Migishi Kōtarō: Butterflies Flying above Clouds, 1934.
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Kid Cudi, performing on SNL 4/10/2021 (I love seeing men in flowers).
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Lot of ceramic buttons by Dame Lucy Rie, ca. 1946.
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Worn Dephinula lapel pin at Rennes.
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Detail from The Hug by Leslie Simpson, 1990. Found thanks to stopping off place.
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When I was going through some of my photographs last night, I saw one of [civil rights activist] Dorothy Height. I looked her up, and found this quote of hers, which is exactly how I feel about everything: ‘I am the product of many lives that have touched mine, from famous, distinguished and powerful to the little known and the poor.’
Ming Smith, interviewed by Zoe Whitely for The White Review, March 2021.
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Christian Lorentzen, "Between the Sentimental, the Gothic, and the Ironic." Bookforum, Summer 2021.
I believe that one reason I began writing essays—a form without a form, until you make it—was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other voices. In short, the essay is not about the empirical “I” but about the collective—all the voices that made your “I.”
Hilton Als, from Alice Neel, Uptown, quoted in an interview in The Creative Independent, 10/16/2020.
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As the novel progresses, Katharina flees Leonberg to avoid arrest. Before she’s dragged back to prison, the accused visits a doctor and former executioner’s assistant who works out of the baths at Ulm. She wishes to get a second opinion as to whether or not she is a witch. “I didn’t really think I was a witch,” Katharina qualifies, “but I have never been one to be afraid of increasing my knowledge.” The doctor turns out to be just another peddler of personal intuition. “I was asked once to look at an extra nipple. There was no way to verify if it was or wasn’t used to suckle a devil,” he admits. “I have a strong sense of people. Of their true selves. That’s all I have to offer.”
Hannah Gold, "I Put a Spell on You." The Baffler, 6/17/2021.
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Steven Shapin’s previous book, A Social History of Truth, was about the sense in which—during the period covered by this new book, the late 16th and the 17th century—what people knew depended on who they knew. And who they knew, of course, and how they knew them, were largely functions of social class. In that book he set out to show ‘the ineradicable role of what others tell us and ... how reliance upon testimony achieves invisibility in certain intellectual practices.’ If all knowledge is more or less sophisticated gossip then what we believe depends on what we are in a position to hear and overhear.
Adam Phillips, "You Have To Be Educated To Be Educated." London Review of Books, Vol. 19, No. 7, April 3, 1997.
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What the sentimental and the gothic have in common is that they are both at root children’s literature, delineating good and evil, marching away from ambiguity. Something is missing from each of these narratives: irony.
Christian Lorentzen, "Between the Sentimental, the Gothic, and the Ironic." Bookforum, Summer 2021.
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Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, "Two Sisters."
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[T]he usual response I hear when I tell someone not to use personality tests is, “oh, but it sounds so accurate, and it helped me discover who I am!” There’s actually a term for this: the Barnum effect, which is a phenomenon wherein people tend to perceive vague, abstract personality statements to be highly accurate and personally relevant, despite a lack of scientific evidence.
Stephen Zhou, "Three Warning Signs to Consider Before Using a Personality Test." Fast Company, 6/7/2021.
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And yet what partly doomed Ethel was her perceived lack of femininity. Her refusal to court the press or the public and her stony-faced stoicism throughout the trial were taken as signs of her coldness, even masculinity. No one understood that this was, at least in part, her only protection against the onslaught she felt to her fragile being. President Eisenhower, to whom she appealed for clemency, worried about sending a young mother to the electric chair, but then absolved himself because “in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one.” Is there a more revealing example of the straitjacket of postwar femininity than this outrageous comment, which helped to seal Ethel Rosenberg’s fate?
Joseph Dorman, "How Ethel Rosenberg Offered Her Own Life as a Sacrifice." NYT, 6/8/2021.
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In the evening, the three of them had long conversations. Genrikovna was amazed at the girls’ wisdom and forgiveness. “These are not ordinary children,” she liked to say, making the sign of the cross over their beds.
The two underage grandmothers slept and dreamed of finding the magical ointment for their beloved Genrikovna.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, "Two Sisters."
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Your father,” said Saunders, “is a lost cause. He thinks those boys are great and he’s never going to think you’re anything, because you’re a girl.”
“Well,” said Goldin, “I can’t change that.”
“No, but you can stop wanting him to change,” said Saunders.
Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. “That’s what I mean,” said Emma loudly. “That’s just what I’m talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us!”
Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody's Family Is Going to Change, quoted by Sarah Blackwood in "Children's Lib!" The New York Review, 5/13/2021.
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"I have reached the heart of a word itself."
