in.

PRINTED MEDIA

Allergen paperbacks: Will likely elicit sneezing; notable for brown, crumbling pages. Ideally sourced from a library sale (see above) or Little Free Library.

Floral Observer.

Old magazines, local newspapers, and crossword puzzle books.

TELEVISION

Nope.

TRAVEL

Rose-garden tourism. 

Band-based roadtrips.

Micro-excursions: Small outings to unfamiliar places.

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Plain Goods wide-brim linen sun hat / Nicholson & Nicholson Tender poplin top / Shaina Mote Volume pants / Seavees Fairfax lug-soled slip-on sneakers / Rachel Comey Baby Keel silver earrings / vintage Seiko wristwatch / Cirque Colors Sterling nail polish / vintage beaded bag, via Plain Goods / Bembien Clara bag / Virago Modern Classics paperbacks / Sanbitter soda / tomato sandwich / bowl of chips.