what i love...flying into jfk

i can't resist taking photos of this magical scene

paper moon farm and brigg's barbecue, caswell county nc

 

eve and i drove 45 minutes from durham to visit maddy's beautiful farm, paper moon. maddy is a solo farming inspiration to me (though living in a trailer through all those summer tornado warnings is petrifying to think about). here and here are some photos of her goats.

the very enjoyable briggs bbq in yanceyville.

diy shadowbox gift

since i was so profoundly inspired by this shadowbox-filled house on the selby, i made this little shadowbox from a bamboo drawer organizer from bed bath and beyond, steiff animals, some felt, tissue paper, and the all-important super glue from a craft store, and these battery powered string lights!

i didn't really know what i was doing. but it came out okay. eve, for whom this was a birthday present, has some strong feelings about t-rexes and goats, so that's why they make an appearance. one huge benefit to this kind of project: it's fully customizable! i bought some junk food japanese erasers to give that t-rex a snack.  i think i might add onto the background some trees or mountains cut out of a national geographic. i will post an updated picture when i do!

that beautiful painting on the easel is by my roommate marina!

Recent Favorite Books, Part 4

Part 3, 2, and 1! And for color-lovers.

1. Bluets, Maggie Nelson

Along the lines of Dept. of Speculation, Autoportrait, Remarks on Color, or Speedboat (or, for that matter, Ongoingness or 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, listed below) (just for the first time noticing my obsession with this form), this is a collection of fragments of intense noticing. I am obsessed with the color blue, and the book made me train my eyes on blueness with new delight. I really recommend this one.

"I have been introduced to a man who had one of his front teeth replaced with lapis lazuli, solely because he loved the stone, and to another who worships blue so devoutly that he refuses to eat blue food and grows only blue and white flowers in his garden, which surrounds the blue ex-cathedral in which he lives" (6).

2. Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso

This volume is even slimmer than the quite slim Bluets. I wish it had gone more in-depth into the many ideas it just sketches out--what it's like to get older, what it's like to spend less and less time describing in your journal the things that would have sent you into rapturous longwindedness before--anyways, this book more suggested than enlightened. 

"Now I am old enough to know what I'll never accomplish. I will never be a soldier, a physicist, a thousand other things. It feels like relief.

"Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to" (60).

3. Stoner, John Williams

The entire life of an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri. This book put me in a trance and I delayed dinner to finish it.

"After the cold, the heat inside the building was intense. The grayness outside trickled through the windows and glassed doors on either side of the hall, so that the yellow tiled floors glowed brighter than the gray light upon them, and the great oaken columns and the rubbed walls gleamed from their dark. Shuffling footsteps hissed upon the floors, and a murmur of voices was muted by the great expanse of the hall; dim figures moved slowly, mingling and parting; and the oppressive air gathered the smell of the oiled walls and the wet odor of woolen clothing. Stoner went up the smooth marble stairs to Archer Sloane's second-floor office. He knocked on the closed door, heard a voice, and went in" (17).

4. Lost! A Ranger's Journal of Search and Rescue, Dwight McCarter and Ronald Schmidt

True stories of deadly mishaps in the Appalachian Mountains. 

"Old timers will tell you that a one dog night is 32 degrees and above. This is to say, one dog on top of you during the night. A two dog night is around 20 to 32 degrees. This means, a dog on either side of you. A three dog night is below 20 degrees, when you need one dog on either side and one on top!" (140).

5. 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, Sarah Ruhl

Yesss, this is a good one. An extremely approachable book that I see myself forcing on my mom. I was lucky enough to see Sarah Ruhl give a reading of some of these tiny essays at Brooklyn College, and she was hilarious, thoughtful, and so original. I love her slanted way of viewing the world, and her goodwill for humankind. As you can see from this photo, I splurged on the hardcover, which I almost never do.

"I would be interested in seeing a short series of plays, all called "Untitled." So that the eye might be redirected and the play might become ever more interior and private, with no recourse to a title that might restrict meaning. Titles by their nature imply that the play's architecture is like a bull's-eye (and some are) with the point being in the center. Sometimes the point is in the margins, or in the experience of throwing the dart" ("On Titles and paintings," 14). 

Probability

Probability

By Lia Purpura
source

Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think--
it's the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare--
because what if it wasn't?
Astonishment's nothing
without your consent.

more brooklyn photo journal

around my neighborhood

 

my sister's hair is very much like mine

i went to a wedding at an army base with this view of the verrazano narrows bridge

bed-stuy by our apartment

Internet favorites for March: two favorite New Yorker articles

I think about these two all the time:

Jonathan Rosen about passenger pigeons, 6 Jan 2014:
In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock—if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at sixty miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun—that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass. Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around just how many passenger pigeons that would mean, consider that there are only about two hundred and sixty million rock pigeons in the world today. You would have to imagine more than eight times the total world population of rock pigeons, all flying at the same time in a connected mass.

Burkhard Bilger about Sandor Katz and wild fermentation, 22 Nov 2010:
The ants, collected from his woodpile in the winter when they were too sluggish to get away, had a snappy texture and bright, tart flavor—like organic Pop Rocks. (They were full of formic acid, which gets its name from the Latin word for ant.) He brought us a little dish of toasted acorns, cups of honey-sweetened sumac tea, and goblets of a musky black broth made from decomposed inky-cap mushrooms. I felt, for a moment, as if I’d stumbled upon a child’s tea party in the woods.

ps: all the other internet favorites

from the museum of natural history in berlin

edited to add:
derek parfit
bringing animals along
secret riches beneath a temple