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Bent woman/simple movement, via Kickpleat's Instagram.
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How to draw a mouse, from What to Draw and How to Draw It, by Edwin George Lutz, 1913.
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M.F.K. Fisher, from How to Cook A Wolf.
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[Editorial interlude: What I've gathered here may feel—probably is—utterly irrelevant. But this blog has always been a junk drawer—a place to lay whatever is rattling around my brain, and these are rattling days. There are two links to pandemic-related pieces, both clearly marked—no need to click them if it amplifies stress.]
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The softly-rippling impact of a book, an essay, a story, a poem, isn’t calculable in figures. I think about my students with young children, my friends who are single parents and uninsured freelancers. I think about the authors we haven’t read yet, whose books may never exist, because they do not have the space, literal and figurative, to birth their worlds onto paper. I think about mothers in particular, because the burden of childcare still falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders. These writers have unwritten libraries housed inside them, voices trapped inside the walls of our present system.
Who gets to live a spacious hour? Who gets to spend time with their children, and time doing work that fulfills them?
Karen Russell, "A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood." Wealthsimple.
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A ghost ship washes ashore after nearly a year at sea.
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Dissecting Garth Greenwell's extraordinary sentences.
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I told the art critic that I needed a rest for my mind, and that I was enjoying this stream of pure images. It was all squares, squares, squares of people’s children and flowers and dogs and sunsets and friends and family and parties and workouts and whatever else they saw that day.
Dayna Tortorici, "My Instagram." N+1, Winter 2020.
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The working class, the uneducated, the failures, and the washed out. We are creators too. And we are allowed to circumvent the tastefulness of the establishment, the cultural gatekeepers, and the university powerhouse. The art world hates us, yes. But art doesn’t.
Jessa Crispin, "The Topeka Fools." The Baffler, March 2020.
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Making these: Salted chewy chocolate cookies.
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'We just happened to be lucky enough to see the problem in terms we could understand. In terms of personal friendship, in fact.'
Margaret Talbot, "Ida and Louise Cook, Two Unusual Heroines of the Second World War." The New Yorker, 9/3/2019.
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How (and why) to sew masks for the CORVID-19 pandemic. (Editor's note: Nadia helped me spot the typo here, but I am leaving it so you can enjoy her comment about it. Sorry, though, crows!)
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The one thing that’s worth stockpiling is decency, that silver lining of our lives back in the USSR, with its near-permanent state of national emergency. Today, in America, where decency has taken a beating over the past four years, it might mean something as straightforward as not buying both of the last two loaves of bread, not forwarding that doomsday chain email, and not going out even if you are healthy.
Anastasia Edel, Oakland, California, 3/21/2020. The New York Review of Books Pandemic Journal.
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We must be at once cautious and courageous: courageous, in what doth not depend upon Choice; and cautious, in what doth.
Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758. Found thanks to Honey and Wax Books.
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