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Sophia Thoreau, five hickory leaves inscribed with “Fair Haven,” a poem by her brother Henry. In 1841, he wrote in his journal, "It is as a leaf which hangs over my head in the path. I bend the twig and write my prayers on it, then letting it go the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven ... As if it were not kept shut in my desk—but were as public a leaf as any in nature."
"Eggs of Macremphytus varianus inserted in the leaf of dogwood" from Insect Life and Natural Insect History by S.W.Frost, 1942 (1959 edition). Via stopping off place.
Donna Dennis, "Has Henry James put me in this mood?" The Paris Review, 9/22/2022.
"It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on you to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline."
Emily Colucci, "If I Stay All Night and Talk: Conversation as Corrective in Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan’s 'Faith, Hope and Carnage.'" Filthy Dreams, 9/20/2022.
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Detail of a 20th century Vietnamese wood panel, via Bonne Maison.
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Smooth and lumpy sculpture in walnut wood by Julian Watts.
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Yoko Ono, Earth Piece, 1963.
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Coming back in a cab, I saw a man dragging a big square piece of plywood across the street to plunk it down next to a big earthy hole he was digging in the street. The plywood looked as if it might cover the hole. I felt a vague excitement—a stirring of memories about how exciting a hole with earth heaped beside it had been to me a few years ago—I remembered digging for red clay—digging into a hill, digging for Australia, digging ’til water came in, the danger of digging a deep hole and getting inside, etc.
Donna Dennis, "Has Henry James put me in this mood?" The Paris Review, 9/22/2022.
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Awe-tinged wonder’s positive ethical potential is related to its power to unsettle the wonderer. It erodes the ego’s defences, throwing the wonderer slightly off her guard, so that she might come to view the world, and her place in it, differently. Research on wonder and awe seeks to understand this phenomenon of accommodation and its potentially significant – and salutary – effects. Investigators have pinpointed a distinction between short-term, experimentally induced awe (using immersive videos or images of landscapes) and ‘dispositional’ awe experienced by people in whom wonder has become a habitual mode of engagement with the world.
Lisa Sideris, "To Benefit From Wonder, Make Sure You've Got the Genuine Kind." Pysche, 10/4/2022.
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The best thing that can happen to me while reading a poem is to fall off a cliff at a line break. In the plummet, meaning splits apart, and when I land on the next line (or in empty space!) I can’t retrace my steps. This gap in the sensible that poetry provides is pure potential: aesthetic and political. Such eruptions in time and meaning—like the femme voices of Greek myth—threaten order and containment.
Elvia Wilk, "Siren (some poetics)," 4Columns.
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Gohar calls the Argentine psychologist Susana Balán her “therapist,” though she concedes that the term isn’t quite right: they speak regularly, but Gohar does not pay for sessions. “It’s more like I’m a subject she’s studying,” Gohar explained. The two met after Gohar read Balán’s self-published children’s book, “Link and the Shooting Stars,” and identified with its hero. The story follows a young misfit horse, Link, who sets out to find a life that can accommodate his many talents and interests. The book is intended to illustrate a concept that Balán has developed called the “Link personality,” which she feels Gohar exemplifies. Such people have “many ‘I’s,” Balán told me.
Molly Fischer, "Laila Gohar's Exquisite Taste." The New Yorker, 9/19/2022.
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The Rorschach is now broadly considered a pseudoscience ... In a way, it was discredited from the start: Hermann Rorschach never had any success promoting his method, and the psychoanalytic establishment paid it little attention. Rorschach died only a year after completing his system, still in his thirties, and he might have been forgotten entirely if his cards weren’t taken up by the US military. The Army needed a way to weed out psychotics from their recruits, and the inkblot test was an ideal method for a modern military. It’s replicable and it’s cheap, you can mass-produce the inkblot cards like bullets, and it can be administered without much training. ... Maybe the best name for the test would not be pseudoscience, but magic. A kind of mid-century witch-doctoring, perfectly compatible with IBM systems and the big faceless bureaucracies of military and corporate life. At its core, it’s an exercise in mythopoesis: the way we take random patterns and fill them with meaning; the symbols by which the world reveals itself.
Sam Kriss, "The Roaring of Things." Justin E.H. Smith's Hinternet, 9/25/2022.
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The part of my brain that wasn’t battling itself over a musical necessary belief in the divine was given over to the image, presented at the end of the audiobook’s exclusive final 12-minutes, of Nick Cave panic-buying a hundred cans of baked beans in a fury of pandemic paranoia, sending them to his sons, and responding to their confusion with the vague threat: “Something’s coming down the line.”
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... [H]ere is a proposition for you to consider: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need. In fact, I’d invite you to do more than consider it. Take it out for a spin in the world. See if proceeding on this assumption doesn’t change how you experience life, maybe not radically, but perhaps for the better. And the implicit corollary should also be borne in mind. If I have exactly as much attention as I need, then in those moments when I feel as if I don’t, the problem is not that I don’t have enough attention. It lies elsewhere.
L.M. Sacasas, "Your Attention is not a Resource." The Convivial Society, 4/1/2021.
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"My fungus period has been bubbly and fun and a lot of dancing."
... [F]orty-five minutes was, I think, his atom of time, the span of shortest possible duration. It took forty-five minutes to brush and floss his teeth. Forty-five minutes to shave. And forty-five minutes, minimum, to bathe. Forty-five minutes between saying, “I’m almost ready to go,” and going. ... These forty-five-minute intervals were because, I think, he did everything while thinking about something else. He lived inside a series of dreams, and each dream could admit only one pedestrian task into its landscape. He often spoke of the life of the mind. He wished for my brother and me that we could enjoy a life of the mind. But, as with many phrases, I think my dad used “the life of the mind” in his own way. He never, for example, urged us to read Foucault, or Socrates, or, really, any books. Those forty-five-minute blocks of daydreams were, I think, closer to what he meant by the life of the mind. They were about idly turning over this or that, or maybe also about imagining yourself as Marco Polo. They were about enjoying being alone, and in your thoughts.
River Galchen, "How to Recover From a Happy Childhood." The New Yorker, October 3, 2022.
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I have a vague memory of a nun approaching me at some conference — not a nuns conference — and saying, “You got it right.” Which I really hope so. I really hope there are communities of women all over the world who are just thoroughly themselves. I wish it was everywhere, just not in convents.
Siobhán McSweeney in Vulture on playing Sister Michael, a "natural anarchist," in Derry Girls.
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