Assorted Fabergé treasures from the collection of Harry Woolf, to be auctioned by Christies on November 29, 2021.
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Hannah and Mary and the anchovy paste, via Lapham's Quarterly.
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Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2000. Photo by Christopher Burke via Architectural Digest.
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Mille-feuille silk flats by Sleeper.
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"Bookworm" holes, via The Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Card from the Astronomia deck published by F.G. Moon, ca. 1829-1831. Yale University Library.
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There are many things we can live without. Self-respect is not one of them. One would think the absence of self-respect would resemble much of a sameness, but the circumstances that can make people feel bereft of it are as variable as persons themselves.
Vivian Gornick, "Put on the Diamonds." Harpers, October 2021.
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Living in a fantasy world where you can shit on losers in your published work with no consequences and then cover it up with groupthink isn’t artistic freedom or social change, it’s just being an asshole for no discernible reason other than making yourself and your friends feel superior to a loser who doesn’t know basic social graces or have very many friends.
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Related: The eighth deadly sin, the "fake skills, fake friends, and fake jobs" of the creative writing industrial complex, and what this is all about: "Who is the bad art friend?" (NYT)
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First, you hear something slightly titillating, a bit of gossip you didn’t know. A couple has separated, someone says. “They’ve been keeping it secret. But now Angie’s dating Charles’s ex!” Then you hear something wildly wrong. “The F.D.A. hasn’t approved it, but also there’s a whole thing with fertility. I read about a woman who had a miscarriage the day after the shot.” And then something offensive, and you feel a desire to speak up and offer a correction or objection before remembering that they have no idea you’re listening. They’re not talking to you.
Chris Hayes, "On the Internet, We're Always Famous." The New Yorker, 9/24/2021.
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"There is no strict frontier between what is pathological and what is not."*
When I was a kid, I insisted that my mother read me Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree over and over. Published in 1964, it’s a story about a boy who takes and takes from a tree over the course of his life until the boy is an old man and the tree is left a stump. “And the tree was happy,” the story ends. It’s a strange book, with an ending that is heartbreaking but also streaked with strange joy. I was surprised to discover recently that The Giving Tree is considered “one of the most divisive in the canon” of children’s literature in large part because its moral is unclear. Why is the tree happy when it has been sucked dry? Are we supposed to understand the relationship as one defined by generosity or abuse of power? There was even a 2014 article in The New York Times about whether The Giving Tree is a “tender story of unconditional love or a disturbing tale of selfishness.” Why not both, or, really, neither? It seems many of us can no longer imagine that children can handle, and may in fact prefer, stories defined by ambiguity—stories that have little to do with contemporary politics but rather to do with life as it is lived.
Sophie Haigney, "Persistence Pays: A Young Reader's Report." The Drift, Issue 5, 9/21/2021.
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Virginia Hamilton was doing daring, moody, singular character studies in these books and, with her seemingly limitless faith in children’s ability to make sense of the world, to intuit the difference between “sometimes people are like this” and “you, reader, should be like this” – a faith that seems, to put it lightly, not to be the current norm within the field – selling it as children’s fiction. Like all the best character-driven fiction, her work is an act of open-ended empathy and negative capability, a leap into the dark world of another mind. It helps us learn to say to other people, when they show us who they are: I don’t doubt that. And what else?
Phil Christman, "Book Tour: A Leap into the World of Another Mind." Plough, 9/7/2021.
When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality.
Adam Frank, "Minding Matter." Aeon, March 13, 2017.
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Freud claimed that technology only solved problems that technology itself had created. The alienation and malaise caused by one modern invention was momentarily relieved by another, a process he compared to “the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again.” Nobody seemed capable of articulating what problem these language models were designed to solve. There was some chatter about writing assistance, about therapy bots, about a future where you’d never have to write another email ... all of which seemed to skirt the technology’s most obvious use: replacing the underpaid and inefficient writers who supplied the content that fed the insatiable maw of the internet—people like me.
Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Babel: Could a Machine have an Unconscious?" n+1, Issue 40, Summer 2021.
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It is not news that writers don’t get paid much, but it will feel like news when you see how little the publisher is actually offering you. Writers from Stefan Zweig to William Burroughs have artfully sidestepped this problem by being born rich. We suggest that you do too.
The Fence, Issue 1: "12 Rules for Getting Your First Book Published."
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It’s not really possible to neutralize a chaotic life with homemade granola and a collection of jute shopping bags hung from beechwood pegs.
Mirielle Silcoff, "More is More: The End of Minimalism." The Walrus, 8/12/2021.
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Lilacs quietly tell the story of climate change. Since the 1950s, phenologists across the U.S. have used them as an “indicator plant” to track the start of spring because of their extreme sensitivity to temperatures. Their blooms elucidate the first warm day of the season as not just a feeling, but a fact. There’s an entire “lilac network” that stretches from coast to coast, made up of volunteers who have spent decades documenting the exact days that the buds burst open and winter becomes a passing thought.
Sara Tardiff, "How L.A.’s Flower District Vendors Are Feeling the Effects of Climate Change." Vogue, 9/10/2021.
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My generation has arrived at a party which seems to be ending, and it’s getting harder to recall birds as they were in the days of their plenty.
Patrick Laurie, "The Curlews of Galloway." The Paris Review, 9/30/2021.
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I asked her what it was like to have her husband home again, piled up in her driveway.
“Well, it’s compost,” she told me. “It’s still precious because it was his body. But it’s also compost.”
Lisa Wells, "To Be a Field of Poppies." Harpers, October 2021.
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