*
Sawyer Made split-step stool, for Walker Street Market, photographed by Winnie Yang via The Secret Strategist.
*
"Ideal Hollow" by Nichola Manning, via drifting lament.
*
*
Lissa Rivera, "A Fine Line: The Art of the Clothesline," Museum of the City of New York Blog, 8/7/2012.
"Suffering and enjoyment as sources of knowledge."
Photo of H.D. and a child on a beach in California, collections of the Beinecke Library.
*
Overlapping in a complex network, each line of garments reads as a household census noting: age, family size, and social status. Bed sheets, undergarments, and women’s hosiery on thin strings allude to bodies not present. Starched white shirts dangle neck-down on tiny tightropes stories high above a precipice of filth-black alleys. A warm summer breeze could bring each garment to life with the weightlessness of guardian angels overlooking the city.
Lissa Rivera, "A Fine Line: The Art of the Clothesline," Museum of the City of New York Blog, 8/7/2012.
*
[Clotheslines] were useful in many ways besides drying laundry: for running messages and cups of sugar from one apartment to another, or—stretched diagonally down to the ground—for conveying groceries to the elderly infirm or growlers of beer up to the corner saloon. They were characteristic of a life stretched by necessity, out of interiors of apartments as far as possible into the public space beyond.
Lucy Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.
*
She felt contempt for her environment. ‘Women, yech!’ she’d say. ‘Clotheslines and gossip,’ she’d say. She knew there was another world—the world—and sometimes she thought she wanted that world. Bad. She’d stop dead in the middle of a task, staring for long minutes at a time at the sink, the floor, the stove. But where? how? what?
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments.
*
I think the idea of comfort generally, even when you asked me if I’m comfortable, is a rich thing. These are concepts. If you ask somebody how they grew up, they won’t tell you rich. They’ll say, “We were comfortable.” I’d never heard the word growing up. Comfortable? What? We’re not comfortable. Nobody is comfortable! There are roaches in the sink. The snow has come through the window, and I’ve got to put cellophane on it. Nobody is comfortable, and we’re very comfortable being uncomfortable. But the rich are not. And they dictate what is comfortable and what isn’t. They are uncomfortable often.
Robby Hoffman, interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the NYT, 6/27/2026.
*