odds and ends / 10.17.2025

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A photograph of autumn clouds from the collection of P.J. Cohen.

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Louise Bogan, writing to Morton D. Zabel, August 22, 1937. Via Letters of Note.

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Emanuele Cavalli, "Solitario," 1936.

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Austrian Essex Glass pendant depicting a bolete, circa 1890. Sourced by Will Martindale, Classical Gem Hunter, for J.W. Anderson.

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Stained glass by Abraham van Linge, c.1633, in a Georgian window at Lydiard Park, photographed by Caro/@soniclb.

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Still from "One Battle After Another."

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"I’m a Thing Finder," said Pippi. "The whole world is full of things and somebody has to look for them. And that’s just what a Thing Finder does."

"What kind of things?" asked Annika.

"Oh, all kinds," said Pippi. ‘Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that."

Tommy and Annika thought it sounded as if it would be fun and wanted very much to be Thing Finders, too.

"We shall see what we shall see," said Pippi. "One always finds something."

Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking.

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"'I almost never make up anything,' she told me. 'I just notice different things.'"

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INTERVIEWER: I’m trying to imagine you writing here at your desk. I’m picturing a huge tower of books from obscure libraries that you’re collaging from as you go⁠⁠—you know, some ancient Greek texts about ant colonies in India or whatever⁠⁠—and a complex system for taking notes on all the source materials … Is that how it is?

WEINBERGER: Not exactly. I tend to do most of the research before I start. That can take months. And I’ve never kept a notebook or taken notes, because I can’t read my own handwriting. When I have to write little to-do lists, I do it in block letters.

INTERVIEWER: So where do you keep the research?

WEINBERGER: It’s all here.

INTERVIEWER: Are you pointing to your giant cranium?

WEINBERGER: No, no, I’m pointing to the books on the shelves, which are incredibly OCD-organized ... As I write, I’m trying to remember where I’ve read something, so there is a chance that I’ll lose something forever ...

Srikanth Reddy, "Eliot Weinberger, The Art of the Essay No. 4," The Paris Review, Issue 253, Fall 2025.

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For sale: A former British prep school filled with 150,000 second-hand books "meticulously sorted into subject areas, from naval history to 19th-century literature, architecture to zoology ..." Includes a garden with "philosophical follies, such as doorknobs surreally attached to tree trunks" and a "modern version of the Tantalus myth ... a table and chairs in the middle of a pond, overhung with an unreachable fruit bowl." (Found thanks to Jess.)

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"In the possession of books unread, there is not shame but virtue."

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Related: antilibrary (noun): A collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read.

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We continue to know more and more about modern society, but we find the centers of political initiative less and less accessible. This generates a personal malady that is particularly acute in the intellectual who has labored under the illusion that his thinking makes a difference. In the world of today the more his knowledge of affairs grows, the less effective the impact of his thinking seems to become. Since he grows more frustrated as his knowledge increases, it seems that knowledge leads to powerlessness. He feels helpless in the fundamental sense that he cannot control what he is able to foresee. This is not only true of the consequences of his own attempts to act; it is true of the acts of powerful men whom he observes. 

Such frustration arises, of course, only in the man who feels compelled to act. The “detached spectator” does not know his helplessness because he never tries to surmount it. But the political man is always aware that while events are not in his hands he must bear their consequences. He finds it increasingly difficult even to express himself. If he states public issues as he sees them, he cannot take seriously the slogans and confusions used by parties with a chance to win power. He therefore feels politically irrelevant. Yet if he approaches public issues “realistically,” that is, in terms of the major parties, he has already so compromised their very statement that he is not able to sustain an enthusiasm for political action and thought. 

The political failure of nerve has a personal counterpart in the development of a tragic sense of life. This sense of tragedy may be experienced as a personal discovery and a personal burden, but it is also a reflex of objective circumstances. It arises from the fact that at the centers of public decision there are powerful men who do not themselves suffer the violent results of their own decisions. 

C. Wright Mills, “The Powerless People: The Social Role of the Intellectual,” Politics, 1944. Found thanks to an essay in N+1: "Large Language Muddle: It's OK to be a Luddite!"

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Mass movements sound dramatic. But they are not built dramatically. They are built through many, many mundane actions. Talking to people. Making a list. Knocking on doors. Planning a meeting. Going to the meeting. Setting up for the meeting. Participating in the meeting. Cleaning up after the meeting. Planning the next meeting. On and on. You get to go hurl rocks at the barricades sometimes, yes, but you can’t just do that part, and not do the meetings. This is why the real heroes of mass movements are… the masses. Not the guy who gets in the spotlight to announce his unique plan to save us all—all the people who actually do all the stuff.

Hamilton Nolan, "Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory," How Things Work, 10/16/2025.

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"Trump is racing against time, trying to consolidate power before his unpopularity renders his coalition too small to accomplish much."

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[O]bservers have been far too credulous of [broliagarch] libertarian self-narratives. Their actual behavior suggests fealty to a patronage market, not a free one, as they attempt to translate their proximity to President Trump into lucrative defense and surveillance contracts. These entrepreneurial parasites need a state they can feed on.

Suzanne Schneider, "From the Cesspool to the Mainstream," The New York Review, 10/23/2025. 

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I recognize the situation is growing quite frightening, but it is also important to keep in mind that fear is a weapon. Fear is a force multiplier. If you strike terror into people’s hearts, they will obey, far beyond their actual exposure to danger. And the modern dictatorship does not need to rely on bloodcurdling terror of torture and death so much as the fear of nuisance, the fear of trouble, the fear of harassment. ... Even if your personal circumstances make it difficult for you, where and when you can, do not obey. Find ways to be intransigent; a pain in the ass. 

John Ganz, "This Is It: Obedience and Support are the Same." Unpopular Front, 9/18/2025.

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Seriously, this is giving me blood pressure, I can’t take it. If only there could be some sort of great spontaneous gathering, in cities all across this great land of ours, citizens, exercising their right to the Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom of Speech, people who are mad as hell and not gonna take it any more! Maybe on a weekend? 

Joe Macleod + Tom Scocca, "Mr. Wrong: Congress' Day Off," Indignity Vol. 5, No. 84, 10/16/2025.

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No Kings, 10/18/2025.

odds and ends / 3.31.2025

 

Frank Wilbert Stokes, "The Sun’s Rays, Sidney Herbert Bay and Joinville Land, South Pole, Feb. 10, 1902." Via subterranean thunder.

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Found text via stopping off place.

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What was being contrived at the time was the abolition of all dissent or nuance, with narrow-mindedness elevated to a universal principle, and betrayal the new public morality.

W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling. From Silent Catastrophes (excerpted in Book Post). 

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Flooding the ether with bad ideas isn’t Trump’s unique know-how—it’s standard autocratic fare. Hannah Arendt used the word “preposterous” to describe the ideas that underpinned 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Bad ideas do a lot of the work of building autocracy. By forcing us to engage with them, they make our conversations, our media and our society dumber. By conjuring the unimaginable—radical changes in the geography of human relationships, the government and the world itself as we have known it—they plunge us into an anxious state in which thinking is difficult. That kind of anxiety is key to totalitarian control.

Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water—because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.

Masha Gessen, "The Barrage of Trump's Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It Is Supposed To." The New York Times, 2/15/2025.

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Interruption, incoherence, surprise are the ordinary conditions of our life. They have even become real needs for many people, whose minds are no longer fed . . . by anything but sudden changes and constantly renewed stimuli . . . We can no longer bear anything that lasts. We no longer know how to make boredom bear fruit. So the whole question comes down to this: can the human mind master what the human mind has made? 

Paul Valery, quoted as the epigraph in Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity.

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To put it bluntly, under conditions of ‘liquidity’ everything could happen yet nothing can be done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance (meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the moment will come and where the place will be. On a globalized planet, that condition is universal—no one is exempt and no one is insured against its consequences. Locally caused explosions reverberate throughout the planet.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

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Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality. ...  

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters." November 19, 2014. Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin.

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A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being. 

Sam Kriss, "Alt Lit." The Point, 2/4/2025. 

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chronoclasm

(plural chronoclasms). From Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos, “time”), and κλάστης (klástēs, “a person who breaks something”); from κλάω (kláō, “break”).

 1. The intentional destruction of clocks and other time artifacts
 2. (politics) The desire to crush the prevailing sense of time, due to a conflict regarding the fixation of linear time in a community

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Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. 'While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,' she writes, 'it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.' She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our 'time-givers' instead.

David Farrier, "Wild Clocks." Emergence, January 23, 2025. 

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What tense would you choose to live in? I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.'

Osip Mandelstam, Critical Prose and Letters. 

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Saturday plans:

Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. They're taking everything they can get their hands on, and daring the world to stop them. On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets nationwide to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!

pretty pink things / a billet-doux

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Heart cockles, via the Natural History Museum, London.

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Sam Gilliam, "Blue Edge," 1971, acrylic on canvas, The Baltimore Museum of Art via David Kordansky Gallery.

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A Rudolph Steiner interior in Dornoch, Switzerland. Photo by Deidi von Schaewen, via Commune.

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Victorain shell cameo, ca. 1850, via Sian Harlow Antiques.

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An 1817 "cobweb" valentine, featured in "Victorian Romance: The Art of Cobweb Valentines." The recipient would gently pull the string in the center to reveal a hidden image.

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Nacreous cloud formation, photographed over Kingston Upon Hull, United Kingdom, via The Cloud Appreciation Society.

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Slight unpremeditated Words are borne
By every common Wind into the Air;
Carelessly utter’d, die as soon as born,
And in one instant give both Hope and Fear:
Breathing all Contraries with the same Wind
According to the Caprice of the Mind.

But Billetdoux are constant Witnesses,
Substantial Records to Eternity;
Just Evidences, who the Truth confess,
On which the Lover safely may rely;
They’re serious Thoughts, digested and resolv’d;
And last, when Words are into Clouds devolv’d.

Aphra Behn, "Love's Witness." 

sunday tune: the go-betweens - clouds

odds and ends / 3.30.2022

I hate the term in her own right—as in “artist in her own right”—because it suggests that we are still bound to our overshadowed lives, like freed slaves. I hate the word muse, too, for the same limiting reason. We are both referred to as muses, and you have repeatedly been described as “a painter in her own right,” as I have. Why are some women artists seen for what they are uniquely? What is it about us that keeps us tethered? Both of our talents are entirely separate from those of the men we have been attached to—we are neither of us derivative in any way. Do you think that, without fully understanding why, we are both of us culpable?

Celia Paul, "Against any Intrusion: Writing to Gwen John." The Paris Review, 3/2/2022.

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I sometimes wonder, though, how many times “rediscovery” can happen before we begin to grow tired of being constantly reacquainted with the figure of the neglected woman artist. But the narrative seems unlikely to wear itself out: it is already ubiquitous, continuing to find purchase across social media, newspaper columns, essays, and blogs, as well as a home in the mouths of well-meaning individuals. As Sara Ahmed writes, “the more a path is used the more a path is used.” The more we repeat the same narratives, the more they solidify into the only ways of thinking and speaking about particular issues—issues that lose their complexity as a result. ... The central problem with this narrative is its very clear limitations. As Cooper’s sarcasm suggests, the language in which rediscovery is couched is often about reorienting the individual artist, assimilating her into the canon of greatness, rather than actually dismantling the structures of power that have led to such women being ignored in the first place.

Katie da Cunha Lewin, "The Politics of Rediscovery." LARB, 8/17/2020.

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"What happens if the histories you want to know have left no records?"

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Americans have powerful fantasies about what work can provide: happiness, esteem, identity, community. The reality is much shoddier. Across many sectors of the economy, labor conditions have only worsened since the 1970s. As our economy grows steadily more unequal and unforgiving, many of us have doubled down on our fantasies, hoping that in ceaseless toil, we will find whatever it is we are looking for, become whoever we yearn to become. This, Malesic says, is a false promise. While the book rarely veers into polemic, it has a strong moral-religious bent. It is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don’t work—the old, the disabled—lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another’s humanity.

Charlie Tyson, "The New Neurasthenia." The Baffler, 3/25/2022. 

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I have a confession to make: I do not work. I am on SSI. I have very little work value (if any), and I am a drain on our country’s welfare system. I have another confession to make: I do not think this is wrong, and to be honest, I am very happy not working.

Sunny Taylor, "The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability." Monthly Review, 3/1/2004. 

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Throughout this period, Glass supported himself as a New York cabbie and as a plumber, occupations that often led to unusual encounters. "I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo," he says. "While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. 'But you're Philip Glass! What are you doing here?' It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. 'But you are an artist,' he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish."

John O' Mahoney, "When Less Means More." The Guardian, 11/23/2001.

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Apart from this despair about money, there was a worse despair; the fact that having to devote so much energy and time to obtaining the very basic monies for living, there was little strength (let alone peace of mind) left for working on the books whose non-completion was daily haunting and tearing away at my mind. I was, for a period, reduced to a total feeling of inferiority, hating myself, placing no value on myself, lacking all confidence.

Kay Dick, Friends and Friendship, quoted by Jennifer Hodgson, "Dreadful Present." New Left Review, March 11, 2022.

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She would hold down this unremarkable job for the next 30 years, her employer a 'lodestar in a disordered existence.' ... Her work was dull, but it did not capture her mind–'I did not want a job where I had to use up my whole energy'–leaving her free to read, something she did omnivorously.

Rachel Cooke, "Stevie Smith, steel soul of the suburbs." The Guardian, 4/6/2015.

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Fake it until you make it.

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How can you explain that a cultural phenomenon people know and love is really a cartoon version? And at what point do you give up and accept that the cartoon now has its own separate life?

Bee Wilson, "Too Specific and Too Vague." The London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 6, March 24, 2022. 

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There’s an anecdote I’ve heard about Herbert Marcuse being interviewed at his home in La Jolla, California. The interviewer says something challenging, like, “Herbert Marcuse, you’re a Marxist thinker, but I’m looking at all this luxury. We’re lounging around your swimming pool. What do you say to that?” And Marcuse supposedly replies, “Nothing is too good for the people.”

Jude Stewart, "How to Choose Your Perfume: A Conversation with Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh." The Paris Review, 3/23/2022.

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“I was shaking,” she said. “I was just so furious.”

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Found snapshot from the collection of Billy Parrott.

gifts for burnt-out home cooks (who still have to make dinner)

A kit to make Xi’an Famous Foods' 'biang biang' noodles, because slapping dough against the counter is a needed catharsis after two years of pandemic cooking.

Measuring spoons of pleasing geometry.

A jar for storing vinegar (instead of letting it brew in your heart).

Cheerful scrubbies to help in summiting what my friend Abbey calls "dish mountain."

A box of tropical fruits, for a taste of sunshine.

"A rare and amusing book about food, about those who eat it and those who prepare it." (Also available here.)

Sky plates to make any meal a little more magical.

Cocktail picks, because crafting elaborate garnishes > crafting elaborate meals.

A stylish toaster oven with the all-important "pizza" setting.

Dedicated cooking clogs, to cosplay at cheffiness.

Edible gold flakes, for making boxed mac and cheese EXTREMELY fancy.

A case of highly rated ramen, because noodle soup cures all. (Other amazing options here).

odds and ends / 9.1.2021

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Heinrich Kühn: Miss Mary and Edeltrude at the Hill Crest, ca. 1910, autochrome. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Via Venetian Red.

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Ivor Cutler, "The natural height of cloud." Via stopping off place.

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Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743), Plate. Edo period. Hatakeyama (Collection Tokyo). Via Desimone-Wayland.

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Auguste Renoir: Landscape at Vétheuil, ca. 1890. The National Gallery of Art.

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Tasseled mules by Hereu.

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Page from Ada Carlson's collection of 1,355 four-leaf clovers, collected between 1910 and the 1920s. Via Anonymous Works.

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The summers were so long that they gradually grew longer than the whole year, they stretched out slowly beyond the edges of our lives, but at every moment of their vastness they were drawing to an end, for that’s what summers mostly did: they taunted us with endings, marched always into the long shadow thrown backward by the end of vacation. 

Steven Millhauser, "Flying Carpets." The Paris Review, Issue 145, Winter 1997.

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"There are occasional moments when one feels a full affinity with a piece of art in this way, feels taught by it, deeply, in the moment, in a way that changes, and this would turn out to be one of those for me." — Aimee Bender on Jane Campion's "The Piano" and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.

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Pulling a book from my shelf, it isn’t the flow or obstruction of its plot that comes to mind, but rather a representative image that has somehow absorbed the mysterious energies of that particular novel. (A serious reader submits to synecdoche. No one can remember everything.) This image I’m describing seems to float free of the novel that contains it. It becomes the novel, at least insofar as one’s private experience is concerned.

Dustin Illingworth, "The Luminous Wheel: On Fictions and Images." Obstructive Fictions, June 28, 2021. 

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Several of her friends were writers, too, and they talked about the body. Where is the body when you write? You are always writing from the body, they said. But we can’t really feel the body in your work. We don’t believe in the bodies in your stories. Your stories are all words. Bring the body into your writing, they said.

She wasn’t sure.

Danielle Dutton, "Acorn." The New Yorker, 8/26/2021. 

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If states could learn to read novels as a kind of literary seismograph, Wertheimer argues, they could perhaps identify which conflicts are on the verge of exploding into violence, and intervene to save maybe millions of lives.

Philip Olterman, "'At First I Thought This Was Crazy': The Real-Life Plan To Use Novels To Predict the Next War." The Guardian, June 26, 2021.

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End-of-summer slushies.

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It’s really clever to see how the kids are growing up on TikTok. The kids are understanding the reality they’re in. I guess that’s always shocking to every generation—how much the kids actually get the world they live in. 

Shayne Oliver, interviewed on Platform.

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What it looks like to leave social media: "I love people to think that I'm dead."

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On lying flat: "From my view down here on the carpet, I see a system that, even if it bounces back to 'normal,' I have no interest in rejoining, a system that is beginning to come undone." (NYT)

Related (also NYT): "Lying flat is justice."

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"i am Done explaining Myself. but sometimes, There is so much to Explain (Although to Who i am Not quite sure). it seems like a Lot of life these Days in this World we live in (or at least the World we find ourself in now) is spent Explaining."

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The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.

Brian Eno, "What Happens Next?" Prospect, November 26, 2010.

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"The main thing is that it happens before you drop dead."—the artist Peter Bradley, on his late-in-life comeback (NYT).

odds and ends / 8.20.2019

  

Blue skies found in newspapers by Joseph Pielichaty.

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Rebecca Scattergood Savery, Sunburst quilt, 1839. Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The quilt contains almost four thousand diamond-shaped pieces, each about four inches long, that were first basted to a paper template to ensure uniformity of size before being meticulously whip-stitched together. At least thirty-four different small-patterned, roller-printed cottons are used to form the octagonal rings that radiate from a central eight-pointed star to create a striking dark and light design. 

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Inès Bressand Akamae basket no. 9, oval backpack in elephant grass.

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Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890. National Gallery of Art.
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Recycled gold and opals from WWAKE.

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Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.

From Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, quoted by Jeremy Lybargar in "SCUM Rising: The Long Afterlife of Valerie Solanas." The Baffler, 8/1/2019.

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'After all, sane protest at a crazy world might well manifest as insanity.'

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A one-person protest against development.

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It took A.O. Scott twenty years to understand Tracy Flick.

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There is a difference between debating something that is a true matter of opinion and entertaining an argument that is palpably false, between a willingness to look stupid in one’s personal quest for wisdom and the choice to actually be stupid by deciding that all theories are equally valid and deserve equal consideration.

Justin Peters, "Joe Rogan's Galaxy Brain."  Slate, 3/21/2019.

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"'Imaginary’ universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed ‘real’ one."

Mathemtician G.H. Hardy quoted by Karen Olssen, "The Aesthetic Beauty of Math." The Paris Review, 7/22/2019. (I cannot wait to read Olssen's book on Simone and André Weil).

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I felt like a lizard sitting on a rock in the sun. I felt like Ramona in the Beverly Cleary books squeezing out a whole tube of toothpaste in the sink just for the pleasure of it. It was like floating in a completely still freezing-cold swimming pool on a hot day and just staring at the sun. I was like, 'Should I quit my job? I’ve organized my life all wrong.' So, no, I have no trouble, no trouble at all, disconnecting.

Jia Tolentino on writing for the sake of writing, a conversation with Brandon Stosuy at The Creative Independent


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Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

Ross Gay, quoted in Nicole Rudick's essay "Delighting in Ross Gay, One Essay at a Time." NYR Daily, 8/17/2019.

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'The Latest Dreams of Barbara Hilary, the First African-American Woman to Travel to the North Pole.'

odds and ends / 3.21.2019

Paper fan covered with ca. 1890-1900 scraps, via Paper of the Past.

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Daniel Rabel: Première entrée des fantômes, quatre figures (First entrance of ghosts, four figures). Costume design for ballet. 1632. Via Geisterseher.

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A. J. Johnson (photographs), William G. FitzGerald: A Human Alphabet, The Strand Magazine, 1897. Via Letterform Archive.

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Brodgar bench, by Gareth Neal and Kevin Gauld for The New Craftsman (photo found at Colourful Beautiful Things).

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Three pages from a Tibetian ceremonial music score with 'notation for voice, drums, horns, trumpet, and cymbals,' via Stephen Ellcock.


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In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you. “Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that ‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed.

Everyone has heartstrings. Over time, she wrote, we had grown addicted to having them pulled, rather than focussing on what the pulling could accomplish by way of political change. We’d replaced tangible action with affective experience. “What does it mean for the theory and practice of social transformation,” she asked in a 1999 essay, “when feeling good becomes evidence of justice’s triumph?” Somewhere along the way, doing good had come to seem irrelevant—or maybe just felt impossible.

Hua Hsu, "Affect Theory and the New Age of Anxiety: How Laurie Berlant's cultural criticism predicted the Trumping of politics." The New Yorker, 3/25/2019.

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Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now… Empathy is biased… It is shortsighted.” Bloom helpfully distinguishes between the more useful cognitive empathy—understanding what’s happening in other minds and bodies—and emotional empathy, trying to feel like or even as someone else. With a simple thought experiment—you pass by a lake where a child is drowning—Bloom shows that emotional empathy is often beside the point for moral action. You don’t have to feel the suffocation, the clutch of a throat gasping for air, to save someone.

Namwali Serpell, "The Banality of Empathy," NYR Daily, 3/2/2019. A terrific, troubling essay taking apart the myth 'that art promotes empathy.'

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Related: "Reconsidering the role of empathy in Hannah Arendt's concept of enlarged mentality."

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"Who cares what you think if your every word is a compliment?"

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The difference between millions and billions.

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Fairy tale-ish: the hallucinatory realism of Rachel Ingalls; a new book by Helen Oyeyemi (YAY).

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Gravestones, clouds, flowers: the Romantic paintings of Matvey Levenstein.

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Emily Wilson on translating the deaths of the slave women in The Odyssey.

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Batia Suter's Cloud Service — a book of cloud and cloudlike pictures "interested in the visual dialog that emerges with the simple act of placing images in new relation to one another."

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In the nineteen-eighties, Apple called its headquarters the Robot Factory. “To understand the electronics industry is simple: every time someone says ‘robot,’ simply picture a woman of color,” [Louis] Hyman advises. One in five electronics companies used no automation at all, and the rest used very little. Seagate’s disk drives were assembled by women in Singapore. Hewlett-Packard hired so many temporary workers that it started its own temp agency. The most important technology in the electronics industry, as Hyman points out, was the fingernail.

Jill Lepore, "Are Robots Competing for Your Job?" The New Yorker, 3/4/2019.

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Teju Cole, in conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being: "There’s a beautiful Inuit word, qarrtsiluni. It means 'sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.'"

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.)