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 / 9.6.2024

Andrew Cranston, "The Invisible man," 2024. 

From Terry R. Myers' review of "One day this will be a long time ago," Cranston's show at Karma: 

The 'time' of painting has always moved in multiple directions, and all of that movement (not to mention what we call memory) is incapable of being anywhere except the present.

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Bee-shaped woven palm bag.

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Cody Hoyt, "Square Chair."

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Walter de Maria, "Boxes for Meaningless Work," 1960.

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Gena Rowlands, in a still from "A Woman Under the Influence."

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The universe that Dante inhabited was orderly, complete, and completely known. The universe we inhabit is 95 percent dark matter and dark energy, about which we mainly know what they are not. The more precisely we are able to measure and analyze, the more mysterious everything becomes. We are the first humans to realize that our stomachs are incredibly complex ecosystems whose ramifications we barely grasp. To put it another way, here we are in the vastness of the cosmos, and we don’t even understand our own stomachs.

Eliot Weinberger, interviewed by Jack Hanson for The Yale Review.

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'I’m not chasing utopia; I’m chasing wholeness and power. Every narrative I explore, no matter how far back I go, involves catastrophe. But what I’m really interested in is what comes next—how we survived. We’re still here, so what happens after the disaster?'

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Sevigny knows what she’s supposed to say about aging—that it’s a wild ride into uncharted territory, that older women and the natural changes that come with the passage of time deserve to be represented onscreen. But honestly, she’s annoyed by the whole thing: “The second adolescence or something? There’s some term. But it seems more difficult than adolescence because I’m menopausal and all that. Hormonal changes.” (And in case you’re wondering, no, she has not read All Fours, Miranda July’s perimenopausal novel. “Sounds intolerable,” she says when I describe the plot.)

Emily Gould, "A Suitable Change for Chlöe Sevigny," New York Magazine, 9/4/2024. 

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"It’s like, stand up, sister! Use your human mind!"

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The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Ted Chiang, "Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art," The New Yorker, 8/31/2024.

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How much of my time is spent thinking about style, fashion, clothing, decorating, fabrics, pattern, quilting…. So what if those are ungrand concerns, “feminine” concerns…. the visual statements that have moved me—many of them—were made from small ideas, unpretentious ones that were big after all.

Christina Ramberg, in diary entry from 1979 quoted by Susan Tallman in "The Sneaky Sublime," The New York Review, 8/15/2024.

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She wore an oversized olive-green sweater, wide-legged black satin pants, and chunky pale-pink sneakers; her hair was white and cut in a blunt, chin-length bob with a center part, and around her neck she wore a gold chain with a pendant of green glass. She was chic and easy in her manner, but life at her age is far from effortless, she said. Since Vicky’s death, Ducrot has been increasingly dependent upon Wijesundara, who has worked for her for forty years. 'She washes me,' Ducrot told me at one point. 'I am completely in her hands.' As we sipped our champagne, Ducrot explained that the happiness she felt was not unqualified. 'I am terrified also, naturally, because friends of mine, old people, are dying,' she said. 'But happiness is another thing. I think I am helped by the words that come to me—words are more generous with me now.'

Rebecca Mead, "An Artist Flowering in her Nineties," The New Yorker, 7/22/2024. From the same profile (which is an absolute gem): 

Her treasures range from seventeenth-century Tibetan prayer shawls to fragments of Egyptian cotton dating possibly to the ninth century. Vicky collected Indian miniature paintings, becoming a self-taught expert. On their travels in Yemen, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere, the Ducrots gathered cuttings of wild roses—transporting damp stems in their suitcases before planting them at their country house, in Umbria, where they tended a garden exclusively dedicated to the genus. It still supplies flowers for Isabella’s apartment.

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Useless pennies.

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The Book of the Queen’s Doll’s House contains a fascinatingly weird essay by the engineer Mervyn O’Gorman on the 'effect of size' on the dollhouse’s world. It’s a known bugbear in miniature-making that certain materials don’t perform well at scale: an inch-wide cotton coverlet sits on the dollhouse bed like a piece of cardboard, for example. But Mr. O’Gorman must have been the first writer to seriously consider the physics of the miniature. According to his calculations, the little people living in the dollhouse—he called them 'Dollomites'—would have the strength of ten men. They’d eat six meals a day, leap staircases in a single bound, and have hearts like hummingbirds. Their voices would be inaudible to us; the gramophone and working pianos in their house would cause more pain than pleasure to their tiny ears. To the Dollomites, the paint on the walls would be a half-inch thick, and a single drop of water from the tap the size of a pear. Every glass of wine would be so viscous they’d have to suck it down. And forget about soup. 'Cream or thick soup,' O’Gorman warned, 'would be so sticky that the soup spoon would be found to lift the plate with it from the table.'

Claire L. Evans, "The Queen's Dollhouse," Wild Information, 7/2/2024. 

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Artists' kites for Gaza.

read lately / 2.27.2024 - jewel-like non-essays, haunted poems, an antic novel, and a fraught biography

In a fog of February malaise, I missed watering the geraniums in my office last week, and now their leaves are hanging like limp flags of surrender. I gave them a good drink today and the sun finally came out, so I’m hopeful we’ll both revive soon.

I’ve been reviewing pitches for a new project on sound, which is like getting to eavesdrop on someone else’s dream and pass judgment: yes, this one will come true. Patterns always emerge—I think writers would be shocked to see the sameness in so many personal stories, so many original ideas, so many lyrical voices. (Alice Oswald’s description of lyric as a closed space vs. epic as an opened space “propel[ing] you beyond the voice, beyond the mind” crystallized for me what I am chasing as a reader and what I dislike in lyrical writing.) Or maybe they wouldn’t, and I am the perpetually naive one, startled at folks’ willingness to commodify whatever they can—friendships, loves, deaths, memories—however they can.

Maybe it is because my head is already full of all these story possibilities that most of the books I have been reading register as a dull muttering in my brain. But a few sing, and those are the ones that remind me that wading through all the lackluster pitches is worth it because occasionally, something remarkable is hiding in there, and finding it means something new might come into the world.

Entries in the dream ledger:

GEOLOGIC LISTENING by Deborah Stratman and Sukhdev Sandhu. Reading this felt less like finding a wonderful stone and more like trying to walk a mile with a pebble in my shoe. This slim little book compiles a few oppressively overcooked, overthought essays on the theme of Deborah Stratman’s films and the ineffable mystery of rocks, including a real groaner by a media studies person, a mortifyingly pretentious round-table discussion among artists, and a conversation that is mostly an exchange of flatteries between Helen Gordon and Hugh Raffles, whose work I do, actually, love. (I wrote about his mesmeric BOOK OF UNCONFORMITIES here.)

GREENGLASS HOUSE by Kate Milford. I picked this up to read before I put it out for Hugh to find; it’s a charming enough yarn about an adopted kid in a gloriously ramshackle mansion/smugglers’ inn over Christmas and the unexpected appearance of a passel of unexpected secretive guests who are all, of course, linked by a mystery. Reading it, I noticed a pattern I’ve been picking up on in newer children’s books, where characters present more like a diagnosis pulled inside out into a combination of behaviors and situations and less like actual, gloriously complex human beings. While it is heartening that authors are striving for representation, there is something distressingly reductive about chasing it this way instead of embracing the messiness of real humanity.

MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING by Robert Plunket. A madcap 1980s-era tale loosely riffing on Henry James’s THE ASPERN PAPERS about the escalating hijinks of Elliott Weiner, an unscrupulous presidential scholar on the make who thinks he has a lead on Warren Harding’s reclusive long-lost lover, who is potentially hoarding a trove of salacious letters from the one-time commander in chief (“the shallowest President in history”) in her crumbling Hollywood Hills mansion that could make Weiner’s career. Funny, with a bitter bite.

TO ANYONE WHO EVER ASKS: THE LIFE, MUSIC, AND MYSTERY OF CONNIE CONVERSE by Howard Fishman. In August 1974, when she was 50 years old, Connie Converse loaded her Volkswagon Beetle, drove away from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was never seen again. She left behind a meticulously organized filing cabinet in her brother’s garage that held neatly indexed copies of her letters, professional projects, and creative pursuits, including unfinished novels, musical compositions, and a collection of songs. The songs, which were recorded in the 1950s at a house concert in Long Island, are what kept her from total obscurity—through a wild series of chances, they surfaced in the early 2000s, leading to the release of an album that has become a cult classic, additional works from her archive, and this biography. Fishman is an obsessive and dutiful biographer; he cares deeply about the art she made and is trying to understand who she was. Maybe the weight of that conscientiousness is why I found this book to be a frustrating read—too much explanation, too little historical awareness, too much wild grasping. Maybe she was a hoax! Maybe she was queer! Maybe there was abuse! Maybe there was incest! Maybe she was neurodivergent! Maybe she was one of the first singer-songwriters! (An assertion that seems to depend on defining “singer-songwriter” pretty narrowly.) Maybe she was better than Dylan! (Perhaps the epitome of useless comparison.) This kind of flailing, shoving ambiguities and unknowns into labeled boxes, reveals more about the writer’s conceptual limits than the subject’s experience of life. Fishman is very heavy in his sympathy for Converse as an exemplar of the many brilliant someones who never get the big break. But I kept thinking, my dude, have you never read MIDDLEMARCH?!

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Or even Wallace Stegner?

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something. Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn’t as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not.

Unfulfillment *is* the human condition. Almost no one gets the chance to truly share what is in them with the world—most of us are just cobbling an existence together the best we can, out of what’s near to hand—and when opportunities come along, there are usually limits and disappointments, and even when you do manage to create something extraordinary, well, life rolls on. (See: Robert Plunket.) Converse’s life and work is well worth close attention, which Fishman offers, but I couldn’t help thinking that a more creative, less straightforward approach to writing about it, especially given the volume of written matter she left behind, might have yielded a richer, deeper book.

STATION ISLAND by Seamus Heaney. Gosh, I love Seamus Heaney. Attending a poetry reading he gave in Dublin was a peak life experience; I had only the dimmest notion of who he was at the time (I think he had just won the Nobel Prize, lol), but listening to him speak was like being given the momentary ability to see that the words I already knew could be bent into other, more revelatory languages. (Categorically epic!) The second section of this three-part 1984 poetry collection, Heaney’s sixth, is a poem in 12 stanzas set on Station Island, a pilgrimage site in Lough Derg, County Donegal, also known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory—sometime in the fifth century, God supposedly showed St. Patrick the entrance to hell in a cave on the island, and ever since it has been a holy site. For centuries, barefoot seekers have journeyed to the island for three days of prayer and fasting. Heaney made the pilgrimage himself more than once, and in this poem, as he moves through the stations, the shades of people he has known appear to him, including victims of the Troubles. Heaney, who was born in Northern Ireland, had left Belfast for Dublin in the mid-70s, as the conflict was intensifying, and was living part-time in the U.S. when he wrote these poems. They are shadowed by a sense of culpability, by what is owed to those left behind. I read them after I watched “Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland,” a harrowing and extraordinary oral history of the Troubles that illuminates the sobering fact that peace is not easy or steady but a choice that people have to make together, day after day, knowing that some wrongs will never be redressed.

AN ELEMENTAL THING by Eliot Weinberger. If the devil came to me and said, okay, Stephanie, give me your eternal soul and you’ll write like Eliot Weinberger, I might take the deal. (Equally tempting: the mind/literary gifts of Susan Howe.) Anyway, this is one of the books I reread whenever I need to escape the crescendoing mediocrity of content; it is beauty and strangeness and rest and unease and erudition and morality and curiosity and wonder and sad rhinoceroses. I like to read one of his pieces before bed and hope it shapes my dreams.

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Currently reading: SHELLEY: THE PURSUIT (still); THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION; THE NATURE BOOK.

Bookmarked: “The Hortus Conclusus of Barbara Baum;” “The Case Against Children.”

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Images:

Charles Sheeler, “Geraniums, Pots, Spaces.” 1923, The Chicago Museum of Art.

Stereoscopic images of Martian rocks.

Connie Converse, photographed in New York City in June, 1958.

Pilgrims at St. Patrick’s Purgatory/Station Island in the 1920s, via the Donegal County Museum.

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Other book reports.