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."

Charles Willson Peale, museum-maker. He named many of his ten children after his favorite artists.

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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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sunday tune: mazzy star - common burn

set of three / bean sequence

Alison Knowles, "Score Direction for Bean Sequences." Via Drifting Lament.

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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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Flicking the bean carved sapphire seal by TrumpetforTwo.

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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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Vintage postcard of crocus flowers.

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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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"Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees ..."

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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."

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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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 Found: 430,000-year-old wooden tools, a 500,000-year-old hammer of bone. 

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"The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan."

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In other news: Days are getting longer.

a small valentine

 

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Detail of an American red moiré silk dress, ca. 1837. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During the nineteenth century, women's periodicals specified the types of dress appropriate for the variety of evening activities. In 1832, The Ladies' Cabinet alerted its readers, "Moiré is coming much into favour for dinners of ceremony or evening parties." The modest neckline, long sleeves, and subtle moiré textile suggest that this is a dinner or evening party dress.

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Acquaintance card from the collection of Alan Mays.

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Found flower arranging image via Camille Brown.

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Mouth-to-mouth contact occurs across the animal kingdom, including in many, but not all, human societies. Such contact is commonly referred to as “kissing,” which we more formally define as a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer. ... Kissing poses an evolutionary problem, since it does not appear to aid survival or reproduction in an obvious way, while the potential costs of disease transfer are high. What is its benefit or adaptive function?

Matilda Brindle, Catherine F. Talbot, and Stuart West , "A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing." Evolution and Human Behavior, November 19, 2025.

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Though researchers found evidence of kissing in several species, they narrowed the focus of the study mostly to the behavior of large apes, like gorillas, orangutans and baboons.

But the vast use of the practice surprised Dr. Brindle. She said she had expected examples of kissing among apes and humans, but was surprised to see the gentle behavior shared between bugs, albatrosses and polar bears.

“For some reason, I didn’t expect this many of them to kiss,” Dr. Brindle said.

sunday tune: doveman - the best thing

 

odds and ends / 1.29.2026

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Cloud Appreciation Society: "A 22-degree halo spotted near Lake Crystal, Minnesota, U.S., by David, the brother of Sarah Richards (Member 5,763) ... The bright spots on either side of the halo and level with the Sun are known as parhelia, or sun dogs. These phenomena form as a result of sunlight refracting through microscopic prisms of ice glittering in the low air, known as "diamond dust.'"

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Remy Charlip, via Camille Brown.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Glass staircase at Go'o Shrine, Naoshima, Japan, 2002.

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The sun's rays glanced off the earth at a low angle, bent and twisted through the atmosphere, and refracted in the icy air. Mirages, fogbows, sun dogs, mock moons, and other tricks of the light were so common the men learned not to trust their eyes. On windless days, when suspended ice crystals drifted slowly through the air, they formed prisms that refracted light and made it seem as if there were multiple suns in the sky. The most spectacular such illusion, known as a parhelic circle, caused four false suns to appear at the cardinal points of a halo around the real sun. When conditions were perfect, two perpendicular lines of light, vertical and horizontal, connected these illusory orbs, intersecting in the center to form an enormous talismanic cross. The sight filled even a man as scientifically inclined as Lecointe with reverential awe. "You feel there is something else besides the earth," the captain described. "This sort of religiosity makes you sense a God, not a specific God, but a vastly superior being." 

Julian Sancton, Madhouse at the End of the Earth.

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What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?

Elias Canetti, "Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death." The Paris Review, 1/5/2022.

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INTERVIEWER

What happened when they arrested you?

OSWALD

They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, “I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,” and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up. They drove us to some tents, where we gave our names and addresses and were given bail. There was a scene with the officer who arrested me, who kept saying that I was Section 12, and the officer who was writing it down, saying, “Are you sure?” Because Section 12 means up to fourteen years in prison. Section 13 is up to six months in prison or a fine. The officer kept saying, “Yep, Section 12,” but when I looked at my form a couple of weeks later, I saw that she had actually written Section 13. It was confusion. They didn’t really understand why they were arresting old women with signs.

Alice Oswald, The Art of Poetry No. 119, The Paris Review, Winter 2025.

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Movements need signals and symbols and performance as much as they need on-the-ground commitment.

Protest marches and rallies and strikes and daily calls to elected officials send signals and generate performance and create points of entry that lead to action. A signal from one person becomes action in another. Signals, virtuous or otherwise, help to rally people around a collective cause. So, let your signal be virtuous! Let it inspire! Voicing individual support or disapproval for something you care about creates a ripple effect that begins to change public sentiment, shift culture, alter voting choices, and rejigger patterns of patronage and consumption.

What I want to say to all of the folks with platforms, or without them, wondering if it makes a difference to say anything is, of course it does you giant ding dongs!

Erin Boyle, "Go ahead, send out a signal." Make/Do, 1/28/2026.

(Related: With a post, Erin and Garrett Bucks have raised $25,000 for rent relief in Minneapolis.)

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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.  

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"'The music of the spheres,' he said, "would have to be written on broken instruments."

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Tomorrow: a strike. 

Other ways to be part of the action. 

How to help the Twin Cities. 

And be ready to help Springfield, Ohio, where a 30-day ICE surge is planned.