*
Rebecca Scattergood Savery, Sunburst quilt, 1839. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The quilt contains almost four thousand diamond-shaped pieces, each about four inches long, that were first basted to a paper template to ensure uniformity of size before being meticulously whip-stitched together. At least thirty-four different small-patterned, roller-printed cottons are used to form the octagonal rings that radiate from a central eight-pointed star to create a striking dark and light design.*
Inès Bressand Akamae basket no. 9, oval backpack in elephant grass.
*
Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890. National Gallery of Art.
*
Recycled gold and opals from WWAKE.
*
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.
From Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, quoted by Jeremy Lybargar in "SCUM Rising: The Long Afterlife of Valerie Solanas." The Baffler, 8/1/2019.
*
'After all, sane protest at a crazy world might well manifest as insanity.'
*
A one-person protest against development.
*
It took A.O. Scott twenty years to understand Tracy Flick.
*
There is a difference between debating something that is a true matter of opinion and entertaining an argument that is palpably false, between a willingness to look stupid in one’s personal quest for wisdom and the choice to actually be stupid by deciding that all theories are equally valid and deserve equal consideration.
Justin Peters, "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain." Slate, 3/21/2019.
*
"'Imaginary’ universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed ‘real’ one."
Mathemtician G.H. Hardy quoted by Karen Olssen, "The Aesthetic Beauty of Math." The Paris Review, 7/22/2019. (I cannot wait to read Olssen's book on Simone and André Weil).
*
Jia Tolentino on writing for the sake of writing, a conversation with Brandon Stosuy at The Creative Independent
*
Ross Gay, quoted in Nicole Rudick's essay "Delighting in Ross Gay, One Essay at a Time." NYR Daily, 8/17/2019.
*
'The Latest Dreams of Barbara Hilary, the First African-American Woman to Travel to the North Pole.'
*
I felt like a lizard sitting on a rock in the sun. I felt like Ramona in the Beverly Cleary books squeezing out a whole tube of toothpaste in the sink just for the pleasure of it. It was like floating in a completely still freezing-cold swimming pool on a hot day and just staring at the sun. I was like, 'Should I quit my job? I’ve organized my life all wrong.' So, no, I have no trouble, no trouble at all, disconnecting.
Jia Tolentino on writing for the sake of writing, a conversation with Brandon Stosuy at The Creative Independent
*
Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.
Ross Gay, quoted in Nicole Rudick's essay "Delighting in Ross Gay, One Essay at a Time." NYR Daily, 8/17/2019.
*
'The Latest Dreams of Barbara Hilary, the First African-American Woman to Travel to the North Pole.'
