even*cleveland: angels

Showing posts with label angels. Show all posts

festive things

Gislebertus, "Dream of the Magi," circa 1120-30 , Cathedral of Saint-Lazare, Autun, France. Via Stephen Ellcock.

Mary Delany, "Ilex Aquifolium (Tetandria tetragynia)," from an album (Vol.V, 60); Holly with berries. 1775. Collage of colored papers, with bodycolor and watercolor, on black ink background. The British Museum.

George Brecht, "A Christmas Play for Joseph Cornell," 1963.

Olivier Dassault, "Untitled/Christmas card," 1987. MFA Boston.

Tacuinum Sanitatis, Milan or Pavia, ca. 1390-1400. Via The Fortnight Institute.

Schreiber pop-up toy theater book, ca.1885. The V & A.

Katie Marchant/thankyou_ok Christmas cake.

Holiday dress of my dreams: Rothermal Theater Dress by Bode.

Star Finial, artist unidentified, United States, 1875–1925, paint and gilding on metal, 45 × 22 × 9 in. American Folk Art Museum.

1883 Louis Prang silk-fringed Christmas card.

... [W]e are seeing our own mortality in the close of day and year. The hours of sunlight run by more quickly, and we’re left behind in the darkness. It’s hard now to feel the privation of former winters, or experience the desolation of the landscape; it’s not even likely to snow. But we see the trees unleafing, and sense the different strains of winter light: sometimes bright and cold, often thin and misted. Much of our enjoyment of this gauntness is in relief. Fasting for advent used to make a penitence of nature’s dearth, relieved at last by ecstatic abundance. On Christmas Eve congregations would hang the branches of the churchyard trees with apples. In Moscow, they deck avenues of leafless boughs with red and gold baubles, which has the same effect.

Our contrivance of these spots of colour has its roots in nature’s contingencies: red berries on a black branch, an evergreen tree in a field of snow—Ruskin’s lesser beauties perhaps. But it takes a mind to frame them, to put the tree in a painting or a living room. Sometimes novelty itself seems poetic, as though the product of design. ... We aestheticise the tree by changing its setting, or we admire it through a picture. Christmas itself is a removal, separated from the rest of the year by its spangles and pageantry. The season makes us tourists of our own nostalgia; it’s best not to think too hard about the absurdity of chopping down a tree and covering it with tiny ornaments. What do we do with the wanwood when the new year comes? In the 16th century, after the feast and the dancing, the tree would be ceremonially burned, marking the end of festivities with a final brilliant spectacle, which does seem better than leaving it on the street for the council to collect.

Alicia Sprawls, "Christmas Trees." London Review of Books, 1/5/2017.

In 1419, the Freiburg bakers’ apprentices noted having seen a tree set up in a hospital, decorated with apples, wafers, gingerbread, and tinsel. In Riga, in 1510, a brotherhood of merchants are said to have set up a tree around Christmastime, then decorated it with thread and straw; they burned it at Lent. Many of the hints of early Christmas-tree—or solstice-tree, or New Year’s tree—traditions come from rules limiting them. A regulation in Upper Alsace specified that each citizen could take from the forest no more than one pine, of a height no more than eight shoes. A 1611 ban against felling trees in the Alsatian town of Turckheim is arguably the first appearance of the term “Christmas tree”: Weihnachtsbaum.

Rivka Galchen, "The Science of Christmas Trees." The New Yorker, 12/6/2022.

One thing is for certain—I wouldn’t want to be a Christmas tree. It would be nice to be the center of attention, to be so decorated and lit that people stared at you in wonder, and made a fuss over you, and were mesmerized. That would be nice. But then you’d start dropping your needles and people would become bored with you and say you weren’t looking so good, and then they’d take all your jewelry off, and haul you off to the curb where you would be picked up and crushed and eventually burned. That’s the terrible part. Maybe that’s why so many people today have fake trees. They are quite popular. Their limbs come apart and you can put them in boxes and store them. You can have one of these trees until you die and you can pass them on to your children. They may not be real but when you look at them you can’t tell the difference. That always makes people happy—not being able to tell the difference. And happiness, to want to be happy, is the most natural thing of all.

Mary Ruefle, "Recollections of My Christmas Tree." Harpers, December 20, 2013.

See also: Robert Frost, "Christmas Trees."

Charles Mingus' secret eggnog recipe.

Merry everything, friends.

odds and ends / 1.12.2023

Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel, 1903.

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Léon Spilliaert, Winter round the lake, 1929.

Melted clock.

Proustian holiday card.

Sculpture by Tung Ming-Chin.

Hans Christian Anderson's sun troll.

'Time is incredibly flexible and we all experience it in different ways,' Ogden explains. ... In Iraq, for example, people she surveyed almost universally felt that time slowed. But half of U.K. respondents who experienced time distortion felt it moved faster than in what we've come to think of as 'the before times.' In Argentina, younger, physically active women felt time passed faster than older men. Ogden says it's hard to pinpoint the root cause of those differences, because there are so many different variables. Living in a war-torn area, or under strict lockdown policies, could help explain the differences in each country. 'When life changes, time changes,' Ogden says.

Yuki Noguchi, "How Did COVID Warp Our Sense of Time? It's a Matter of Perception." NPR's Morning Edition, December 14, 2022.

The imperative to always demonstrate the right stuff shaped the language that astronauts used to describe their experiences in space. As Patricia Santy, a longtime psychiatrist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston, wrote in 1994, “Expression of emotions such as sadness or fear is considered a weakness.” If the sight of Earth marooned in darkness inspired such feelings in the heart of an astronaut, he was unlikely to admit it, lest he jeopardize his shot at another mission. ... Weibel, who conducts anonymous interviews of astronauts for her research, said that one told her he took one look out the window of the space shuttle and “became absolutely convinced we would kill ourselves off between 500 and 1,000 years from now.” He never said so publicly.

Marina Koren, "Seeing Earth From Space Will Change You; The Question is How." The Atlantic, December 10, 2022.

"Far from being exceptional, the sense of looming annihilation, of going about our daily business on the edge of an abyss, has been the norm for quite some time."

Because of the tutoring, because it is a Teaching Monday after a Friday payday, because I am delirious after three solid hours of two different seminars of two dozen sulky first-years, I buy sneakers I unnecessarily tried on and coveted last week. Cycle of unnecessary shopping becoming rationalized into necessary purchase. I want a uniform. Everything I buy will be the last thing.

My mom texts me an article about uniform shopping, “what if you buy yourself a uniform, a capsule closet,” she suggests. But what if I have claustrophobia.

Adrienne Raphel, "Shopping Diary." The Paris Review, November 25, 2022.

"I try to remember what it was like knowing nothing, how powerful that was, and it seems like a lost idyll."

She was afraid of finding someone else’s thoughts left behind in her personality, like a strange scarf unearthed from the sofa cushions after a party. Books were the most acute threat to the sanctity of the bordered self.

Audrey Wollen, "The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books." The New Yorker, January 3, 2023.

"Where gaps are present, there the real work of reading begins."

Is there ever anything sham about it, I sometimes wondered reading Tenth of December, moving toward one of his deaths or near-deaths. A cheapness? There was a whiff of robin funerals, of that kid who wants to feel the feeling, something you don’t get with, say, Flannery O’Connor, who might actually have killed people. Then again, robin funerals are kind of the business: a little thing to put in a box, so that the rest of us can be glad to feel alive.

Patricia Lockwood, "Worm Interlude." London Review of Books, November 17, 2022.

"I suppose I’m trying to make a space where people can rest their attention in one place for a while."

Snow drawings.