festive things

Gislebertus, "Dream of the Magi," circa 1120-30 , Cathedral of Saint-Lazare,  Autun, France. Via Stephen Ellcock.

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Mary Delany, "Ilex Aquifolium (Tetandria tetragynia)," from an album (Vol.V, 60); Holly with berries. 1775. Collage of colored papers, with bodycolor and watercolor, on black ink background. The British Museum.

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George Brecht, "A Christmas Play for Joseph Cornell," 1963.

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Olivier Dassault, "Untitled/Christmas card," 1987. MFA Boston.

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Tacuinum Sanitatis, Milan or Pavia, ca. 1390-1400. Via The Fortnight Institute.

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Schreiber pop-up toy theater book, ca.1885. The V & A.

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Katie Marchant/thankyou_ok Christmas cake.

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Holiday dress of my dreams: Rothermal Theater Dress by Bode.

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Star Finial, artist unidentified, United States, 1875–1925, paint and gilding on metal, 45 × 22 × 9 in. American Folk Art Museum.

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1883 Louis Prang silk-fringed Christmas card.

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... [W]e are seeing our own mortality in the close of day and year. The hours of sunlight run by more quickly, and we’re left behind in the darkness. It’s hard now to feel the privation of former winters, or experience the desolation of the landscape; it’s not even likely to snow. But we see the trees unleafing, and sense the different strains of winter light: sometimes bright and cold, often thin and misted. Much of our enjoyment of this gauntness is in relief. Fasting for advent used to make a penitence of nature’s dearth, relieved at last by ecstatic abundance. On Christmas Eve congregations would hang the branches of the churchyard trees with apples. In Moscow, they deck avenues of leafless boughs with red and gold baubles, which has the same effect.

Our contrivance of these spots of colour has its roots in nature’s contingencies: red berries on a black branch, an evergreen tree in a field of snow—Ruskin’s lesser beauties perhaps. But it takes a mind to frame them, to put the tree in a painting or a living room. Sometimes novelty itself seems poetic, as though the product of design. ... We aestheticise the tree by changing its setting, or we admire it through a picture. Christmas itself is a removal, separated from the rest of the year by its spangles and pageantry. The season makes us tourists of our own nostalgia; it’s best not to think too hard about the absurdity of chopping down a tree and covering it with tiny ornaments. What do we do with the wanwood when the new year comes? In the 16th century, after the feast and the dancing, the tree would be ceremonially burned, marking the end of festivities with a final brilliant spectacle, which does seem better than leaving it on the street for the council to collect.

Alicia Sprawls, "Christmas Trees." London Review of Books,  1/5/2017.

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In 1419, the Freiburg bakers’ apprentices noted having seen a tree set up in a hospital, decorated with apples, wafers, gingerbread, and tinsel. In Riga, in 1510, a brotherhood of merchants are said to have set up a tree around Christmastime, then decorated it with thread and straw; they burned it at Lent. Many of the hints of early Christmas-tree—or solstice-tree, or New Year’s tree—traditions come from rules limiting them. A regulation in Upper Alsace specified that each citizen could take from the forest no more than one pine, of a height no more than eight shoes. A 1611 ban against felling trees in the Alsatian town of Turckheim is arguably the first appearance of the term “Christmas tree”: Weihnachtsbaum.

Rivka Galchen, "The Science of Christmas Trees." The New Yorker, 12/6/2022. 

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One thing is for certain—I wouldn’t want to be a Christmas tree. It would be nice to be the center of attention, to be so decorated and lit that people stared at you in wonder, and made a fuss over you, and were mesmerized. That would be nice. But then you’d start dropping your needles and people would become bored with you and say you weren’t looking so good, and then they’d take all your jewelry off, and haul you off to the curb where you would be picked up and crushed and eventually burned. That’s the terrible part. Maybe that’s why so many people today have fake trees. They are quite popular. Their limbs come apart and you can put them in boxes and store them. You can have one of these trees until you die and you can pass them on to your children. They may not be real but when you look at them you can’t tell the difference. That always makes people happy—not being able to tell the difference. And happiness, to want to be happy, is the most natural thing of all.

Mary Ruefle,  "Recollections of My Christmas Tree." Harpers, December 20, 2013. 

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See also: Robert Frost, "Christmas Trees."

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Charles Mingus' secret eggnog recipe.

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Merry everything, friends.

odds and ends / 5.7.2021

 

Jean Brusselmans: Lilas (Seringen), 1934.

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Candlesticks that look like carnivorous plants by Tommy Mitchell.

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Wax-seal-encrusted treasure box by Parvum Opus.

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Colleen Herman, Something Warm. 

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NOMASEI ballerinas (tiny gold hands!)

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Klingspor-Schriften type sample. Offenbach: Gebrüder Klingspor, 1951.

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Photo of the artist Rose Wylie, by Sam Wright for the NYT Style Magazine.

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A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new
joys where imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books record as my
experience.

Then experience is revelation, because plants and people have in their cells
particles of light that can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also
with the creativity of metaphor, as in a beam of light holographically, i.e., by
intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the Bourbon rose, then try to separate
what is scent, sense, and what you call memory, what is emotion, where in a
dialogue like touching is it so vibratory and so absorbent of my attention and
longing, with impressions like fingerprints all over.

I'm saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment, whereas for the
rose, scarlet itself is matter.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, from "Hello, the Roses."

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Related: videos of Diana Thater's gardens.

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To start, think about what you like. Consider your own taste. What is your perfect soup? Is it clear? Creamy? Spicy? Thick? Think about its components. What ingredients do you have access to? We will offer some suggestions and a simple road map, but this is not an edict; improvisation is an essential part of cooking.

Who are you feeding? Reflect on this with every step.

Emily Hilliard and Rebecca Wright, "A Soup Recipe: Questions and Interpretive Instructions for a Present Process and a Future Meal." Ecotone. 

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It’s not that literature can’t be personally uplifting, or even morally improving; but when you insist that this is what literature is for, you make a claim that sits at odds with the manifest intentions of most writers and readers. Why do I read? Largely because I hate to be bored, and books are my favourite way of not being bored. (Also, a little bit, because I like people to think of me as someone who reads books.)

Sarah Ditum, "Books Won't Save You." UnHerd,  4/27/2021.

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[Jane] Harrison was the foremost figure in the Cambridge Ritualists, a group of classical scholars who infused the study of ancient Greece with modern theories of “primitive” ritual. The holophrase, a linguistic instance in which subject and object are rendered indistinguishable, fascinated her. In her book Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), she provided an example of a holophrase ascribed to an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego: mamihlapinatapai, which means “looking-at-each-other-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do.” She believed this suggested pre-modern speakers’ total involvement with their environments, the self dissolved in pure relation. The duality of mind and body is superseded by an articulation of shared reality.

Dustin Illingworth, "Little Funny Things Ceaselessly Happening." Poetry, 3/1/2021. 

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"I want a holophrase."—Hope Mirrlees, Paris.

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Clariloops.

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What if hope exists not for any individual human being now living—but rather for the members of future generations, who though powerless to redeem us, might nevertheless be able to overturn the injustices we have been subject to and carve out a better existence for themselves? In this view, hope is not for “us” but it is nevertheless related to us, by means of our connection to other, future human beings. “I” might not be able to hope for anything. But “we” certainly can meaningfully hope for a better world—through the actions we might take, through the world and across generations, together.

Tom Whyman, "Why, Despite Everything, You Should Have Kids (If You Want Them)." NYT, 4/13/2021.

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This pure feeling I have and my certainty of what has caused it: the sight of the children … the rousing music, the marching feet. A feeling of one in distress who sees help coming but does not rejoice at his rescue—nor is he rescued—but rejoices, rather, at the arrival of fresh young people imbued with confidence and ready to take up the fight; ignorant, indeed, of what awaits them, but an ignorance that inspires not hopelessness but admiration and joy in the onlooker and brings tears to his eyes.

Franz Kafka, from a diary entry dated March 1922 describing hope:. 

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Archeologists found a lost 3,000-year-old city in Luxor: "Work is underway and the mission expects to uncover untouched tombs filled with treasures." (Washington Post.)

gifts to fill idle hours

Build a pond yacht for miniature regattas.

Dye hand-pieced linen napkins with last summer's flowers.

Carve a stone, a spoon, or a bowl with kits from Melanie Abrantes.

Add color to the day with handmade watercolors by MCY Goods, or encourage someone to pick up a brush with Beam Paints' clever travel card.

String a strand of glimmering gems.

Revive epistolary practices using a passel of posh postcards or sign up for a stationery club, and then practice perfecting obsolete forms of beautiful penmanship.

Thrum a pair of cloud-soft slippers.

Print celestial cyanotypes (or make your own photopolymer stamps).

Concoct an edible gelatinous wonderland (recipe here).

Stitch stars on a handmade quilt.

Get unblocked with Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, a set of 100 cards, each with "a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations."

odds and ends / 10.6.2020

 

Max Hauschild, A View Through a Window, with Vine Leaves, ca. 1810-1895.

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1950s house key at Erie Basin.

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Excerpt from They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, a collection of interviews with ten ordinary Germans who became Nazis. At Popula, found thanks to The End of the World Review.

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Octopus hidden in shells; screengrab from My Octopus Teacher.

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Porcelain box in Brussels’s Royal Museum of Art and History, photgraphed by Charlotte Edwards.

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Diane de Prima badges by Synchronise Witches Press, proceeds supporting "the Bent Bars Project, a letter-writing scheme for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, gender-variant, intersex, and queer prisoners in the U.K."

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These self-conscious times have furnished us with a new fallacy. Call it the reflexivity trap. This is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault—that lip service equals resistance. The problem with such signalling is that it rarely resolves the anxieties that seem to prompt it. Mocking your emotions, or expressing doubt or shame about them, doesn’t negate those emotions; castigating yourself for hypocrisy, cowardice, or racism won’t necessarily make you less hypocritical, cowardly, or racist. As the cracks in our systems become increasingly visible, the reflexivity trap casts self-awareness as a finish line, not a starting point. To the extent that this discourages further action, oblivion might be preferable.

 

Katy Waldman, "Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction?" The New Yorker, 8/19/2020. 

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I sometimes struggle to find evidence in contemporary literature and the conversations around it of one of the most basic material facts of our era: in order to live, the vast majority of people have to sell the hours of their lives at work. Or some others: nearly everything around us is owned, and almost everything owned was built (by people and out of something), or that all of this is threatening to fully deplete our common home, the earth. How strange that we live in the epoch of hour-selling, in a made world in which we do not acknowledge the makers, in an arrangement of space in which trespass threatens every step, in a world in which no extractable goes unextracted, and yet much of the most lauded literature locks this up like a secret inside itself. The structure of reality becomes, in our books, a hidden chamber unlocked only with the question, “but who made this world?” The books themselves hardly ever seem to ask it.

For example, I am not sure that beyond the work of radical poets, I’ve ever seen much mention in literature that a car requires gas, that the gas requires the oil industry, the oil industry requires imperialist war, etc. Instead, people in books move via invisible fuel in machines that are visible only as reflections of character, like a Ford Fiesta is not a material fact but a mere symbol of selfhood, running on biographical oil. I sometimes imagine some alien reader picking up a contemporary novel and thinking that everything about our species in our time and place was feelings, self-identification, self-interest, self-fulfillment, self-determination, that humans were made from the inside out, instead of the outside in, and that the only relation to objects we had was our curation of them.

Anne Boyer, in conversation with Sam Jaffe Goldstein for The End of the World Review, 9/15/2020.

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Most members of the bourgeoisie experience history as they do their heartbeats: they know it’s there but only become aware of its presence when something goes wrong. Neither I nor my peers in the “creative class” of that faux-meritocratic New York understood that the Obama years were precisely that — years, an era among others, a period with a beginning and an end. 

Nicolás Medina Mora, "An American Education." N+1, Winter 2020 Issue 36. 

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Just after the publication of The Hobbit, but before he began writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.F. Tolkien wrote an essay arguing that fairytales gave us three things: recovery, escape, and consolation. His earnestness jolts, in a very agreeable way. He didn’t think much of modern society, thought we had broken off relations with the natural world, and argued that fantasy was our way of trying to heal the breach, to learn how “to converse with other living things.” The unhappiness of the world, as he saw it, was not something to be trivialized. It was not a bad thing to want to escape it, as a prisoner rather than a deserter (which was the difference to him between escape and escapism). Because our world was as oppressive as it was, a happy ending was not trite, or easy. He termed the word “eucatastrophe” to express the intensity of such an event, of experiencing joy “beyond the walls of this world, poignant as grief.” Happiness that cuts like a knife: He wanted his readers changed when they returned from his world; to make decisions differently, expect a different outcome. For him, fantasy was radical, profound.

 

Jenni Quilter, "Fish Tossing." (It's an essay about the Muppets.) Avidly/LARB, 8/19/2020.

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More Tolkein: "The Lord of the Rings is an extended meditation on what one should do when things appear utterly hopeless. It is, in fact, an account of how to survive by creating and living through hope."

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2020 is not a lost year. It’s a chance for parents and children to watch and listen to one another, to turn the weekday scramble into an occasion to experiment and think about what it takes to make a free human being — one whose freedom comes from truly knowing something about the world, and about herself.

 

Molly Whorton, "When You Get Into Unschooling, It's Almost Like a Religion." NYT, 9/25/2020. (I'm unschooling my kid this year, and it's ... kinda awesome?)

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Snack: cinnamon-sugar scones.

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Doyle Lane's "ravishingly seductive" weed pots: "Some are smooth as river rocks; others are cracked or lumpen, like overripe fruit from otherworldly trees."

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If you want to stop fascism, the efficient mission is not to attack the opposing side. It is, rather, to be the opposite of Donald Trump: a defiantly open heart who protects and bolsters valid information systems required for people to truly decide for themselves about all that he and his movement represent.

 

Sarah Smarsh, "How is Arguing with Trump Voters Working for You?" The Guardian, 9/17/2020.

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‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.

 

Patricia Lockwood, "Insane After Coronavirus?" The London Review of Books, 7/16/2020. 

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Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Ed Yong, "America is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral." The Atlantic, 9/13/2020. 

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Maisy Card: "The idea that there is a beginning and an end, a single leader and a single traitor to a movement, is an illusion."

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"I keep thinking about Sharpies."

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Scream into the void (but do not sell my personal information).

odds and ends / 3.25.2020

Georgia O'Keeffe, Light Coming on the Plains I, 1917. Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

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Willy Guhl, concrete dog house ca. 1965. Lot 269 at Wright.

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Bent woman/simple movement, via Kickpleat's Instagram.

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How to draw a mouse, from What to Draw and How to Draw It, by Edwin George Lutz, 1913.

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M.F.K. Fisher, from How to Cook A Wolf.

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[Editorial interlude: What I've gathered here may feel—probably is—utterly irrelevant. But this blog has always been a junk drawer—a place to lay whatever is rattling around my brain, and these are rattling days. There are two links to pandemic-related pieces, both clearly marked—no need to click them if it amplifies stress.]

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The softly-rippling impact of a book, an essay, a story, a poem, isn’t calculable in figures. I think about my students with young children, my friends who are single parents and uninsured freelancers. I think about the authors we haven’t read yet, whose books may never exist, because they do not have the space, literal and figurative, to birth their worlds onto paper. I think about mothers in particular, because the burden of childcare still falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders. These writers have unwritten libraries housed inside them, voices trapped inside the walls of our present system. 

Who gets to live a spacious hour? Who gets to spend time with their children, and time doing work that fulfills them?

Karen Russell, "A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood." Wealthsimple.

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A ghost ship washes ashore after nearly a year at sea.

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Dissecting Garth Greenwell's extraordinary sentences.

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I told the art critic that I needed a rest for my mind, and that I was enjoying this stream of pure images. It was all squares, squares, squares of people’s children and flowers and dogs and sunsets and friends and family and parties and workouts and whatever else they saw that day.

Dayna Tortorici, "My Instagram." N+1, Winter 2020.

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The working class, the uneducated, the failures, and the washed out. We are creators too. And we are allowed to circumvent the tastefulness of the establishment, the cultural gatekeepers, and the university powerhouse. The art world hates us, yes. But art doesn’t.

Jessa Crispin, "The Topeka Fools." The Baffler, March 2020.

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Making these: Salted chewy chocolate cookies.

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'We just happened to be lucky enough to see the problem in terms we could understand. In terms of personal friendship, in fact.' 

Margaret Talbot, "Ida and Louise Cook, Two Unusual Heroines of the Second World War." The New Yorker, 9/3/2019.

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How (and why) to sew masks for the CORVID-19 pandemic. (Editor's note: Nadia helped me spot the typo here, but I am leaving it so you can enjoy her comment about it. Sorry, though, crows!)

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The one thing that’s worth stockpiling is decency, that silver lining of our lives back in the USSR, with its near-permanent state of national emergency. Today, in America, where decency has taken a beating over the past four years, it might mean something as straightforward as not buying both of the last two loaves of bread, not forwarding that doomsday chain email, and not going out even if you are healthy.

Anastasia Edel, Oakland, California, 3/21/2020. The New York Review of Books Pandemic Journal.

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We must be at once cautious and courageous: courageous, in what doth not depend upon Choice; and cautious, in what doth. 

Epictetus, translated by Elizabeth Carter in 1758. Found thanks to Honey and Wax Books.
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gifts for march sisters

A "little cabinet piano ... with beautiful black and white keys ... and bright pedals." (Roland Kiyola oak piano).

A "band of sky-blue stones" to wear as a reminder not to be selfish. (Rosa de la Cruz turquoise eternity ring.)

A boxwood sewing kit, for mending tears and stitching the long seams of sheets.

A party dress with frills and a touch of real silk (Ulla Johnson Severine gown) or a sensible yet pretty skirt.

A length of silk velvet ribbon, to cover frizzled bangs or adorn a newborn baby.

Cards of gingerbread to nibble and plates of russets to eat while curled up on attic divans, reading.

A basket for corralling errant kittens.

A favorite story (The Pilgrim's Progess by John Bunyan.)

A pocket-sized pochade box for painting abroad. (Guerilla Painter pocket box and accessories.)

A little remembrance of beloved birds that died from neglect, perfect for keeping needles handy.

A chest with a lock, to keep childhood treasures safe and vengeful sisters away from unfinished manuscripts.

Sturdy boots for running until your hairpins tumble out.

An edition of Undine worth the wait. (Undine by De La Motte Fouque, translated by W.L. Courtney and illustrated by Artur Rackham.)

A martin house to convert into a post office, for sharing "tragedies and cravats, poetry and pickles, garden seeds and long letters, music and ginger-bread, rubbers, invitations, scoldings and puppies" with next-door neighbors.

And, naturally, pickled limes.

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For the truest March-sister Christmas: find a nearby food bank or some other way to share some comfort and joy.

"Merry Christmas, Marmee! Many of them! Thank you for our books. We read some, and mean to every day," they all cried in chorus. 

"Merry Christmas, little daughters! I'm glad you began at once, and hope you will keep on. But I want to say one word before we sit down. Not far away from here lies a poor woman with a little newborn baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there, and the oldest boy came to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?" 

They were all unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour, and for a minute no one spoke, only a minute, for Jo exclaimed impetuously, "I'm so glad you came before we began!"

... They were soon ready, and the procession set out. Fortunately it was early, and they went through back streets, so few people saw them, and no one laughed at the queer party. 

A poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm. 

How the big eyes stared and the blue lips smiled as the girls went in. 

"Ach, mein Gott! It is good angels come to us!" said the poor woman, crying for joy. 

"Funny angels in hoods and mittens," said Jo, and set them to laughing.