Alice Neel, "Snow in Vermont," 1975.
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Beguiling grainy image of a pinecone mobile found on Pinterest; I can't determine the source, but I'd like to make one.
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Garry Knox Bennett, "Granny Rietveld." Via Commune Design.
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Ivor Cutler, "A Clock." Via stopping off place.
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It’s winter now, some months after the phoebes outside have built their nest, raised a family, and moved on. Bitter cold, snow on the ground, blue jays crowding the feeders clownishly while the little birds—chickadees and nuthatches and tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers—wait anxiously for the bullies to leave so they can begin their own meal. You might think you know something about me now from the highly redacted scraps of personal anecdote I started with—but really, I could have written anything, shaped those glimpses however I wanted, and you wouldn’t know.
You know far more about me from how I’ve been writing here ... You know what books I’ve loved and why I love them. You know I like birds, you know I watch them, you know I live in a place sufficiently rural to have trees and phoebes. You know many of my days resemble one another, and that I have a house, and that I must not be commuting daily to a job—which in turn suggests I have some other way to make an income. You know I have enough free time to look outside and note down what I see, and that I value both actions.
And beyond those relatively simple facts, you have a sense of my sensibility: my emotional makeup, my responses to the world, my obdurate insistence on revising and revising again. What I notice, what I pay attention to.
Andrea Barrett, "Energy of Delusion," excerpted from Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact and Fiction in Harpers, January 2025.
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The inside covers of the notebooks were used to save a substantial collection of news clippings, an off-beat record of the world through those years of writing the book. There are pressed leaves, wildflowers, feathers of owls and colourful parrots and lorikeets, swans, finches, cockatoos, picked up on walks, hundreds of walks, of walking alone while deep in thought, that in the end, amounted to much of what went into creating this book. The feathers alone form a catalogue of walking through many seasons in different parts of the country.
You will find in these notebooks: broken wings of butterflies, such as the brown forest butterflies found in the summer months when the woods were abundant with their dance; travelling beetles crawling in their hundreds in the leaf litter. This collection was a part of much more. All these objects were studied and, if not intentionally, were thought about as works of scale as were the patterns on a butterfly wing which are composed of millions of scales, grandiose designs developed over aeons of time. All of these collected objects were a reminder of being grounded while facing the realities as we have done in the past, and will do so in the future in dealing with other major concerns which hold no beauty, nor added comfort to our combined humanity.
Alexis Wright, "Dream Geographies." HEAT, Series 3, number 16, September 2024.
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Friends have begun to call, and tell us they’ve lost their homes. One said he had forgotten his passport, but he had the family dog, and he’d managed to save his child’s beloved stuffed walrus (named “Walrus”). They’d rebuild with that, he told me.
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Looking out the window into the snow and thinking of Los Angeles.
