flowers for mothers (not medals)
Pansies for thoughts: Anntian g-mallows t-shirt.
A blank journal by IDEA, with photographs of Shozo Sato's ikebana scattered throughout to encourage words to bloom, or a book about finding flowers (a favorite).
Nonfiction "Open Arms" perfume, "an interpretation of a healing moment, nurtured with elements of nature’s vitality and caring gestures. Ripe fruits, sweet flower blossoms, fresh green leaves from nascent branches, and crushed peels are condensed to create a fresh, bittersweet essence." (A fresh, bittersweet essence is exactly how I'd describe motherhood.)
Garden notecards by Jane Ormes at Bari Zaki.
A length of floral embroidered ribbon from Minnieolga, to tie in her hair or use as a bookmark.
A long basket by kaaterskill market and a pair of snips, for bringing home bouquets.
A tea towel that looks like a meal of flowers or actual petals to eat (The Quiet Botanist's matcha rose chocolate bar).
Spiritual Objects golden flower necklace, for everyone and anyone called to mother, in whatever form that takes.
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(This is the medal I am talking about; absolutely repugnant.)
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imaginary outfit: a rainy saturday walk in paris
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I spent the last two weeks of March in Paris—one week with my mom and sister, one week with Sean and Hugh. On the Saturday that fell in the middle, my sister and mom woke up early to leave for the airport, and Sean and Hugh were scheduled to arrive sometime later that afternoon. So after I got the rental apartment in order, I dropped my bags at a luggage locker. Then, the morning was mine.
I needed to cross the river to get where I was going: the Musée de Minéralogie, a 200-year-old wonder-cabinet of rocks, gems, and minerals tucked inside the École des Mines, and the Jardin des Grands Explorateurs. After a cold and sunny week, the rain was falling light and steady, but the air was warm. As I walked, I looked. I saw a woman in a boldly striped ankle-length grass-green and navy slicker chatting with a butcher in a shop aglow with pink neon. Nearby, a masted ship carved in stone was frozen in full sail above the door of a boy's school, a comic book shop promised stories for heros, and ancient saints with woebegone faces leaned on each other in the arch around the doors of a weathered church. Tucked in a little alley I looked into shop windows full of glass-tipped pens and prune-colored ink, rings heavy with old intaglios, and silvery Japanese papers. There was a poetry bookstore with simple wood shelves that I coveted (I went back later to get a closer look at those).
I kept walking, headed toward the flower market. I saw a man riding a bike with two umbrellas open; one over his head, but the other angled over the handlebars, like some sort of mutant turtle. I passed the big old clock; blue, spattered with gold, with a face like the sun and two serene women presiding over the time, wielding sword and scale. I passed lines of people waiting in the rain, patiently waiting to see splendor, and walked on along the wide streets. I passed through a small park littered with the remnants of an old church; it's there you find the oldest tree in Paris. I wandered through a cold, clammy church, dark with stone pillars, then past big bookstores promising sales and high street shops with rainwashed fronts. I saw the backside of a medieval garden and walked through a market with bricks of nut-studded nougats stacked like cinder blocks. I saw a second clock, much smaller, behind a fogged pane of glass set into an alcove in the thick, creamy walls of the Sorbonne; it was near a statue with a lipsticked mouth, garish against the stone. And eventually I found where I was going, after entering a glassed vestibule watched by a friendly guard and wandering austere school halls marked with noticeboards. I turned a corner and found myself facing a startlingly grand staircase surrounded by murals depicting ice caves and other geologically sublime places. I rang the bell and bought my ticket. I spent longer than I expected looking at the specimen samples, but also at the beautiful blond wood cases, with slanted glass tops, some protected by lids, that stretched on from room to room to room. Tall windows overlooking the Jardins du Luxembourg were thrown open and the rooms smelled of rocks, rain and wood; I caught glimpses of the Eiffel Tower behind a scrim of cloud.
As I was leaving, I found a locked door—through its glass pane, I could just see a peek of the skylit library, closed that day. I walked out through the gardens; by then, the sun had appeared, and the famous pale green chairs scattered throughout the grounds were filling up. The air smelled like hyacinths. I made it to the Jardin des Grands Explorateurs and ambled all the way to the massive bronze turtles sunning themselves in the dry fountain bed. Then it was time to meet my guys, so I turned back. But I made sure to visit the bees along the way; I first stumbled across them by accident more than twenty years ago and hoped that I would find them again this time. It felt good to know that they are still there.
Rachel Antonoff Marie the Baguettes Madison slicker / ventilated Calzuro clogs / Two New York sweatshirt / COS slouchy pants / Kathryn Bentley fish studs / Sapir Bachar gold eternity beads necklace / Manicurist nail polish in Hollyhock (I bought this in Paris and have been impressed by how well it holds up) / Nizū Kanū x Niwaki rucksack / The Common Toad and other Essays by George Orwell / Bresciani socks, colored like the iridescent oil slick on a puddle.
odds and ends / 3.31.2025
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Found text via stopping off place.
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What was being contrived at the time was the abolition of all dissent or nuance, with narrow-mindedness elevated to a universal principle, and betrayal the new public morality.
W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling. From Silent Catastrophes (excerpted in Book Post).
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Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how—it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable—radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it—they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water—because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
Masha Gessen, "The Barrage of Trump's Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It Is Supposed To." The New York Times, 2/15/2025.
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Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed . . . by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli . . . We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made?
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To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal—no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet.
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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. ...
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin, "Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." November 19, 2014. Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin.
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A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being.
Sam Kriss, "Alt Lit." The Point, 2/4/2025.
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chronoclasm
(plural chronoclasms). From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), and κλάστης (klástēs, “a person who breaks something”); from κλάω (kláō, “break”).1. The intentional destruction of clocks and other time artifacts
2. (politics) The desire to crush the prevailing sense of time, due to a conflict regarding the fixation of linear time in a community
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Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. 'While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,' she writes, 'it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.' She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our 'time-givers' instead.
David Farrier, "Wild Clocks." Emergence, January 23, 2025.
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What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.'
Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters.
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Saturday plans:
Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!
february 28, 2025 / "this is our first action"
I think there’s a fake fantasy of solidarity that is like the rainbow: one of you, and one of you, and we’re all happy and we all look alike and we’re all together, and that’s really not what it is. It’s a fraught and constantly shifting series of relationships. And as much as it is a fantasy, it is also an absolute necessity because at least in the United States, change only comes from coalition, and if you’re out there on your own, you cannot transform the society. ...
ACT UP had a radical democracy structure in which people were allowed to disagree and they could function in separate spheres as long as they adhered to the one-sentence statement of unity, which was “direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” If you were doing direct action to end the AIDS crisis, really you could do anything. And the key to ACT UP was that they did not try to force homogeneity of analysis or strategy. Instead, there was simultaneity. So it’s not about compromise, it’s about coexistence—or as the Palestinians call it, co-resistance. ...
Activism is about opening a door that makes it possible for people to be effective where they’re at.
Sarah Schulman, interviewed by Sally Tamarkin for them, 12/15/2023.
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From Newsweek:
As a response to the [Trump Administration's] DEI rollbacks, the People's Union is planning a 24-hour economic blackout all day on February 28, beginning at 12 a.m.
During this time, participants are pledging to not make any purchases either online or in brick-and-mortar stores.
The People's Union is targeting Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy, but the group is also asking boycotters to refrain from spending money on fast food or gas, as well.
If consumers must make purchases, they are asked to buy only from small, local businesses.
The article also includes this quote from Kevin Thompson, founder and CEO of 9i Capital Group:
"History has shown us this—our ancestors leveraged economic pressure in 1955 during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted far longer than a single day and led to real systemic change," Thompson said. "While the impact of a one-day boycott may be limited, its true power lies in mobilizing a like-minded community. If this initiative sparks a larger movement, its long-term influence could extend far beyond February 28.
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WHY THIS MATTERS
- Corporations and banks only care about their bottom lines.
- If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.
- If they don't listen (they won't), we make the next blackout longer (we will).
This is how we make history.
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Image of a Diane di Prima button found at art predator.
'as if a swan sang'
Hao Boyi, "Love for the rinsing," 1991. Woodblock print. Via le jardin robo.
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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.
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John Hollander's "Swan and Shadow" shape poem, 1969. Via Anabela.
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Hans Christian Anderson paper cut-out of Pierrots balancing on swans, 1820-1875. The Met.
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Girl feeding swans in the Bois de Bologne, Paris, ca. 1930.
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Anna Stokes, "White Wall-Mounted Swan," in the collection of CoCA/York Gallery.
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Swans covering Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."
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... Come, then, and let us walkSince 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 swansThat night in late October while they slept?Swans must have stately dreams, I think.
Sara Teasdale, from "A November Night."
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Me elsewhere: Delighted to be among these seven swans on Catbird's site.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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