odds and ends / 5.21.2026 (may flowers)

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

Sawkille Minnewaska sconce.

*

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

*

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.

*

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.)

*

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.

* 

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.

*

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

*

"Her mouth breathes flowers ..."

*

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.

*

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. 

*

silvered flowers, beehive bonbons, and a deck of rainbows/gifts some mothers may enjoy

Silver paper flower by Momoca.

The Shenandoah Mansions linen robe (and/or the matching pajamas and eye mask) by Desmond & Dempsey and Ash Hotels.

Beehive bonbons from Shane's Confectionery filled with honey and black sesame praline.

English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, about: 

[A] series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created ... one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens ...

Nomenclature of Colors playing cards by Roomytown.

A packet of "Dark Night" scabiosa seeds.

A snail sketch print by Annette Messager, "Locus Solus XIII," because, snail-like, mothers have the power to carry home with them.

An album worth blasting on the way to and from pick-up.

Bienamé hand creams that smell like life in bloom, the color red, or happy days.

Peaceful girl with fist charm by Leith Clark x Catbird (I like to think she is catching a star).

An Apogee card featuring a quote by Gary Indiana, wishing for the ineffable.

*

Related posts: choosing motherhood / what's possible / true colors

Other gifts some mothers may enjoy: 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025

odds and ends / 5.27.2022

*

Henri Biva (1848-1929), Villeneuve-l'Étang embrumé. Oil on canvas.

*

Félix Bracquemond, Margot la Critique, 1854. Per The Met:

Here Bracquemond rendered a veiled criticism of critics. The squawking magpie holds a plume and straddles a globe ... Bracquemond underscored his commentary with a reference to Ovid’s description of magpies in "Metamorphoses", citing in the lower margin: "Raucaque garrulitas studium que immane loquendi," which translates to "their hoarse garrulity, their boundless passion for talk."

* 

Skull of a crowned athlete, ca. 300 BCE. Archaeological Museum of Agios Nikolaos, Crete. Per The Greek Reporter: "Inside the mouth, a silver coin was found as a token to Charon, who in Greek mythology was the ferryman of Hades who carried the souls of the newly deceased to the underworld."

*

Poem by Florine Stettheimer, in the collection of the Beinecke Library.

*

Nik Gelormino's prototype for a anti-extraction beehive for Cactus Store.

*

As usual, what “we” could be presumed? Numbers spiked and dropped; outrage and numbness set in. Imaginations stopped trying or got massively creative. Many of us burst into demands for an economic and procedural reboot of safety, security, and community, which included defacing the image of the police as the ideal local military. Meanwhile, mental health crises that faced life as well as death expanded into a pandemic with their own structural bases, their own hotlines, their own everydayness, and their own appearance as intimate partner violence and as police actions, where qualified immunity protects them from the consequences of spraying out their own roiling emotions onto other vulnerable bodies. Like dust bouncing off a trampoline, active counter-dominant solidarity on multiple and conflicting fronts induced pervasive and desired atmospheres, with their uneven rhythms of efficacy. The inconvenience of other people became a pragmatic political topic: With whom can you imagine sharing the world’s sidewalk? What do you do with the figures of threat and dread that your own mind carries around?

Lauren Berlant, from the introduction to The Inconvenience of Other People.

*

About the hermits’ lives, little is known. They appear rarely, and only then to those with the eyes of faith, yet their presence in these forests is undisputed. They might accept an offering of dried chickpeas or a handful of roasted barley left in a clearing, but mostly they subsist on leaves, bitter roots, and prayer. They wear shabby clothes, unkempt beards, dreadlocks. Only the holiest of them achieve a state of invisibility. When someone manages to see them and attempts to take their picture, it is said, their image will not appear in the photograph. A hermit might live in a particular forest for years, going about his hidden work of intercession, and then one day someone walks by a juniper tree and discovers a pile of his bones.

Fred Bahnsen, "The Church Forests of Ethiopia: A Mystical Geography." Emergence, 1/11/2020. 

*

For her, fixity and separateness are deadening specters. The very act of naming arrests and asphyxiates true freedom: as she warns, “don’t identify yourself with your description of yourself.” Dualisms which others might see as contradictions or mutual exclusivities—self/other, individual/collective, moral/theological, earthly/cosmic, work/art—manifest for Howe as uncannily interpenetrative possibilities. She is one of the twentieth century’s great epistemologists, principally through her refusal of discursive tidiness and her magnification of such concerns through indeterminate lenses. Thomas Aquinas thought it a grave failure to confuse knowing and believing. Howe’s is a corpus entrenched in unknowingness.

Jamie Hood, "The Irreconcilable Fanny Howe." The Baffler, 5/16/2022.

*

"It’s people’s certainty that I find strangest: “This means this, this means that.” I find myself getting less and less certain about everything." (NYT)

*

Reading about a young girl wandering through shipwrecks and dodging American soldiers in The Prowler, I thought of a professional wrestler adjusting their story to allow more truth into the performance. That sounds off, frankly, considering how restrained and briny [Kristjana] Gunnars’s writing is. But what feels similar is that alternation between calling attention to the scaffolding, and then leaping from it. The leap is always real, even if the wins and losses are imaginary.

Sasha Frere-Jones, "The Scent of Light." 4Columns, 5/20/2022. 

*

"I found myself wondering if there’s a difference, anyway, between the things we read and the things we do. Reading is an experience, if an artificial one, constructed and simulated—but then so are many of the others we go out in life to achieve in vaguely artificial ways."

*

Very early on in my “career,” an editor said to me, “You do something that we don’t really do here. I noticed that in your sentences, the word that comes next isn’t exactly the word you’d expect to come next.” And I remember thinking: of course it fucking isn’t. Otherwise why would I write it?

Tobi Haslett, interviewed by Jessica Swoboda, The Point, 5/17/2022.

*

Let’s hope that—at least—we can be in touch through words. I 
remember many beautiful moments in your study, with leafless trees 
outside 
or spring trees.

Adam Zagajewski, writing to Jonathan E. Hirschfeld, quoted in "Without Irony," Hirschfeld's tribute to Zagajewski in PN Review 263, Volume 48, Number 3, January/February 2022.

*

I watched the trees gradually recede, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: ‘What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will vanish for ever into thin air.’ And indeed if, in the course of time, I did discover the kind of pleasure and disquiet which I had just felt once again, and if one evening—too late, but then for all time—I fastened myself to it, of those trees themselves I was never to know what they had been trying to give me nor where else I had seen them. 

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

*

"Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?" 

*

The ocean is losing its memory.

*

No guns for men.

odds and ends / 9.4.2018

Haford Grange dandelion paperweights at Choosing Keeping (I bought the small one when I was there in June, and hope to buy the big one when I go back in October.)

*

Ito Shinsui: Kibi (Approaching Storm). Taishō period, 1912-1926. Found here.

*

Open House: bronze pressed-flower earrings (also here).

*

Craig Huber: 1970s wood and velvet kaleidoscope with 'three interchangeable viewers using natural elements of dried flowers and mini seashells.'

*

Rembrandt van Rijn: The three trees, 1643.

*

“The happy day has arrived,” he concluded, “when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.” Just one of the gasp-inducing lines in Rebecca Altman's heartbreaking history of the plastic bag, which is punctuated by Jan Stoller's disturbingly lovely photographs.

*

Encountering grief, a guided meditation. (I had a miscarriage last month and this helped.)

*

"An important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliad but at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, and at how anger and hatred play out in our societies. ‘The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.’ Barker’s novel is an invitation to tell those forgotten stories, and to listen for voices silenced by history and power.”

Emily Wilson on Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, which I can't wait to read.

(Sidebar gripe: why do U.S. editions get such boring covers? The cover for the U.K. edition is 1000% better.)

*

New books for Hugh: The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris; A Big Mooncake for Little Star by Grace Lin.

*

The glamorous life of a Parisian honeybee (NYT).

*

A tuna sandwich of note.

*

Dazzling.

odds and ends / 5.29.2018

From top:

Branches and vines quilt in cotton, silk, and wool, ca. 1875. Made by Ernestine Eberhardt Zaumseil.

*

Trademark Sylvie gingham ballet flat. (My obsession with black-and-white gingham rages on.)

*

Cole and Sons Ardmore Savuti wallpaper in the showroom of Kvanum Danmark.

*

'Beehive.' Oddfellows banner, ca. 1900. Part of to Further Seasons, a show curated by Lucia Simek at The Reading Room — 'a show about fecundity, blossoming, pollination, scientific exploration, horticulture, wizardry, danger, and beauty.' (I so wish I was Dallas so I could see this — open through June 9.)

*

Hannoh Wessel Vionette green jacket. (One of the things I loved about the new 'Howard's End' was the costuming for Margaret and Helen Schlegel; in the first few episodes, they are always wearing one thing with deep, bright color, usually red or blue. I've been channeling vibrant and unabashed Schlegel dressing by finding ways to wear more bright color; this green is my current obsession.)

*

Lady Granville's beetle parure: 'tiara, necklace, and earrings formed of dried South American weevils (lamprocyphus augustus)with iridescent green wing cases, mounted in gold in the Egyptian taste with lotus motifs.' Created by Philips Brothers, 1884-1885.

*

“Sometimes we feel like something sour and sweet at the same time . . . and sometimes we need chocolate but mixed with some fruity surprises . . . It all depends on how we feel, our mood, the weather . . . . You could say that each person’s candy bag reflects the state of mind of that person.”

Hannah Goldfield, 'How to Eat Candy Like a Swedish Person.' The New Yorker, 5/17/2018.

*

'Why is editing the best job on Earth? Because you learn facts like these.'

*

Related: 'Elegy for the World's Oldest Spider.'

*

(Fascism, he said, is “any regime that not only prevents one from speaking but above all obliges one to speak.”)

Adam Shatz, quoting Roland Barthes. 'The Mythologies of R.B.' NYRB, 6/7/2018.

*

Beckett was not a Jew. He had merely had a tiny taste of the poison of anti-Semitism. Beckett had not directly experienced torture at the hands of the Gestapo or deportation to a concentration camp. He had merely experienced these things indirectly, through the fates of his friends and through basic human compassion. He was left therefore with a paradox: the need to express what he had not experienced, to be a witness to what he had not seen. His art would come from having no power to witness, no desire to witness, no authority as a witness—together with the absolute obligation to witness.

Fintan O'Toole, 'Where Lost Bodies Roam.' NYRB 6/7/2018.

*

Obligation to witness, obligation to speak: I am calling my representatives this week to demand an end to this abomination, to advocate for choice, and to ask, again, again, for gun control.

*

'It took 35 years to build a landslide.' (More happy tears: #HometoVote.)

*

Baby Coffee 8: Clogs are a Window: 'Explorations of clogs as the ultimate in women's footwear, by Andrea Linett, Heather Anne Halpert, and Koyuki Smith.'

*

Paper geraniums.

gifts some mothers might enjoy

Suzanne Sullivan large vase with gold handles (like a trippy trophy cup for parental achievements).
William Abranowicz for Whisper Editions (because motherhood sometimes feels like learning to steer a tricky craft through ever-changing conditions—dead calms, rogue waves—and places off the map.)
Doing Goods gold hand knobs (lending a helping hand is part of the job).
Masanao Abe: The Movement of Clouds around Mount Fuji (the title is a poem).
Made by Yoke Vata perfume oil: vanilla, coconut, bergamot, rose (it looks like a magic potion).
John Derian x Astier de Villatte beehive mug (a nod to ceaseless industry; female bees are the workers, after all).
Kamperett Cassatt dress (in cotton, with pockets, and a grosgrain belt, AND it is named for a woman artist: so, yes.)
Unpublished poems + expensive art book blank books, Book/Shop x Various Projects (a cheeky way to catalog two ongoing interests).
The Covet shower cap (fabulous and also practical).
Comb honey in a pretty jar (again with the bees; also necessary for tea and toast. This is from Healdsburg Shed.)
Irv Teibel's Environments (for moments of calm, and also because Hua Hsu's review is beautiful).
Mother-of-pearl moons by Gabriella Kiss, photographed by August (because my son says he is a crescent moon and that I am a full moon, and that Sean is a full moon, too, and that together we are a family of moons.)

bisi bees

"The bees been so bisi,” cothe he, “aboute comune profit,
And tendeth al to travail while the tyme dureth
Of the somer saison and of the swete floures;
Thayr wittes been in wirching and in no wile elles
Forto waite any waste til winter approche,
That licour thaym lacke thair lyfe to susteyne.”

From the 15th century poem, “Mum and the Sothsegger.” Discovered thanks to The Paris Review.

(We had two hives of bees delivered last week, and the bees have been busy getting established.)

Top: An illustration of apiaries from the Tacuinum Sanitatis, 14th century.
Bottom: Art Nouveau Horn carved hornet pin, ca. 1910.

gifts for beekeepers

Honeycomb ring by One Little Star / Blind Huber by Nick Flynn (recommended by Amanda) / house for a solitary bee / Ballard Bee Company honey /  Keith Carter: Boy with Bee, 1990 / Isabel Marant Glimy Pullover (for wearing on lazy mornings while eating toast and honey butter) / Butterbean Studio beeswax candles / vintage stereoview photo of a hornet's nest / Chabatree honey jar and stick.

Also: a backyard beehive starter kit.