odds and ends / 5.15.2020

Image of masked women, from the collection of Billy Parrot.

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Charles Mahoney (1903-1968): Miss Edith inspects the Sweetpea, ca. 1934.

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Excerpt from Self-Hypnosis, Explained, 1978, from stopping off place.

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Set of ten ink cakes with poems of the Ten Scenes at the Westlake in cursive script style (xingshu), ca. 1736-95

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Page of an herbarium by Abigail Bainbridge.

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Lit (The Bed), 1893.
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"Beauty and Terror" plate by 1690 Ceramics at Cutter Brooks.

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In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.

Sabrina Orah Mark, "Fuck the Bread. The Bread is Over." The Paris Review, 5/7/2020.

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Lockdown has made me aware of something I barely noticed before: the many opportunities that my old life provided for escape. More specifically, the almost gracious way that society was set up to allow me, and many others, to slip from one role into another and another as the day rolled by. This flow strikes me as distinctively modern. And it is gone now, temporarily. The heterogenous, compartmentalized life of before is replaced with a life where your Main Thing is now your Only Thing. At moments it’s fascinating to live this way, but there’s also a sting. It’s the sting of being unable to take turns carrying each other’s burdens.

Katherine Sharpe, "Billionaires of Time." n + 1, 5/11/2020.

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‘Isn’t this grief?’ I’m asked. Perhaps. So what? We are so accustomed to contrasting sentiment with reason that we have forgotten that emotion can sharpen our vision, opening us to otherwise overlooked evidence on which reason can act. When serene, I threw about the benefit of the doubt as a gift to all. Now I see it is a currency with which our leaders will buy first-class tickets off the hook.

Stephen Methven, "Staying Angry." London Review of Books Blog, 4/16/2020.

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Viruses are prodigious catalysts of evolution. By shuttling genetic material between organisms they generate evolutionary novelty and have even made possible some of our deepest intimacies: as placental mammals we depend on genes acquired from viruses to develop within our mothers. Viruses enter their hosts and must suspend their immune systems; developing mammals are faced with a similar challenge. In the absence of these viral genes, it wouldn’t be possible for embryos to share bodily space with their mother without being rejected as an other, a non-self. I can’t stop thinking about this. Our parental care, our social bonding, our need for closeness—all have their roots in a viral infection. I hope that the current period of cultural evolution catalyzed by a virus can draw us towards a state of greater care, bondedness, and consideration—both towards other humans, and towards the more-than-humans with whom we share the planet. Of course, it could do quite the opposite.

Merlin Sheldrake in conversation with Robert MacFarlane at LitHub, 5/12/2020.

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New favorite online timewaster: Gotta Eat the Plums! (Discovered thanks to Nadia.)

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Dolphins swimming in a bioluminescent sea (found thanks to Ashley).

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Best sweatshirt.

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How to make ice cream in a Mason jar. And a recipe for this particular green soup.

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A clip of cut flowers growing; a clip of rain falling.

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Every choice is a refusal. For Christ’s sake
I am guarding the walls. Like punctuation,
it could make all the difference.

Karen Solie, from "A Hermit." The Paris Review, Issue 218, Fall 2016.

imaginary outfit: flying squirrel

Our winter routine of sitting on the couch watching television programs about billionaires (so many television programs about billionaires—hapless former billionaires, reality show billionaires, scheming mogul billionaires) was enlivened by the appearance of an unmistakeable rodent-shadow—and not a mouse shadow, a wait-a-second-could-that-be-a-rat shadow—flitting along the bottom of the bookshelf. 

After a minute, rat panic subsided; the tail was too short and bushy, and the body wasn't that hunched rat-lump shape. So I crept over to the settee by the bookshelf, tucked my feet up, sat still and waited. The intruder reappeared: a flying squirrel. 

Now, the thing about a flying squirrel is that it is utterly adorable. A little anime dream animal come to life, with gleaming twinkly obsidian eyes and teeny little paws. They don't really fly–they leap and glide from tree to tree, using flaps of skin called patagium—and when this one crept out, it had the ungainly charm of a tiny child dragging a bedsheet cape, its furry sides rippling along the floor. I watched as it sat up, peeked around, and darted back under the radiator cover. 

Hijinks ensued: an overturned couch, frantic FaceTime calls to my family, a furniture-lined pathway to the fireplace, a refusal to exit up the chimney (not sure it got in that way, anyway), and a near-capture in a butterfly net—a successful plan until I got distracted by the cuteness. When I paused in admiration, it hopped out of the net onto my sweater (cue screaming), then my leg, before jumping to an armchair and gliding six feet across the room to the safety of another radiator cover. I apologized to it for the screaming, and eventually, it crept out again. We swooped the net down on top of it and guided it along the floor and out the door. When it (or its near relation) came back a couple of nights later, we all behaved much more rationally. Sean opened the front door and the flying squirrel politely scampered out—no screaming, nets, or furniture barricades required. 

I suppose we should be more worried about having a flying squirrel show up in our living room—they can be a hassle in houses—but there's been no other squirrel signs or squeaks since those two visits. And maybe it's a measure of just how messed up things are that chasing a squirrel out of the living room felt like a giddy relief—a simple silly problem that to jump and flail and laugh at instead of everything else.

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Filed under surprisingly helpful: Hugh's butterfly net. Also, headlamps.

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Squirrel-catching garments and gear: Rollas overalls / Isabel Marant top / Womenswork leather work gloves / Fenix HM50R USB rechargeable headlamp / Gabriella Kiss oxidized bronze baby acorn earrings / Insect-catching net / Clarks Ashton flat shoe (crepe soles a bonus for quiet steps and sudden, non-slip leaps) / Bonne Maison squirrel socks.

first steps

Last weekend I slipped, fell and managed to break both of my elbows. Everything is turning out better than expected, but it has made for a wobbly start to 2014. I'm feeling a bit like this little guy – a little uncertain on my feet, but eager to get moving.

wild tigers

polar bears

mechanical animals

Mechanical animals by Julianna Swaney at her shop, Oh My Cavalier. Seen at Creature Comforts.

the fruits of concentration

penguin

They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts—and rather portly withal.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard on penguins

Image: Penguin. 1992 Origami by Michael LaFosse.

the one that is good at curving itself to the sky

Something wondrous for a Tuesday morning: narwhals surfacing for air near the edge of an ice floe in Arctic Bay, Canada.

It's hard to believe such creatures exist, but they do. Apparently, the Inuit name for them translates as 'the one that is good at curving itself to the sky', because of the way they poke their heads out of the water.

Beautiful.

The photo is part of the 'Irreplaceable: Wildlife in a Warming World' project/Paul Nicklen/National Geographic Image Collection. Discovered through The Big Picture.

who are you? what are you?

The thing I remember most vividly about the bear is that it is a dangerous animal for many reasons, but principally because its face is always concealed. Its face is enduringly expressionless. It's not like a dog that will raise its hackles, not like a cat that will sort of narrow its eyes and flatten its ears. It has this huge head and a furry face and very small expressionless eyes that don't change. Its eyesight is very poor so it's always sort of squinting at you (he squints) and its sense of smell and its hearing are very keen, so it always has this expression the most terrifying aspect of which is: "Who are you? What are you?" And the judgment of what you are can suddenly change. Because it doesn't see you clearly. It doesn't know what you are.

John Irving
(He has a thing about bears - check the recurring themes chart.)

captive

Dancing Bear by Julianna Swaney: reminds me of this book, and a million (well, three) John Irving stories.

pounce

Tiger Leaping by Melinda Melmoth.

anointed

The Royal Bengal tiger is solitary and “secretive”—the last attribute regularly appears in the language of even the most sober field manuals. A group of tigers—should one be so fortunate to see one—is called a streak. A male tiger can be as large as ten and a half feet in length and weigh more than five hundred pounds. The tiger’s coat is deep amber, the lines of its characteristic black shadow-stripes abstract and sophisticated. Its claws retract, like those of a domestic cat; it “prusts,” or chuffs, rather than purrs, as well as roars. The iris of the tiger’s eye is amber-yellow. The tiger is one of the few anointed animals commonly referred to as “charismatic”; “Nature’s masterpiece of the creation,” to cite a recent book; or, as Kushal put it, “something to look up to,” both beautiful and powerful ...

Carolyn Alexander, 'Tigerland', The New Yorker, April 21, 2008.

(I would like to heard a tiger chuff ... from a distance.)

fearful symmetry

William Blake (1757–1827): Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794/ca.1825.
Plate 42: The Tyger

tigers

Henri Rousseau: Fight between a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

i listened for lions

I came home and found a lion in my living room
Rushed out on the fire escape screaming Lion! Lion!
Two stenographers pulled their brunette hair and banged the window shut
I hurried home to Patterson and stayed two days

Called up old Reichian analyst
who'd kicked me out of therapy for smoking marijuana
'It's happened' I panted 'There's a Lion in my living room'
'I'm afraid any discussion would have no value' he hung up

Alan Ginsberg, from 'The Lion for Real'.

rare breed

From a site dedicated to the classic Lion stamps of Persia (modern Iran.) They were issued in the late 1800s. Something new to collect.

(Danielle had me thinking of stamps ...)

i have looked into the eyes of lions

Lion anatomical engravings by Hermann Dittrich for the Handbuch der Anatomie der Tiere für Künstler.

Post title: Karen Blixen.