Naively mistaking all aspects of this situation
Lean in to tension
I see it all, I pay attention
A small dose of humiliation
It keeps me humble, it keeps me waitin'
odds and ends / 5.21.2026 (may flowers)
Albert Marquet (1875-1947), "Flowering Tree," undated, via le jardin robo.
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Poem by “Michael Field,” the pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published in 1893.
"Medaljonger" tapestry designed by Märta Måås-Fjetterström in 1926.
Estrid Ericson at her summer house, Tolvekarna, in 1942, photographed by Bo Törngren, via Svenkst Tenn. (More photos here, including a truly enviable picnic set-up.)
Fernando Pessoa, 115 [c. 2 September 1923], from The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis.
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"Gertrude always loved her flowers 1937," from the Peter J. Cohen collection.
Poem by “Michael Field,” the pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published in 1893.
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Whether I pick you or leave you, flowers,
Your destiny remains the same.
You, path that I follow, are heading
For other destinations, not just mine.
We are nothing that is of any worth
And are therefore doubly worthless.
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"Her mouth breathes flowers ..."
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To compare women to flowers is another habit of eternity or of triviality. Here are some examples. “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys,” says the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon. In the story of Math, which makes up the Fourth Branch of the medieval Welsh tale known as the Mabinogion, a lord is asked to form a woman who is not of this world, and by “magic and enchantment” conjures one out of “the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet….” In the Fifth Adventure of the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried at last beholds Kriemhild, and the first thing we are told is that her skin shines with the glow of roses. Ariosto, imitating Catullus, compares a maiden to a hidden flower (Orlando, I, 42); in Armida’s garden, in Tasso, a purplebeaked bird exhorts the lovers not to let this flower wither (Gerusalemme, XVI, 13-15). At the end of the sixteenth century, Malherbe tries to console a friend on the death of his daughter and in his condolence are these words: “Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses” (“And, a rose, she lived the lifetime of a rose”). Shakespeare, in a garden, admires the deep vermilion of the roses and the whiteness of the lilies, but these delights for him are but shadows of his absent love (Sonnets, XCVIII). “God, making roses, made my face,” says the Queen of Samothrace on a page of Swinburne. This list might go on without end; The same metaphor is suggested with delicacy in Milton’s famous lines (Paradise Lost, IV, 268-71) on the abduction of Proserpine, and in these lines from Darío: let it suffice to recall that scene in Stevenson’s last book, Weir of Hermiston, in which the hero wants to find out whether Christina had a soul in her or “if she were only an animal the colour of flowers….”
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If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from the Notebooks.
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silvered flowers, beehive bonbons, and a deck of rainbows/gifts some mothers may enjoy
The Shenandoah Mansions linen robe (and/or the matching pajamas and eye mask) by Desmond & Dempsey and Ash Hotels.
Beehive bonbons from Shane's Confectionery filled with honey and black sesame praline.
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, about:
[A] series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created ... one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens ...
Nomenclature of Colors playing cards by Roomytown.
A snail sketch print by Annette Messager, "Locus Solus XIII," because, snail-like, mothers have the power to carry home with them.
An album worth blasting on the way to and from pick-up.
Bienamé hand creams that smell like life in bloom, the color red, or happy days.
Peaceful girl with fist charm by Leith Clark x Catbird (I like to think she is catching a star).
An Apogee card featuring a quote by Gary Indiana, wishing for the ineffable.
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Related posts: choosing motherhood / what's possible / true colors
Other gifts some mothers may enjoy: 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025
sunday tune: world party - 'ship of fools'
We're setting sail
To the place on the map from which no one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burn
Drawn by the promise of the women and the lace
And the gold and the cotton and pearls
It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need
You sail away from the light of the world on this trip baby
Pay, you will pay tomorrow
You're gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow
Save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no no
Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no no
I want to run and hide
Right now
Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Drowning in the oceans of history
Travellin' the world, you're in search of no good
But I'm sure you'll build your Sodom like I knew you would
Using all the good people for your galley slaves
As your little boat struggles through the the warning waves
But you don't pay, you will pay tomorrow
You're gonna pay tomorrow, yeah
You gonna pay tomorrow
Save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no
Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no, no, no
Where's it comin' from or where's it goin' to?
It's just a, it's just a ship of fools
All aboard
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Originally posted in 2020, but very much on my mind right now.
odds and ends / 4.10.2026
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1980s British Telecom Picturephone at wertwerk.kr, via Mildew.
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Button seemingly referencing Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics in "The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze" from Act 2 of The Mikado:
Ah, pray, make no mistake, we are not shy
We're very wide awake, the Moon and I
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Ray Johnson's "Evaporations" book stamp, via the London Centre for Book Arts:
Johnson had his "Evaporations by Ray Johnson" rubber stamp made after a May 1970 Artforum article by Robert Pincus-Witten that mused on the legacy of Pop art and dismissed Johnson, along with "Wesselman, Indiana, Marisol,…[and] so many others" as “evaporations” who had "fall[en] away to nothingness."
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People today, especially younger people, have to go out of their way to know literature qua literature—to understand it as a living thing separate from trade publishing as presented to them by mainstream reviews and Goodreads. They live in a world in which people are happily (always happily) "creative"; they understand an activity called "creative writing"; they might even know that there are many professional writers spread across the land like peppercorns spilled across a hardwood floor, teaching at universities and community colleges while paying off debts to Home Depot and Subaru, watching Netflix, and checking their retirement accounts. They understand, at every level from pillow design to haute cuisine to wet-sand sculpture, the whole idea of "art"; but what is meant by "literature," in the sense that Howard deploys it throughout his study of [Malcom] Cowley, has largely passed from view. The idea that a small number of people belonging to each generation have thrown themselves at literature, have tried to become part of it and pound it and reshape it and alter its history—that they have risked their chances of satisfactory, comfortable lives for it—all of that is becoming increasingly difficult to explain.
Vince Passaro, "In the Aftermath of Victory: Malcom Cowley and the Dream of the American Canon," Harpers, January 2026.
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What people click—and what they think they like—is largely a matter of what is available to them. Publics are made and maintained, not discovered preformed, like rock formations. It is a sign of a fatally limited imagination to assume that we can only ever desire the pittance to which we are currently reconciled. It is par for the course that, in a woefully limp statement on the carnage, the [Washington] Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, referred to the paper’s subscribers not as “readers” but as “consumers.” A consumer is a person whose preexisting tastes you strive to satisfy over and over; a reader is someone you hope to change, convince, and surprise. ... The prospect of a paper that flatters its readers by regurgitating what they already click is familiar and depressing. It puts me in mind of [Jeff] Bezos’s other marquee product, another service that dealt a disastrous blow to books. On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all?
Becca Rothfield, "The Death of Book World," The New Yorker, February 10, 2026.
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"The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life."
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"I had a transcendent experience three or four years ago when I decided I was going to finally dust my books, and had to take all of them down by hand," he said. "It was sublime. I couldn’t restrain myself from going through each book. Every one had a whole story for me."
Richard Hell, describing his apartment in the New York Times, March 4, 2026 (gift link).
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set of three / bean sequence
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Stereoscopic view of the Devil's Bean Pot, Purgatory, Mount Vernon, New Hampshire, ca. 1877-1894. Via the NYPL Digital Images Collection.
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It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them, —the last was the hardest of all, —I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans.
Henry David Thoreau, "The Bean-Field."
odds and ends / 2.27.2026
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Maurice Denis, Avril ou Les anémones, 1891.
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Glimpses into Plant Life by Eliza Brightwen, in the collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.As described in the catalog of Honey and Wax Books:
"First edition of Glimpses into Plant Life (1897) by eccentric English naturalist Eliza Brightwen, in a publisher’s binding depicting a skeleton leaf. Born in 1830, Brightwen spent most of her life as an invalid, homebound and depressed at her country house, The Grove. After her husband’s death in 1883, however, Brightwen rallied. Her nephew recalled: 'As her physical strength increased she ventured to explore her lawns and shrubberies; she dared still further, into her woods and meadows; she wandered around her lake, and even, in a broad boat, upon it; she actually quitted her domain and explored the densely-wooded common that hemmed it in upon two sides. She discovered in herself a remarkable gift of natural magic.'"
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Arnold Friedman, Still Life with White Vase, ca. 1942-1946. Via Peter Shear.
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Beaded maple-leaf coin purse, "suitable for your credit cards and identity documents."
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A clear, crispy day—dry and breezy air, full of oxygen. Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelop and fuse me—trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost—the one I am looking at most today is the sky. It has that delicate, transparent blue, and the only clouds are little or larger white ones, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave. All through the earlier day (say from seven to eleven) it keeps a pure yet vivid blue. But as noon approaches, the color gets lighter, quite gray for two or three hours—then still paler for a spell, till sundown—which last I watch dazzling through the interstices of a knoll of big trees—darts of fire and a gorgeous show of light yellow, liver-color, and red, with a vast silver glaze askance on the water—the transparent shadows, shafts, sparkle, and vivid colors beyond all the paintings ever made.
I don’t know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these skies (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before), have had this autumn some wondrously contented hours—may I not say perfectly happy ones? As I have read, Byron just before his death told a friend that he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence. Then there is the old German legend of the king’s bell, to the same point. While I was out there by the wood, that beautiful sunset through the trees, I thought of Byron’s and the bell story, and the notion started in me that I was having a happy hour. (Though perhaps my best moments I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by inditing memoranda. I just abandon myself to the mood and let it float on, carrying me in its placid ecstasy.)
What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days.
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And what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;
And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.
John Clare, from "What is Life?"
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Meghan O’Gieblyn on Marguerite Young: "All her books are, to some extent, about failed searches for paradise."
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"One of the most vast and unique perfume collections in the world already sits improbably in a California strip mall. It’s part sanctuary, part treasure map, and entirely shaped by a woman who has devoted her life to the art of finding what’s worth smelling."
"Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality."
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"Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality."
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I yearn for a serious yet creative American political writer, like the British novelist and queen of reportage Rebecca West, who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening. I’m sometimes irritated at the play of her mind as too free; I want to shout at her that I’m not interested in the a complete tour of the setting in which the Cold-War-era spy William Marshall was arrested ... I’m sometimes put off by West’s emotional partisanship, almost certainly an effect of her hard-knocks youth ... But West’s dedication to work, to visiting and revisiting and going far off the beaten path, to interviewing and reading and writing and rewriting and republishing, sometimes over a span of decades when she was developing a single subject, paid off in super-large understanding.
Sarah Ruden, writing on Rebecca West for Book Post, 4/23/2025.
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In other news: Days are getting longer.
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