gifts for question-askers

A vintage cup for reading the tea leaves. (More here and here.)

A dictonary of symbols, for deciphering meanings, and a dreamlike Borges oracle by Catalina Kobelt for finding questions.

An obsidian mirror for peering into the dark.

Uusi's Supra deck for Jungian reflection.

An enamel "he loves me, he loves me not" spinning top pendant, for protecting unwary daisies from the lovelorn.

A fortune-telling pencil sourced from a mystical machine in Des Moines that will provide a yes, no, or maybe so answer. 

A Hades Wool sweater with the lyrics to Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" for cloudy realities.

Pat Perry's risograph-printed open call for guidance for anyone seeking to be "part of a collective search for perspective in confusing times." 

A 32-sided 1930s-era fortune-telling dice for more answers than you can get from a Magic-8 Ball.

Hysteric Glamour's "You Pay" keychain to end arguments over picking up the tab.

And for finding a fortune worth keeping, a bucket of cookies, plus a frame for the best one.

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I will add waaaaay down here, in an abashed moment of self-promotion, that I am the editor of a series of open-ended oracle decks written by Ellen Freeman and illustrated by Bethany van Rijswijk that are quite beautiful and interesting, if you happen to like mushrooms, flowers, seashells, fairy tales, rocks, cats, or space. Unlike tarot, these oracle decks do not offer traditional meanings, and they don't promise answers—instead, they are way to play with thoughts and ideas using imagery and scraps of myth, folklore, history, and science.

assorted gifts of varying opulence

Polspotten's brass candelabra, as twisted as an old apple tree.

Bridie Hall's intaglio soaps, for getting into a (classical) lather.

A golden gown by Simone Rocha, for sitting for your official portrait.

Delectable almond cookies, packed in a keep-forever tin.

Weiner Time's exuberant cushion, for decadent lounging.

Buly matches, scented with violet and rose.

A diamond-shaped tin of marzipan sweets, because marzipan always feels fancy.

Lelet's bobby pins decked with chain bows (best worn by the dozen).

A POJ Studio kintsugui kit, for making repairs in gold.

A Hogarth Press first edition of Virginia Woolf's Monday or Tuesday, with plates by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Aris Geldis' heavy bracelet of gilded fringe (or Gogo's acorn earrings of baroque pearl).

Bookmarks fit for royalty, designed by Ark Colour Design in Scotland.

A truly luxe hot-water-bottle cover, made by Samantha Holmes of ethically sourced alpaca and wool.

Smart shoes are always a treat—these are Tibi's Randolph flats in zebra-print pony hair.

A bottle of tears—could anything be more precious?

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One more indulgence: These funny gift guides are an annual delight to compile for all of you anonymous folks out there. I don't make any money from them—no affiliate links, no placements, nada! I'm an online renegade!—but if they have brought you joy or amusement, please consider making a donation to Doctors Without Borders. I'm donating what I can, too, and holding the people of Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan in my heart. Thank you.

birthday gifts some 44-year-olds might enjoy

In a digression at the end of The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog trains his cameras on a group of albino crocodiles basking in pools of runoff from a nuclear power plant and muses on crocodiles staring into the abyss of time. For this reason, the image of mortality in my mind is a white crocodile, and the crocodile of time feels very near at my birthday, when I wonder if this is the year it eats me. And maybe because I have spent past few weeks thinking of ghost crocodiles, I misread a sign the other day as "ghost lobsters" and suddenly had a hilarious and terrifying vision of what it would be like to be visited by the ghosts of all the lobsters I have ever ate, hearing the ghost-rattle of their exoskeletons, their ghost eye-stalks observing me, an army of the crustacean dead trailing ghost butter and clouds of steam. And then I half-remembered hearing Edna O'Brien describe a bad experience with LSD, which seemed to involve years of seeing her phone as a lobster, and apparently Jean-Paul Sartre, too, was plagued with visions of lobsters. He kept seeing three or four at a time after a mescaline trip, knew they were not real, but saw them there just the same. So maybe the lobsters are waiting in my psyche with the crocodile.

Fortunately, I forgot all of this on my actual birthday and had an uncommonly nice time. 

Some gifts:

A tool for measuring the blue of the sky, based on blue skies in Ukraine.

Monogrammed rose-scented lip balm by Officine Universelle Buly. 

A matching Sayaka Davis scarf and sweater.

A book out of print: Sam Stephenson's Love and Work: Lyric Research on Jason Molina.

A Marcie McGoldrick ring that doubles as a family portrait.

A butterfly hair claw (or a cloud barrette).

Bright Himukashi wool socks.

A pleasingly wobbly hairbrush by Y.S. Park.

Ithell Colquhoun's Color as Taro.

Porcelain lady apples.

The complete Virago Modern Classic Collection and the most beautiful bookshelf to hold them, made by Sara Levitas Design Studio.

Perfect gold shoes by Avril Gau, just right for stepping into another year.

Money to send to women fighting to live life on their own terms in the U.S. and in Iran.

odds and ends / 3.7.2021

Photo of a frozen daisy, found here.

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Maria Sybilla Merian, drawings of two moths from Merian's Drawings of Surinam Insects &c, ca. 1701-1705. The British Museum.

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Quilted Robe à la Francaise, ca. 1750. In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Rennes stocks a covetable modern version of the luxury quilted housedress by Maku.)

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Unknown artist, lover's eye ring, ca. 1890. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Other eyes.)

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Judy Kensley McKie, Butterfly chest, 1993. 

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We live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle. When the unseen tug of celestial bodies points Earth toward a new North Star, for instance, the shift in sunlight can dry up the Sahara, or fill it with hippopotamuses. Of more immediate interest today, a variation in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere of as little as 0.1 percent has meant the difference between sweltering Arctic rainforests and a half mile of ice atop Boston.

Peter Brannen, "The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth's Ancient Rock Record." The Atlantic, 3/2021.

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Life with an obsessive, often absent, geologist must have been hard. In one recollection Mary Ann is described as 'an eccentric little round-faced woman,' oddly dressed, with rouged cheeks and black curls, often seen walking a few paces behind Smith, 'who plodded steadily on his way, apparently too much immersed in his geological meditations to give a thought to her who followed behind.' Occasionally she had tantrums. Smith never argued but walked quietly out of the room, locking the door behind him. More than once she was known—and who could blame her—'to dash some object through the window of her temporary prison as he passed outside of it.' In February 1842 she was sent to York Lunatic Asylum, where she died two years later. Hers is a story that asks to be written.

Jenny Uglow, "The Reader of Rocks." The New York Review of Books, 3/11/2021. 

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For rock hunters: A jazz musician explains how to find micrometeorites.

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She has freed me from the nagging worry about relevance, because, reading her, I know I am entirely irrelevant, nearly extinct or saved from extinction by some kind conservationists who allow me to graze on austere pastures.

Mary Gordon, "Beatifying Patricial Lockwood." LitHub, 2/24/2021. 

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Everything is too long these days, isn’t it? Every series is at least two episodes too long, podcasts go on for hours, you have to scroll through pages of someone’s barely disguised eating disorder mania to get to the recipe on their blog, and every documentary on Netflix is four hours long, forcing me to go to Wikipedia halfway through just to finally find out what happened ...

Jessa Crispin, "Why I Am Obsessed with this Podcast's Merciless Little Romps." The Spectator, 2/27/2021. 

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This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career—something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships”—is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents.

Joan Didion, "Letter from 'Manhattan.'" The New York Review of Books, 8/16/1979.

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"Contrary to what you might have seen on Instagram, our purpose is not to optimize our one wild and precious life."

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Yes, writing is very hard, and no book really lives up to its aspirations, but once you’re an adult you can’t be writing bad books all over the place. People might read them! It’s not your right to be a writer. It’s not your right to be read. It’s not your right to be a public figure. A just society is one where everyone has a home, food, healthcare, an education, and vacation for four weeks a year. A just society does not mean everybody gets to be a celebrated writer if they want to be. 

Lauren Oyler, interviewed at The End of the World Review. 

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"More than realism, the dominant literary style in America is careerism."

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A new shade of blue, $179.40/tube.

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The blues are both a feeling and a situation, [Angela] Davis writes. America is in the blues now, and the blues are in our history. The United States isn’t occupied by Nazi Germans, it’s occupied by the same people it has been occupied by since it was colonized. “Occupied territory is occupied territory,” James Baldwin wrote in 1966, “even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.”

Eula Biss, "The Resistance." The Paris Review, 2/23/2021. 

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"How are you in a room with pain?" 

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I have striven hard to be pleased with my new situation. The country, the house, and the grounds are, as I have said, divine. But, alack-a-day! There is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you—pleasant woods, winding white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky—and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them in. The children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. As for correcting them, I soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like.

Charlotte Brontë, writing to her sister Emily in 1839, via Lapham's Quarterly Vol. IV, No. 2, Spring 2011.

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"One person is the hider, and the other person is also the hider."

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gifts for practical and fanciful four-year-olds

 

A cheery Duckhead umbrella to brighten rainy days.

Bluebird hankies from Poketo to dry tears and wipe noses.

Hammer time! Haba tap-and-tack.

For practicing wobbly letters: a Musgrave Choo-choo Jumbo pencil and an all-weather reporter's notebook.

Grimms blocks magnets paired with a magnetic tray/pizza pan/cookie sheet to pass the time on long drives.

For the child entranced by technology: an old-school cassette recorder with enticing buttons to push and fascinating tape mechanics (or the more kiddo-friendly Lil Mib voice recorder).

Harlekin spinning tops: a perfect, pocketable amusement.

For newly independent brushers: a toothbrushing timer, to help keep those pearly whites nice and clean.

Squishable, sparkly rainbows: Land of Dough swirly glitter dough (with semi-guilt-free biodegradable glitter) or a kit to mix up a batch of your own. (In stock at Fox & Kit.)

Manitobah mukluks for keeping small toes toasty and dry on wintery days. (I have a pair in grown-up size; they are marvelous.) Mittens on a string are a good idea, too.

A maybe-magical balm for "poetic badgers and other restless wanderers." (My kiddo loves this stuff.)