Fortune magazine, Vol. 11, No. 2, New York, February 1935. Cover art by A. Petruccelli. Via Letterform Archive.
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Grandmother clock, The national Museum of Finland. Via Anonymous Works.
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Hand-painted vintage shearling jacket, Cuttalossa x Wayward Collection.
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Gondola soft pastels at Moth (I want to buy these just to hold those colors in my hand!)
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Vintage signet ring inscribed, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers."
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Throughout his life, de Quincey would be troubled by pain in his guts. A brilliant student, fluent in Greek, in 1802 he ran away from Manchester Grammar, tossing his trunk down the stairs one moonless night. Of course, the lives of the Romantics were filled with desperate flights, but de Quincey was perhaps the most adept at sleeping in actual fields and trudging through mountainous rain. A smallish teenager, he calls the sunset pompous. He watches the girls in bonnets. Then he is found and disappears again to befriend a virgin whore in London’s soggy streets.
Danielle Dutton, "One Woman and Two Great Men," Chicago Review.
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Everybody who’s heard of [Constance] Woolson knows that she and [Henry] James eventually became great friends, and that she was probably in love with him. And they know too that she died, desperately lonely and ill, in Venice in January 1894, having either fallen or thrown herself from a third-floor window. That’s what people remember, and it’s also what they need to forget. What’s more interesting is the story of just how those facts became salient, somehow more important than such great stories as 'Rodman the Keeper' or 'St. Clair Flats' (1873), with its sad, magical evocation of a midwestern marsh country.
Michael Gorra, reviewing Constance Fenimore Woolsen: Collected Stories for The New York Review of Books, 7/23/2020.
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It is this urge to spin a bigger story that is the fatal flaw of Batuman’s article—the 'good faith' effort to find some overarching meaning in this esoteric tale about rental families. The ultimate point of Batuman’s story is not that the Japanese are weird, even if much of the article is unfortunately devoted to establishing precisely that premise, but that we are all weird—that we all have strange, complicated notions of family and deal with them in convoluted and sometimes absurd ways.
This debacle shows us that what we actually share in common is not so uplifting.
Ryu Spaeth, "How The New Yorker Fell Into the 'Weird Japan' Trap," The New Republic, 12/17/2020.
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We might read the epidemic of food nostalgia as an example of what Zygmunt Bauman has called “retrotopia”: the turn in the public mindset “from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever-too-obviously untrustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness.”
Aaron Timms, "Salt, Fat, Acid, Defeat," N+1, 12/31/2020.
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"Somewhere on a single limestone cliff on Moresby Island in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, a thoroughly forgettable moss is in danger of dying out." (Via The End of the World Review)
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Frost painting (scroll to the end of the discussion of scary Russian fairy tales for instructions).
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