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.

 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.

Recent favorite books (Part 2)

See Part 1 here.

 

1. Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press)

 "During this period [of rain and boredom] all like periods of my life were called forth to form a continuum, or at least a constellation, and so, far from forming the bland connective tissue between more eventful times, those times themselves became mere ligaments. Not the little lyric miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame."

2. The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry (Counterpoint)

"Occasionally one stumbles into a coincidence that, like an unexpected alignment of windows, momentarily cancels out the sense of historical whereabouts, giving with an overwhelming immediacy an awareness of the reality of the past.

"The possibility of this awareness is always immanent in old homesites. It may suddenly bear in upon one at the sight of old orchard trees standing in the dooryard of a house now filled with baled hay. It came to me when I looked out the attic window of a disintegrating log house and saw a far view of the cleared ridges with wooded hollows in between, and nothing in sight to reveal the date. Who was I, leaning to the window? When?"

3. Art as Experience, John Dewey (Perigee)

"The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the fire burn better; but he is none the less fascinated by the colorful drama of change enacted before his eyes and imaginatively partakes in it. He does not remain a cold spectator."

From The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

17. Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past

Dried hollyhock. The objects used during the Display of Dolls. To find a piece of deep violet or grape-coloured material that has been pressed between the pages of a notebook.

It is a rainy day and one is feeling bored. To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers. And then one comes across the letters of a man one used to love.

Last year's paper fan. A night with a clear moon.