Flâneuse, another
Défense d'afficher, Paris, 1937 by Marianne Breslauer
Défense d’afficher. Do not advertise. And yet, there she is, Elle s’affiche. She shows herself. She shows up against the city. - Lauren Elkin
Environment matters
Drawing my Days, by Jane Heinrichs
Photo via library of congress, a strip mall in Plainfield, Indiana
On strip malls:
Don’t we deserve better? Humans don’t just thrive no matter where you put them. Environment matters. Environment is determinative, constitutive; it makes you who you are, it makes you do what you do. My father’s best architecture teacher, Louis Kahn, used to tell his students to think like the beams, feel like the beams, what’s pushing you in, what’s pulling you down, and that’s how you think through a building.
- Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse
Leaving isn’t the hardest thing.
“Fact is, there are more than two doors, forgiveness or Kathy Bates. The third door is, you don’t have to forgive at all. You can just go right on living your life with one less asshole to deal with.” - Lauren Hough
On Shadow Work
The Swan, Hilma af Klint
Uses of Sorrow
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
- Mary Oliver
Flâneuse
“I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.”
- Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women
“An American Girl In Italy” by Orkin, Florence, 1951.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
This book was delightful! A few favourite passages:
1 - I’m just saying,” Jinx said, seemingly more lucid now, “when you’re lost in the deep dark forest, the thing to do isn’t to get scared of the trees. You have to find your way out again.
2 - You can't tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn't think that should be their own decision.
3 - It really makes you wonder: What kind of truth would require this many lies to tell?
Ladies are quite impossible.
Describing her occupation as ‘spinster’, Virginia Woolf takes out lifetime membership to The London Library in 1904.
She later recounts in her diary of an infuriating chance meeting with E.M. Forster. “…met Morgan in the London Library yesterday & flew into a passion. ”Virginia my dear,” he said. “You know I’m on the Committee here. And we’ve been discussing whether to allow ladies.” Oh but they do – I said. There was Mrs Green… “Yes yes – there was Mrs Green. And Sir Leslie Stephen said, never again. She was so troublesome. And I said, haven’t ladies improved? But they were all quite determined. No no no, ladies are quite impossible.” See how my hand trembles. I was so angry.”
(credit: https://stjameslondon.co.uk/news/the-london-library-a-history)
Image via Lit Hub. Penguin Modern Classics, various editions: To the Lighthouse (1966), The Waves (1964), Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway (1972; from a painting of Woolf by Vanessa Bell), The Voyage Out (1970), Night and Day (1969), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Jacob’s Room (1965; cover design by John Sewell), A Room of One’s Own (1963; cover drawing by Paul Hogarth), To the Lighthouse (1964; cover drawing by Duncan Grant)
A Few Favourite Quotes from The Wedding People
1 - Having a mother helps you believe that everybody wants to hear every little thing you think. Having a mother helps you speak without thinking. It allows you to trust in your most awful self, to yell and scream and cry, knowing that your mother will still love you by the end of it.
2 - She doesn’t see the point in staying alive only to do all the same things that made her want to die.
3 - Some people are like religious children that way, mistaking suffering with goodness.
4 - It is nice the way everyone here keeps asking this, even if it’s just their job. Each time feels like another chance to practice asking for what she needs.
5 - Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.
6 - The wife is the reason the man becomes the architect. The mistress is the reason the architect keeps building.
The Silence in Between
“Mozart said that music is not in the notes but in the silence in between. I think that's where our souls are – hidden in that silence. Evil demanded little of me – it merely asked me to stay silent, to do nothing.”
- The Silence in Between by Josie Ferguson
by Josie Ferguson
Always, on this day
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
- Louise Erdich, The Painted Drum
M.K. Ciurlionis, 1906/7, from The Zodiac
Small Kindnesses
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
~ Danusha Laméris
Maira Kalman
Horizon
I hope I haven’t already driven
past my greatest moments.
I hope there is something beautiful on the horizon
that’s just as impatient as I am.
Something so eager,
it wants to meet me halfway.
A moment that is diligently
staring at its watch, trembling with
nervousness, frutrated,
and bursting at the seams,
wondering what’s taking me
so long to arrive.
by Rudy Francisco
Image via @well_hello_april
(Fear of) Choice
There isn’t a right answer.
There just isn’t. The game show
where the bells ring and the points
go up and the confetti falls
because you got the answer
is a lie. The preacher who would assure you
of how to attain salvation
is making it all up. The doctor
who knows just how to fix
what ails you will be sure
of something else tomorrow.
Every choice will
wound someone, heal someone,
build a wall and open a conversation.
Things will always happen
that you can’t foresee.
But you have to choose.
It’s all we have—that little rudder
that we employ in the midst
of all the eddies and rapids,
the current that pulls us
inexorably toward the sea.
The fact that you are swept along
by the river is no excuse.
Watch where you are going.
Lean in toward what you love.
When in doubt, tell the truth.
–Lynn Ungar
KwangHo Shin on Behance
In Praise of Mystery
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
- Ada Limón
You Wake Up in the Morning
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the magic tissue of the universe of your life. No one can take it from you. No one receives either more or less than you receive. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt. You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you.
-Arnold Bennett
Luc Lavenseau. Rêve de voyage
What My Mother Says
My mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating eggs without salt.
Which is a better way of saying — take the scenic route. Say I love you when it’s true. Drive 12 hours just to touch. Buy kumquats because they’re called kumquats. Call someone you love a little kumquat. Write letters. Recite poems. Be verklempt. Rise early to hunt the moon. Eat pastries whose names you can’t pronounce. Astonish everyone. Haunt everything. Sing, even if poorly. Press the peel for zest. We’re nothing but brief bodies. Hearts, fragile as parakeets. Spit, lips, and longing. All we’ve got is this skin. This necessary salt.
- Joy Sullivan
Why I Am Magic by Nikita Gill
There are days
I have been the thirst
and days
when I have been the water
but the days
I love myself most
are the days I am both.
Letter to N.Y.
In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.
—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.
- Elizabeth Bishop
The Journey by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
To the woman I met, whose child is in crisis
You are not alone.
https://www.craftliterary.com/2024/02/14/novel-map-hannah-grieco/
Hinke Schreuders