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Evelyn Dunbar, April (1937/38). Oil painting of illustration originally commissioned for the Country Life 1938 Gardener's Diary, found thanks to Susannah Clapp.
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Walter McClintock, Meadow of Pink Flowers. Lantern slide created 1941, published 1905. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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From Charles Moore's introduction to Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows.
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Transitional Gottschalk dolls house with original tiled roof, wall, and floor papers from around 1907, via.
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Keepsake hat by William Ellery, here.
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Shafi' 'Abbasi, Drawing with Flowers, Butterflies, and Insects. 1649-1640. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Horticulturalist Clarence Elliott in his greenhouse, via Upstate Diary.
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She drew, but had no art instruction. After graduating from high school in 1955 she visited the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) on a whim. Dazzled by the atmosphere of freedom and energy—students painting in the hallways and playing bongos in the courtyard—she bought a pair of arty earrings and submitted a portfolio of her pencil sketches of movie stars.
Regina Marler, "Joan Doesn't Give A Damn." The New York Review, March 9, 2023.
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Marriage to a pirate with a decent stash of plunder might offer a young woman the opportunity to set herself up as an independent trader, and also to escape the strictures of what could be a violently patriarchal society. ... The arrangement appears to have allowed the women a good amount of autonomy. Since a pirate husband had no social standing, and usually couldn’t even speak the local language, he ceded almost all economic and social responsibilities to his partner. By marrying a pirate, then, a woman could at a stroke gain freedom from the control of her family and move into a position of economic, social and, it seems, sexual independence, with nary an in-law in sight. Ports and villages on the coast sometimes became ‘cities of women’, where trade and contacts with the outside world were controlled by a new class of female merchants, who ‘constituted the backbone of such communities ... no decision of importance could be made without them.’ Graeber thinks that by throwing in their lot with prestigious, wealthy outsiders, young Malagasy women had seen a chance to ‘re-create local society’ according to their own lights, ‘and with the creation of the port towns, the transformation of sexual mores, and the eventual successful promotion of their children by the pirates as a new aristocratic class, this is precisely what they were able to do.’
Francis Gooding, "When Thieves Retire." London Review of Books, March 30, 2023. (Made me rush out and buy a copy of Graeber's Pirate Enlightenment.)
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“Stealing jewelry, it was just exciting. It also became a social outlet for me. That was my everything,” the nonagenarian says of her 60-year criminal career. “I don’t regret being a jewel thief. Do I regret getting caught? Yes.”
Aaron Rasmussen, "Ice Queen: The Story of the Notorious Jewel Thief Doris Payne." Grazia, Winter 2022.
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Climbing up through the site we saw plaques with images of excavated objects that were now in the museum. One that I had particularly wanted to see was the colossal head of one of the Elefsina caryatids, balancing her sacred basket. I had recently visited her twin at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. According to the plaque the twin was ‘stolen’ by E.D. Clarke, a Cambridge mineralogist, in 1801—incidentally, or not, the same year that removals were begun by Elgin’s agents on the Parthenon. But the case of the Caryatid is different. Her abduction was unequivocally legal—Clarke had obtained clear permission from the authorities for her removal—but also entirely immoral. Clarke didn’t have Elgin’s theoretical (if disputed) claim to archaeological altruism, rescuing a neglected monument from the depredations or indifference of the locals; the locals revered the statue, piling dung about her to bless their fields, crowning her with flowers, lighting candles before her. And as her face is eroded featureless, there could be zero claim to artistic value.
He wanted her because she was hard to get.
A.E. Stallings, "Eleusinian Mysteries." The London Review of Books Blog, March 29, 2023.
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When I was a kid, in the touch-tone era in the Midwest, I often dialed, for no real reason, the “time lady”—an actress named Jane Barbe, it turns out—who would announce, with prim authority “at the tone,” the correct time to the second. I was, in those days, a bit obsessed with time. I would stare, transfixed, at the Foucault pendulum at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry as it swept slow traces through its day; or gawp at the patinaed green clock, topped by a scythe and hourglass-carrying temporal patriarch and marked with a single word—time—that adorned the Jewelers Building on East Wacker Drive. But nothing felt so immediate, so curiously satisfying, as having the exact time delivered through the intimacy of the phone’s earpiece.
Tom Vanderbilt, "In Search of Lost Time." Harpers, April 2023.
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I have always been a reader, but I tend to get into ruts where I simply read the same passages over and over again. These include the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which the narrator tells you about his cave of lights; Marcel Proust’s description of place names; Joan Didion’s expressions of pointed indifference in Slouching Towards Bethlehem; the scene in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son where Fuckhead, the protagonist, stands outside a woman’s window; the introduction to Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (with the dinosaur skin); some random sentences in Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex; Orwell’s matter-of-fact conclusions in “Reflections on Gandhi”; every word of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son; the last stanza of Marilyn Hacker’s poem “For K. J., Leaving and Coming Back,” which reads “Although a day alone cuts tight or lies/too limp sometimes, I know what/I didn’t know/a year ago, that makes it the right/ size:/owned certainty; perpetual/surprise”; the list of items in Zooey Glass’s bathroom in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey; the postscript to Borges’s story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” as well as his love letter titled “Delia Elena San Marco.”I’ve come to realize that I function like a more curated but less efficient version of GPT.
Jay Caspian King, "What's the Point of Reading Writing by Humans?" The New Yorker, 3/31/2023.
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