Eve, my phone, and I have been so many places together.
These are in chronological order. (Here's my insta.)
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Eve through my phone
Eve, my phone, and I have been so many places together.
These are in chronological order. (Here's my insta.)
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Monday, August 10, 2015
Recent Favorite Books, Part 5
Here are all the recent favorite books, and here are some from my summer reading regimen, which, evidently, is "Women + Sebald."
The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
"Now, in town, you never know whether the neighbors are home. Even in the backcountry of Yosemite, there are those other people with a pass. Nearly anywhere you go, someone might hear or see you. But not on a levee by the Elbe two miles from the nearest town in dense fog at six o'clock on a Sunday morning in September. They say in space no one can hear you scream, but why would a person with a sense of dignity scream anywhere else?" (93)
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
"This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?" (125)
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
"When I wake up, I see the jars of preserves ranged on the chest and in the cold compartments of the tiled stove. I try in vain to work out what they mean. They don't mean anything, says Mama, they're just cherries, plums and pears." (206)
The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits
"I am no longer immune, however, to the occasional plummet in time altitude. A plummet happened the other night. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about Mexican wineglasses, the green kind with the air bubbles. They are the size of goblets. I'd put a lot of identity stock, at one time in my life, in Mexican wineglasses. I'd bought some in my twenties, and they represented a pinnacle achievement in self-realization. Thinking of these wineglasses reminded me of a trip I'd taken through Mexico with a boyfriend when we were both in our twenties; we'd driven a two-piston rental through mountain ruts. We slept in fields. We emerged in a town with white walls and cafés, and were there also Mexican wineglasses? Did I buy mine there? I don't think so. I only remember a photo I took in that town of a white adobe wall and, rising above it, a crucifix atop a church dome. I was not religious, yet the photograph was so religious that I felt I shouldn't or couldn't be as fond of it as I was. But now, lying in bed and thinking about wineglasses, I found myself thinking of this photo, and the girl who took it, and the town--I'll never know its name--and I felt the kind of longing for that girl/town/photo I feel for my children at night when they are asleep." (59)
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
"And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realized that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent." (65)
And, the best for last (I went crazy for this book, which I found much more satisfying than Bluets).
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
"If you're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see--Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be." (66)
"But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life." (112)
The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
"Now, in town, you never know whether the neighbors are home. Even in the backcountry of Yosemite, there are those other people with a pass. Nearly anywhere you go, someone might hear or see you. But not on a levee by the Elbe two miles from the nearest town in dense fog at six o'clock on a Sunday morning in September. They say in space no one can hear you scream, but why would a person with a sense of dignity scream anywhere else?" (93)
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
"This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?" (125)
from the museum about dunwich in orford...
The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
"When I wake up, I see the jars of preserves ranged on the chest and in the cold compartments of the tiled stove. I try in vain to work out what they mean. They don't mean anything, says Mama, they're just cherries, plums and pears." (206)
The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits
"I am no longer immune, however, to the occasional plummet in time altitude. A plummet happened the other night. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about Mexican wineglasses, the green kind with the air bubbles. They are the size of goblets. I'd put a lot of identity stock, at one time in my life, in Mexican wineglasses. I'd bought some in my twenties, and they represented a pinnacle achievement in self-realization. Thinking of these wineglasses reminded me of a trip I'd taken through Mexico with a boyfriend when we were both in our twenties; we'd driven a two-piston rental through mountain ruts. We slept in fields. We emerged in a town with white walls and cafés, and were there also Mexican wineglasses? Did I buy mine there? I don't think so. I only remember a photo I took in that town of a white adobe wall and, rising above it, a crucifix atop a church dome. I was not religious, yet the photograph was so religious that I felt I shouldn't or couldn't be as fond of it as I was. But now, lying in bed and thinking about wineglasses, I found myself thinking of this photo, and the girl who took it, and the town--I'll never know its name--and I felt the kind of longing for that girl/town/photo I feel for my children at night when they are asleep." (59)
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
"And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realized that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent." (65)
And, the best for last (I went crazy for this book, which I found much more satisfying than Bluets).
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
"If you're looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see--Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don't even want to talk about "female sexuality" until there is a control group. And there never will be." (66)
"But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again--not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life." (112)
Saturday, April 4, 2015
~free~ color-theory inspired diy
i love colors.
i love josef albers, though i am ashamed to call this a josef albers diy, because it's not rigorous enough. but maybe i'll try doing one of his real exercises ("make two colors make like the same color by putting them on different backgrounds," "make one color look like two different colors," etc) next time i go to home depot.
i love color-aid, except that the nice set is more than a hundred dollars, and i'd feel bad about cutting up all those beautiful colors anyway.
this is where home depot comes in! they have those sumptuous FREE paint chips in splendid array all over the walls of the paint section, and since they're actually painted, not just printed on a printer or something, they are a wonderful substitute for color-aid, i think.
i went around the paint chip section, first pulling down the colors that were most appealing to me (i love periwinkle blue and ocean blue, dark teal, cadmium red, etc) and then pulling down colors that i found grotesque but worthy (olive green, ballerina pink, etc) and i fanned them out and looked for any weak spots. there aren't too many really bright yellows on the market, but i found a eye-piercing chartreuse that filled in that gap.
i came home and cut off all the written-on parts, resulting in lots of pieces of pure color in many different sizes.
huuuughghhghghghghghgh
i tried a lot of different arrangements. i planned to keep all the pieces as rectangles, but i didn't like the overlapping-shingle look. they were beautiful laid out in a tidy spectrum, but on a rectangle of paper, i couldn't find a pleasing order. i just wanted to keep all the potential of rainbow there...you know how a palette often ends up more beautiful than the painting it was supposed to be in service of?
get on me, beauteous color assortment
so i hit on the idea of cutting the rectangles into squares, and then cutting the squares into 45-45-90 little triangles. that way i could pair them off and be a little more organized about it, matching color to color, like a puzzle, till i was satisfied.
the finished thing ended up with some rainbow on the side and then lots of triangles. i was inspired by these absurdly beautiful children's blocks. yes, color rally! that is exactly how i want to feel!
here's the final result, slightly skewed in front of an old monoprint.
and one last note if you want to pursue the freewheeling joys of a color collage yourself: i found my super glue was more helpful than my glue stick for keeping down the cardstock-thick color samples.
Friday, January 2, 2015
internet favorites for january: love exists
In the fall my friends and I watched the documentary "112 Weddings," where a wedding videographer catches up with some of the couples he's filmed over the years, and interviews them about how their lives and relationships have gone. The documentary was almost entirely negative, lots of emphasis on how people didn't "think things through" ("what does that mean, though?" Eve wondered), and how the challenges of child-rearing can destroy everything.
So I went back to my archive of favorite things on the internet to re-read my top two articles about love and relationships.
This one, from the Huffington Post, includes an idea I just love:
“One woman in Georgia gave some pretty amazing advice. She and her husband have been married for over 60 years, and after being asked what her best relationship advice would be, she paused and said ... 'Don't be afraid to be the one who loves the most.'"
I didn't understand what that advice meant until I was in a very serious relationship, but now I think about it through every rough patch, and it helps so much.
This one, from the Atlantic, focuses on a very empowering and beautiful idea: that trying to be a good person and a good partner will make you better. I find it easy to notice what's unfair about the world, and what can't be controlled, and how often bad things happen to good people. It's nice to think that sometimes trying to do very hard things might actually work.
“There’s a habit of mind that the masters have,” Gottman explained in an interview, “which is this: they are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.”
“It’s not just scanning environment,” chimed in Julie Gottman. “It’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
I hope you find these helpful too!
So I went back to my archive of favorite things on the internet to re-read my top two articles about love and relationships.
This one, from the Huffington Post, includes an idea I just love:
“One woman in Georgia gave some pretty amazing advice. She and her husband have been married for over 60 years, and after being asked what her best relationship advice would be, she paused and said ... 'Don't be afraid to be the one who loves the most.'"
I didn't understand what that advice meant until I was in a very serious relationship, but now I think about it through every rough patch, and it helps so much.
This one, from the Atlantic, focuses on a very empowering and beautiful idea: that trying to be a good person and a good partner will make you better. I find it easy to notice what's unfair about the world, and what can't be controlled, and how often bad things happen to good people. It's nice to think that sometimes trying to do very hard things might actually work.
“There’s a habit of mind that the masters have,” Gottman explained in an interview, “which is this: they are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate and say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect and appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.”
“It’s not just scanning environment,” chimed in Julie Gottman. “It’s scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right or scanning him for what he’s doing wrong and criticizing versus respecting him and expressing appreciation.”
I hope you find these helpful too!
my sister on her wedding day
Saturday, June 14, 2014
big moments
my sister got married almost two years ago. she was 24 and the groom was 23 and that ushered in the era of a wedding seemingly every week on facebook. my sister is one of the most serious people i know, but she'd been obsessively watching "say yes to the dress" on netflix, which taught me about the overwhelmingly powerful interestingness of wedding planning. i mean, my mom and i thought that the "say yes to the dress" episodes that netflix kept recommending to us were part of some weird glitch, until my sister, whose idea of an extravagance is diy reupholstering the seat of her two-person tricycle, confessed.
anyway, her wedding was so wonderful. really magical. there's all the planning, and then the day. you just have to push it and it starts to roll.
i love the idea of making a day that embodies my very favorite aesthetic. though i'm certainly not going to be married anytime soon, i already have a folder of favorite things that might somehow relate. i care about invitations, photography, and colors (red and blue). i don't care about table settings. there were three weddings in the backyard of the stately 1930s house where i grew up in durham. i always imagined how fun it would be to pour the cost of a normal wedding venue back into that house. along the upstairs hallway are giant closets which peaches macpherson flung open when she was showing the house to my mother, and declared, "and these are where we kept our debutante gowns!" i was invited to be a debutante in durham, and it is one of my greatest regrets that i didn't say yes. i didn't know who my marshal would be.
my sister made all the bouquets herself from chiffon, but i love the idea of fresh flowers, like shakespeare and company uses for decorations.
i love spending so much on perishable things. there are very few times in life where there are truly "no holds barred."
i just love this wedding, jemima kirke's. it's given me the clearest possible image/articulation of the poignance of the perishable beauty of a wedding...
she'd been saving since teenagerhood a set of antique french candles that looked like a bride and a groom.
the hoarder in me thinks, no, don't burn them! save them, save your antique candles.
but this is the moment that we save such things for.
anyway, her wedding was so wonderful. really magical. there's all the planning, and then the day. you just have to push it and it starts to roll.
i love the idea of making a day that embodies my very favorite aesthetic. though i'm certainly not going to be married anytime soon, i already have a folder of favorite things that might somehow relate. i care about invitations, photography, and colors (red and blue). i don't care about table settings. there were three weddings in the backyard of the stately 1930s house where i grew up in durham. i always imagined how fun it would be to pour the cost of a normal wedding venue back into that house. along the upstairs hallway are giant closets which peaches macpherson flung open when she was showing the house to my mother, and declared, "and these are where we kept our debutante gowns!" i was invited to be a debutante in durham, and it is one of my greatest regrets that i didn't say yes. i didn't know who my marshal would be.
bella figura wedding invitation
from somewhere on style me pretty
a jason munn poster
from the voynich manuscript
my sister made all the bouquets herself from chiffon, but i love the idea of fresh flowers, like shakespeare and company uses for decorations.
amy flowerjugs sets up for the paris literary prize
i love spending so much on perishable things. there are very few times in life where there are truly "no holds barred."
i just love this wedding, jemima kirke's. it's given me the clearest possible image/articulation of the poignance of the perishable beauty of a wedding...
she'd been saving since teenagerhood a set of antique french candles that looked like a bride and a groom.
the hoarder in me thinks, no, don't burn them! save them, save your antique candles.
but this is the moment that we save such things for.
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