odds and ends / 9.8.2026

Firmin Baes, "The Young Girl and the Cabbage (‘La petite fille au chou’)," ca. 1903, private collection, Antwerp.

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A grasshopper design in Leavers lace. Late 19th or early 20th century. Collection of Anne Swift.

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Yui Suzukey, "Lattice Picnic," 2026.

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Felix Vallotton, "Coucher de soliel, nuages bleus (Sunset, Blue Clouds)," 1918.

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Excerpt from "Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him" by Nancy Willard.

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Early 20th century three-light chandelier made of lacquered sheet metal featuring thistles and tulips.

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Charlotte Perriand with an unknown man on a summer’s day, date and photographer unknown, from the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, via aetherian_upstate.

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He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer to the 19th century than it was to our own dully fractious era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.

Ian Penman, "Infinite Wibble." London Review of Books, 9/25/2025.

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Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity—the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious. ... A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere—extreme misery and extreme grandeur. It is when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

Simone Weil, "The Mysticism of Work" from Gravity and Grace.

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In order for work to be meaningful and sustaining, Weil argued, it had to demand thought and attention. This was an insight she arrived at through firsthand experience. During her work on the assembly lines of newly automated factories, she marveled at “this mental void inside me, this absence of thought indispensable to the slaves of a modern machine.” She worried that the “social machine,” the managerial class of bureaucrats and technocrats, was slowly gravitating toward unconsciousness as countless decisions were being outsourced to specialized technical criteria nobody really understood. Modern life was no longer serving human needs; it was serving the ends of the machine, and it was becoming more and more difficult to steer it in a direction of our choosing. In the talks I gave that year, I often quoted a passage from Oppression and Liberty in which she imagines a future civilization where “all human activity…was subjected right down to matters of detail to an altogether mathematical strictness, and that without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.” It never failed to elicit a sympathetic murmur from the audience.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Wishing It So." New York Review, 9/24/2026.

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... [H]e asked if I’d be open to reading some Shakespeare aloud together: specifically, Act I, Scene 7 and Act II, Scene 2 from “Macbeth.” ... “I’m kind of obsessed,” he said. “I go see the same plays over and over and over.” We sat opposite each other at a glass dining table in a midtown hotel suite. ... [H]is performance was serious, decisive, earnest. Afterward, I told him that it was nice to be reminded of the particular, idiosyncratic music of Shakespeare’s lines. He agreed. “It affects you even if you don’t understand the words sometimes,” he said. 

Amanda Petrusich, "Rivers Cuomo Is Piecing It All Together," The New Yorker, 8/30/2026.

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I myself went fell hard for the Eclogues as a University of Michigan undergrad from 1982 to 1984; really, the line A Jove principium; Jovis omnia plena (“The beginning is from Jupiter; all things are full of Jupiter”—but the English just doesn’t cut it) altered me neurologically and impaired my enthusiasm for anything subsequent. Indeed, I became an obscure poet, a translator, a sarcastic cultural historian, and a serial axe-wielding reviewer.

Sarah Ruden, "Criticism, Then." Book Post, June 18, 2026.

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"You do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time."

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We chew our burritos. Maybe our cells yearn to be free of us, I think, most unscientifically. Maybe they’re exhausted by the constant negotiations in time and space it takes to maintain the form of an eye, a limb, a mind. Lord knows I’m tired too.

Claire L. Evans, "Report from Goleta." Wild Information, 7/12/2026.

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Those constant bearers of meaning
bore me. I want to open wide now
to the absence of concept, understanding,
representation, to the inward flare
of exhilaration. To the gratuitous
revelation of mineral forces.

Forrest Gander, from Mojave Ghost.

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A curtain blowing in the breeze. 

odds and ends / 5.21.2026 (may flowers)

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Albert Marquet (1875-1947), "Flowering Tree," undated, via le jardin robo.

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"Gertrude always loved her flowers 1937," from the Peter J. Cohen collection.

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Poem by “Michael Field,” the pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published in 1893.

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Sawkille Minnewaska sconce.

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"Medaljonger" tapestry designed by Märta Måås-Fjetterström in 1926.

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One pressed dried rose which had been worn by the English poet George Gordon Byron on his lapel when he toured the frigate U.S.S. Constitution, anchored off Leghorn (Livorno), Italy, on May 21, 1822. The rose was given as a memento to Catharine Potter Stith, who was on board the ship with her husband Townshend Stith; the following day Byron sent her a volume of Goethe's Faust accompanied by an autograph note. The faded red rose consists of the blossom only, minus stem and leaves.

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Estrid Ericson at her summer house, Tolvekarna, in 1942, photographed by Bo Törngren, via Svenkst Tenn. (More photos here, including a truly enviable picnic set-up.)

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At Tolvekarna, Estrid Ericson aimed to create a kind of choreography of vegetation ...  In front of the house’s south-facing terrace, different varieties of honeysuckle, forsythia, lilac and currant were planted. By the outdoor seating area in the east, a rose garden was laid out to be enjoyed at breakfast. The roses were arranged in squares, each bordered by lavender, carnations and thyme.

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Whether I pick you or leave you, flowers,
Your destiny remains the same.

You, path that I follow, are heading
For other destinations, not just mine.

We are nothing that is of any worth
And are therefore doubly worthless.

Fernando Pessoa, 115 [c. 2 September 1923], from The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis.

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"I don't think flowers are at all unnecessary. I see it more as a kind of generosity."

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"Her mouth breathes flowers ..."

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To compare women to flowers is another habit of eternity or of triviality. Here are some examples. “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys,” says the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon. In the story of Math, which makes up the Fourth Branch of the medieval Welsh tale known as the Mabinogion, a lord is asked to form a woman who is not of this world, and by “magic and enchantment” conjures one out of “the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet….” In the Fifth Adventure of the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried at last beholds Kriemhild, and the first thing we are told is that her skin shines with the glow of roses. Ariosto, imitating Catullus, compares a maiden to a hidden flower (Orlando, I, 42); in Armida’s garden, in Tasso, a purplebeaked bird exhorts the lovers not to let this flower wither (Gerusalemme, XVI, 13-15). At the end of the sixteenth century, Malherbe tries to console a friend on the death of his daughter and in his condolence are these words: “Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses” (“And, a rose, she lived the lifetime of a rose”). Shakespeare, in a garden, admires the deep vermilion of the roses and the whiteness of the lilies, but these delights for him are but shadows of his absent love (Sonnets, XCVIII). “God, making roses, made my face,” says the Queen of Samothrace on a page of Swinburne. This list might go on without end; The same metaphor is suggested with delicacy in Milton’s famous lines (Paradise Lost, IV, 268-71) on the abduction of Proserpine, and in these lines from Darío: let it suffice to recall that scene in Stevenson’s last book, Weir of Hermiston, in which the hero wants to find out whether Christina had a soul in her or “if she were only an animal the colour of flowers….”

Jorge Luis Borges, "Up from Ultraism." The New York Review, 8/13/1970.

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If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from the Notebooks. 

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odds and ends / 2.27.2026

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Maurice Denis, Avril ou Les anémones, 1891.

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Glimpses into Plant Life by Eliza Brightwen, in the collection of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

As described in the catalog of Honey and Wax Books: 

"First edition of Glimpses into Plant Life (1897) by eccentric English naturalist Eliza Brightwen, in a publisher’s binding depicting a skeleton leaf. Born in 1830, Brightwen spent most of her life as an invalid, homebound and depressed at her country house, The Grove. After her husband’s death in 1883, however, Brightwen rallied. Her nephew recalled: 'As her physical strength increased she ventured to explore her lawns and shrubberies; she dared still further, into her woods and meadows; she wandered around her lake, and even, in a broad boat, upon it; she actually quitted her domain and explored the densely-wooded common that hemmed it in upon two sides. She discovered in herself a remarkable gift of natural magic.'"

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Arnold Friedman, Still Life with White Vase, ca. 1942-1946. Via Peter Shear.

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Vintage postcard of crocus flowers.

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Beaded maple-leaf coin purse, "suitable for your credit cards and identity documents."

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A clear, crispy day—dry and breezy air, full of oxygen. Out of the sane, silent, beauteous miracles that envelop and fuse me—trees, water, grass, sunlight, and early frost—the one I am looking at most today is the sky. It has that delicate, transparent blue, and the only clouds are little or larger white ones, giving their still and spiritual motion to the great concave. All through the earlier day (say from seven to eleven) it keeps a pure yet vivid blue. But as noon approaches, the color gets lighter, quite gray for two or three hours—then still paler for a spell, till sundown—which last I watch dazzling through the interstices of a knoll of big trees—darts of fire and a gorgeous show of light yellow, liver-color, and red, with a vast silver glaze askance on the water—the transparent shadows, shafts, sparkle, and vivid colors beyond all the paintings ever made.

I don’t know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these skies (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before), have had this autumn some wondrously contented hours—may I not say perfectly happy ones? As I have read, Byron just before his death told a friend that he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence. Then there is the old German legend of the king’s bell, to the same point. While I was out there by the wood, that beautiful sunset through the trees, I thought of Byron’s and the bell story, and the notion started in me that I was having a happy hour. (Though perhaps my best moments I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by inditing memoranda. I just abandon myself to the mood and let it float on, carrying me in its placid ecstasy.)

What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it?—so impalpable—a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure—so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days.

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And what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A mist retreating from the morning sun,
A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;
And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

John Clare, from "What is Life?"

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"Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees ..."

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Meghan O’Gieblyn on Marguerite Young: "All her books are, to some extent, about failed searches for paradise."

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"One of the most vast and unique perfume collections in the world already sits improbably in a California strip mall. It’s part sanctuary, part treasure map, and entirely shaped by a woman who has devoted her life to the art of finding what’s worth smelling."

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"Ultimately, I am a strange person who cannot fit neatly into reality."

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I yearn for a serious yet creative American political writer, like the British novelist and queen of reportage Rebecca West, who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening. I’m sometimes irritated at the play of her mind as too free; I want to shout at her that I’m not interested in the a complete tour of the setting in which the Cold-War-era spy William Marshall was arrested ... I’m sometimes put off by West’s emotional partisanship, almost certainly an effect of her hard-knocks youth ... But West’s dedication to work, to visiting and revisiting and going far off the beaten path, to interviewing and reading and writing and rewriting and republishing, sometimes over a span of decades when she was developing a single subject, paid off in super-large understanding.

Sarah Ruden, writing on Rebecca West for Book Post, 4/23/2025.

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 Found: 430,000-year-old wooden tools, a 500,000-year-old hammer of bone. 

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"The place on Earth from which you can, in theory, see further than any other is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan."

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In other news: Days are getting longer.

odds and ends / 1.29.2026

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Cloud Appreciation Society: "A 22-degree halo spotted near Lake Crystal, Minnesota, U.S., by David, the brother of Sarah Richards (Member 5,763) ... The bright spots on either side of the halo and level with the Sun are known as parhelia, or sun dogs. These phenomena form as a result of sunlight refracting through microscopic prisms of ice glittering in the low air, known as "diamond dust.'"

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Remy Charlip, via Camille Brown.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Glass staircase at Go'o Shrine, Naoshima, Japan, 2002.

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The sun's rays glanced off the earth at a low angle, bent and twisted through the atmosphere, and refracted in the icy air. Mirages, fogbows, sun dogs, mock moons, and other tricks of the light were so common the men learned not to trust their eyes. On windless days, when suspended ice crystals drifted slowly through the air, they formed prisms that refracted light and made it seem as if there were multiple suns in the sky. The most spectacular such illusion, known as a parhelic circle, caused four false suns to appear at the cardinal points of a halo around the real sun. When conditions were perfect, two perpendicular lines of light, vertical and horizontal, connected these illusory orbs, intersecting in the center to form an enormous talismanic cross. The sight filled even a man as scientifically inclined as Lecointe with reverential awe. "You feel there is something else besides the earth," the captain described. "This sort of religiosity makes you sense a God, not a specific God, but a vastly superior being." 

Julian Sancton, Madhouse at the End of the Earth.

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What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this pile—and all of it for nothing?

Elias Canetti, "Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death." The Paris Review, 1/5/2022.

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INTERVIEWER

What happened when they arrested you?

OSWALD

They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, “I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,” and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up. They drove us to some tents, where we gave our names and addresses and were given bail. There was a scene with the officer who arrested me, who kept saying that I was Section 12, and the officer who was writing it down, saying, “Are you sure?” Because Section 12 means up to fourteen years in prison. Section 13 is up to six months in prison or a fine. The officer kept saying, “Yep, Section 12,” but when I looked at my form a couple of weeks later, I saw that she had actually written Section 13. It was confusion. They didn’t really understand why they were arresting old women with signs.

Alice Oswald, The Art of Poetry No. 119, The Paris Review, Winter 2025.

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Movements need signals and symbols and performance as much as they need on-the-ground commitment.

Protest marches and rallies and strikes and daily calls to elected officials send signals and generate performance and create points of entry that lead to action. A signal from one person becomes action in another. Signals, virtuous or otherwise, help to rally people around a collective cause. So, let your signal be virtuous! Let it inspire! Voicing individual support or disapproval for something you care about creates a ripple effect that begins to change public sentiment, shift culture, alter voting choices, and rejigger patterns of patronage and consumption.

What I want to say to all of the folks with platforms, or without them, wondering if it makes a difference to say anything is, of course it does you giant ding dongs!

Erin Boyle, "Go ahead, send out a signal." Make/Do, 1/28/2026.

(Related: With a post, Erin and Garrett Bucks have raised $25,000 for rent relief in Minneapolis.)

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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.  

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"'The music of the spheres,' he said, "would have to be written on broken instruments."

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Tomorrow: a strike. 

Other ways to be part of the action. 

How to help the Twin Cities. 

And be ready to help Springfield, Ohio, where a 30-day ICE surge is planned.

candle, snowflake, gingerbread, angel

Clara Peeters, "Stilleben mit Façon-de-Venise-Glas, Römer und einer Kerze (Still life with dainties, rosemary, wine, jewels and a burning candle)," 1607.

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Cecelia Glasher's sketches of snowflakes, ca. 1855.

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A tree in winter, photographed by Dr. S.B. Ward ca. 1889, via Anonymous Works.

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Fruit bowl carved by Robert "Mouseman" Thompson, ca. 1950s.

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From Listen and Hear by Kathleen Shoesmith, 1973, via stopping off place.

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Metalwork by Erin Jackson Raynes.

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Barbara Cooney illustration for American Folk Songs for Christmas, via Honey and Wax Books.

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A recipe for gingerbread ca. 1395 and gilded gingerbread and mold. The Fitzwilliam Museum.

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Peter Doig, untitled watercolor, 1999, via le jardin robo.

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Antonia Pinter, "Szélanya," 2024. A History of Frogs.

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Wilson Alwyn Bentley, snow crystal ca. 1910.

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Merry everything, friends.

gifts of notable scale

Foot and hand pillows by John Sohn, for anthropomorphic blanket forts.

A miniature magazine all about miniatures: World of Interiors December 2025 special edition (image via Casa Magazines).

Jumbo Oni paperclips, for a big grip.

A a cottage-shaped box, to hold jewels or sewing notions, or rooms designed to fit on a page, designed by Miss Sarah Elizabeth Birdsall Otis.

A very big bag (Gabrielle Frantzen's raffia weekender), to encourage packing light.

The gift of one book crammed with words (a single-volume edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, complete with magnifying glass) or the gift of just three sentences, written by Kiosk.

An extremely difficult puzzle with just 159 pieces, by Artifact Puzzles.

A whale sized to swim in a tea pot, by Ocean Teabag.

Construction supplies for the littlest household projects by Mini Materials.

The ninth chapter of nine-year-old Daisy Ashford's novel, The Young Visiters, designed to fit on a shirt, by A History of Frogs.

A measuring tape by Alan Sobrino marked in increments of verse.

Lisa Swerling's "One Wish" Glass Cathedral—a summer's night under glass.

ghost ions / danger music

 

Joseph Scharl, "Sunflowers," 1935.

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Mardi Gras 1, costume plate 609. Costume Institute Fashion Plates, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Gwendolen Mary Raverat, "The Princess Lost," wood engraving on paper, 1926. Via mothflower.

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Vintage gloves found by apreski.

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Whalebone and wood whale vertebrae stool, circa 1870, via Rafael Osona Nantucket Auctions.

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Papier-maché skeleton for Odd Fellows initiation rites, ca. 1890s, at Potter & Potter Auctions.

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Odd Fellows symbolic chart, ca. 1870, at Potter & Potter Auctions.

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Allen Hutchinson plaster cast of the hand of Robert Louis Stevenson (undated), photographed by Fabiola Alondra. Edwin J. Beinecke Collection of Robert Louis Stevenson. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Part of Alondra's exhibition of hand-themed objects curated from the collection, "I hold it towards you" that "will present only a glimpse of an otherwise boundless world."

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Dick Higgins, "Danger Music Number Seventeen,” 1962.

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There are, according to Clarke, eight main categories of ghostly phenomenon: traditional ghosts (the souls of the dead); elementals (primitive entities that squat in a single place, like kelpies in lochs or disembodied creatures in burial grounds); poltergeists; mental imprint manifestations (the figure seen crossing a particular room at a certain time); crisis apparitions (of those who are dying or in mortal danger); time-slip experiences (tourists in Versailles in 1901 find themselves in 1792); ghosts of the living; and haunted inanimate objects. In practice there’s a lot of crossover between the categories, and a vast number of accounts – at least of those that come with a backstory–include one or all of certain salient elements: a crime, an untimely or violent death, and some problem with the funeral rites or legacy. These, it seems, are what cause the veil between worlds to lift, even today. The Society for Psychical Research investigated a case in 1998 at Westwood Hall in Staffordshire. The caretaker was writing about Prudentia Trentham, who is supposed to haunt the house, when the spellcheck replaced her name with ‘dead,’ ‘buried,’ ‘cellar.’ (Ghosts have always kept up with the available technology, invading photographs, audio equipment and even the Caterham bypass on the A22.)

Theo Tait, "A Dreadful Drumming," London Review of Books Vol. 35 No. 11, June 6, 2013. 

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From Wikipedia's list of reportedly haunted highways: "On a certain section of the Caterham bypass, spectral females have been seen in the carriageway and crossing the road."

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I felt like a ghost. At night, my sister would appear in my dreams. In the dreams, she hadn’t died. It had all been a misunderstanding. And she felt hurt that I had accepted it as real and continued on with my life, as if life could go on.

But as I said, it wasn’t my life that was going on—not the life I’d had. As I said, I was a ghost. The truth is that, even all these years later, I remain a ghost. You wouldn’t know it if you saw me. I’m not morose or retiring. I laugh a lot. In fact, I’m genuinely happier than many people I know. But I can’t help but feel that, on one level, I do not exist.

Vauhini Vara, "Ghosts." The Believer,  August 8, 2021. Vara wrote the story using ChatGPT.

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We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create custom AI agents to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death; indeed, the past year has seen a boom in startups purporting to offer such services. We call these generative ghosts since such agents will be capable of generating novel content rather than merely parroting content produced by their creator while living.

Meredith Ringel Morris and Jed R. Brubaker, "Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Risks and Benefits of AI Afterlives." 

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The eyeless screen of dawn. No cock is crowing. Instead, a clock’s serrated circle materialises on a blue sky ... Second by second, time counts down like berries plucked from a branch. The scale eats itself away: the circle dwindles to the last few seconds and vanishes. Valves heat up and burn off the night’s dust. Ghost ions float towards the inner surface of the glass.

The watchers are out there, ready to receive.

Rob Young, The Magic Box: Viewing Britain Through the Rectangular Window. (This is Young's description of television). 

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The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.

Czeslaw Milosz, diary entry dated September 20, 1987.