Louise Bourgeois, "10 am is When You Come to Me." Twenty sheets of musical score paper painted with Bourgeois' hands and those of her assistant Jerry Gorovoy. Via 8 Holland Street:
Bourgeois said of Gorovoy: "When you are at the bottom of the well, you look around and say, who is going to get me out? In this case it is Jerry who comes and he presents a rope, and I hook myself on the rope and he pulls me out."*
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, detail from "The Women of Sorrento Drawing in the Boats." De Morgan Collection.
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William Detmold's illustration of dung beetles from Fabre's Book of Insects.
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From Anne Truitt's Daybook, via stopping off place.
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Crossed letter from 1846 in the collection of tihngs.
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But what are comets? The etymology of the term in English—from the Greek word 'komētēs,' meaning 'long-haired'—reminds us that they were once seen as long-tressed stars. For much of human history, comets were less than celebrated. Martin Luther called them “harlot stars,” for their wanton behavior. A Lutheran bishop, in 1578, described them as 'the thick smoke of human sins, rising every day, every hour, every moment full of stench and horror, before the face of God, and becoming gradually so thick as to form a comet, with curled and plaited tresses, which at last is kindled by the hot and fiery anger of the Supreme Heavenly Judge.' A scholar countered that this theory didn’t account for why we saw comets only occasionally.
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Brilliant, beautiful Alice is barely believable as a female human being. And why should she be? She’s a quester, an outlier, a method of inquiry, an experiment maybe, experimented upon like a mink crazed in a lab. ... Alice runs circles around this Dr. Cohen. She is the circle, actually, the Ouroboros, the snake of mythology coiled with its tail in its mouth, sacred symbol of the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth, most secularly realized by the chemist August Kekulé’s dream about the configuration of molecules. Cormac McCarthy is interested in Kekulé’s dream and in the unconscious and in the distaste for language the unconscious harbors and the mystery of the evolution of language, which chose only one species to evolve in. He’s interested in the preposterous acceptance that one thing—a sound that becomes a word—can refer to another thing, mean another thing, replacing the world bit by bit with what can be said about it.
Joy Williams, "Great, Beautiful, Terrifying: On Cormac McCarthy." Harpers, January 2023.
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And although she was now redundant as a woman, being neither a wife, mother nor mistress, she was by no means redundant as a narratologist ... certain female narratologists talked with pleasurable awe about wise Crones, but she was no crone, she was an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power, who flew, who slept in luxurious sheets around the world, who gazed out at white fields under the sun by day and the brightly turning stars by night as she floated redundant.
A.S. Byatt, "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye."
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Our mother was not the sort of woman to unpack her heart everywhere; she looked on human speech as a loaded gun, and, to use her own expression, talking often felt to her like an issue of blood.
Simone Schwarz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond.
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He had a life as well as a career: his ukulele, his animals, his gardening, his inventions—including a model railroad track he’d constructed that ran from his garage workshop to the kitchen to the backyard. Its cars transported snacks to the poolside guests, and the caboose carried Alka-Seltzer.
John Lahr, "Puzzled Puss." London Review of Books, 1/19/2023.
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