all heart

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The "Heart of Space" meteorite, a 4.5 billion-year-old fragment of a star that fell to earth in 1947: "A mind-boggling series of occurrences and accidents were necessary to make a meteorite of this rare shape," says James Hyslop, Christie's science and natural history specialist. "And what makes it even more endearing is the fact that this piece would have come from the very core of its initial protoplanetary body—it broke off from the heart of its originator."

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Handmade valentine in the collection of tihngs.

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Heart meadow created by Winston Howes in memory of his wife, Janet. Daffodils blossom in the center when spring arrives. 

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Poem by David Melnick.

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Heart by Alexander Girard, 1961, at the Compound Restaurant, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Horn spoon with flaming heart and romantic inscription: 

Die Freundschaft bringt Freude

Die Liebe bringt Ruh'

Erwähle sie beide

Wie glücklich bist du

Friendship brings pleasure, 

love rest to the heart; 

if both be thy treasure, 

how happy thou art.

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Personal Message by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, available here.

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It was a September afternoon in 1796, and Mary Wollstonecraft had one thing on her mind. “What say you,” she wrote to her lover William Godwin, “may I come to your house, about eight—to philosophize?” This use of code was typical. If she wanted him she would ask to borrow books or ink; he liked to say he needed soothing, like a sick child. In his journal Godwin used dots and dashes to log what he and Wollstonecraft had done, when they had done it, and where. After their third date he wrote, “chez moi, toute.”

Anahid Nersessian, "Love for Sale." The New York Review, 1/13/2022.  

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One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding onto another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity. ... [T]he point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. 

Andrea Long-Chu, "The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation." Vulture, 2/9/2023. 

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“We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?"

gifts empyrean and edenic

A comet-strewn tea towel celebrating Caroline Herschel, from a design by Judy Chicago.

Nested trees for desktop edens.

Paradisiacal apples (more specifically, the tree to grow your own).

A book of Leonora Carrington's otherworldly visions.

Tiny bottles of radiance-protecting potions. 

Heavenly tunes.

A jacket patterned with fiery objects.

Lithographs of fallen stars.

A ring of endless light.

A scarf dyed with the colors of the world.

Celestial objects, suspended in alignment. 

A tempting serpent (Sheila Metzner's Hand With Snake, 1994, available on 1stDibs).

odds and ends / 1.22.2018

From top to bottom:

Wiener Times hand pillow.

The prettiest electric kettle (lucky Europeans).

A detail from Fairfield Porter's Lizzie at the Table, courtesy of Katie Merchant's moon list.

Storage boxes with funny faces.

Imilac meteorite: "bedazzling partial slice with extraterrestrial gemstones." 

D.I.Y. velvet ribbon barrettes.

Pentominoes socks (pattern by Marlene Pipjers; knitted and photographed by fun9): filed under things that make me wish I was a knitter.

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Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun ... Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience ... who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay.

Jia Tolentino, "The End of The Awl and the Vanishing of Freedom and Fun From the Internet." The New Yorker, 1/18/2018.

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The (divisive, corrosive, democracy-poisoning) golden age of free speech.

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal's drawings of the brain: 'they describe a fantastic netherworld of floating forms, linear networks, bristling nodes and torrential energies. They posit the thing between your ears as an immense cosmic universe, or at least one of the most intricate of all of nature’s creations.'

(There is a book for those of us who won't make it to the exhibit.)

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Landscapes of the mind.

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Cosmic latte: the average color of the universe.

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As Laurie Penny recently wrote, for The Baffler, the risk of promoting individual self-care as a solution to existential anxiety or oppression is that victims will become isolated in a futile struggle to solve their own problems rather than to collectively change the systems causing them harm. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that beneath the face masks and yoga asanas, many of the #selfcare posts sound strangely Trump-like. “Completely unconcerned with what’s not mine” is a common caption. So is “But first, YOU,” and the counterfactual “I can’t give you a cup to drink from if mine is empty.” I recently spotted another hashtag right next to #selfcare: #lookoutfornumberone. The image was an illustration of a pale, thin girl with a tangle of wildflowers growing from the crown of her head, reaching up with a watering can in one hand to water her own flowers.

Jordan Kisner, "The Politics of Conspicuous Displays of Self Care." The New Yorker, 3/14/2017.

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... I brought you
to this world, and I do not regret it.
The sky's still blue, for now.

Amit Majmudar, 'Of Age.'