One painting from each of my favorite painters

Joaquin Sorolla/ Auguste Raynaud/ JC Leyendecker/ Joseph Lefebvre/ Thomas Richman Blackshear

[northwindow]

on cycles

a syllabus of orbits, loops, repetitions, and returns

loops, the limits of language, the paradoxical loneliness of "i love you," and what keeps love alive by maria popova

an installment of popova's newsletter the marganialian that draws on the writing of roland barthes. popova begins by describing her repeated daily walking routes, drawing a connection between the repetition of movement and the repetition of speech and feeling-- the recurrent declaration of "i love you."

why did our universe begin? with roger penrose

video with nobel prizewinning physicist roger penrose that explains his theory of "conformal cyclic cosmology": that our universe's deep past bears a similarity to its deep future, giving evidence for an infinitely cycling timeline. see the essay "time after time" by paul halpern for more on physics and cyclical time.

time, space, and the eclipse of the earth (part i: abstraction) by david abram

from ecologist and philosopher david abram's book the spell of the sensuous. in this section, he distinguishes broadly between how space and time are viewed in oral cultures and literate cultures. he focuses on the alignment between oral cultures and a cyclical model of time, discussing why alphabets and writing might affect the way space-time manifests in a cultural imagination.

the hero with a thousand faces by joseph campbell

book by mythologist and literature professor joseph campbell describing his archetypical "hero's journey" cycle, a basic multi-step plot shared by myths and stories across many centuries and cultures (also called a "monomyth"). for a condensed version of the hero's journey, see this diagram by lisa paltz spindler designed for the gunn center for the study of science fiction.

"on small seasons and long calendars" by ross zurowski

essay by designer ross zurowski on how we divide and mark time, arguing that we should begin to divide our lives into more organic and useful phases. the essay is inspired in part by the sekki, short descriptive seasons used by farmers in ancient china and japan-- you can see a list of sekki (along with twitter and ical notifications) at zurowski's a guide to understanding small seasons.

wintering by katherine may

book by british writer katherine may on literal and metaphorical winters. may writes about the necessity to periodically experience darkness throughout life, meditating on the winter solstice, cold water swimming, the northern lights, hibernation and fairy tales to illustrate how wintering can catalyze self-renewal.

"ouroboricisms" by alice lesperance

medium essay about trauma that uses the ouroboros as a metaphor for the circular reconstruction of memory. lesperance draws from mystics and writers julian of norwich, anne carson, margery kempe, and flannery o'connor and their engagement with the repetition and recreation of wounds.

"on reset" by brian blanchfield

a meditation by poet brian blanchfield from his essay collection proxies about discovering a series of audition tapes in which the same scene is repeatedly recast with different actresses. he draws a comparison between the audition scene and poetic repetition, not only in the structure of poems but in our engagement with poetry itself.

[iirulancorrino]

One of the inventors of the sewing machine didn’t patent it because of the way it would restructure labor. Another was almost killed by a mob.

Always when I sew I think of Emma Goldman with her sewing machine, or Emma Goldman during her first night in jail “at least bring me some sewing.” Wikipedia says the sewing machine reduced average garment construction time from 14 hours to 2 hours. Somewhere on a sewing blog someone wrote of making new garments from existing ones: “use every part of the garment” and “each garment holds in it hours of a garment worker’s life.” I sew and the historical of sewing becomes a feeling just as when I used to be a poet, when I used to write poetry, used to write poetry and that thing culture began tendriling out in me, but it is probably more meaningful to sew a dress than to write a poem. I make anywhere from 10 to 15 dollars an hour at any of my three jobs. A garment from Target or Forever 21 costs 10 to 30 dollars. A garment from a thrift store costs somewhere between 4 and 10 dollars. A garment from a garage sale costs 1 to 5 dollars. A garment from a department store costs 30 to 500 dollars. All of these have been made, for the most part, from hours of women and children’s lives. Now I give the hours of my life I don’t sell to my employers to the garments. My costs are low: 2-dollar fabric from Goodwill, patterns bought for 99 cents or less, notions found at estate sales for 1 or 3 dollars. I almost save money like this. The fabric still contains the hours of the lives, those of the farmers and shepherds and chemists and factory workers and truckers and salespeople and the first purchasers, the givers-away, who were probably women who sewed. Sewing is difficult. There is a reason girls were trained in it before they were trained in anything else, years and years spent at practice, and even then they might not have been any good.

Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women

[hotcassavetessummer]

leonard cohen, "one of these days"

[leonardcohenofficial]

“The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It’s useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.”

— Leonard Cohen in a 1985 interview

[atreides]

“Sometimes my heart feels too big for my body so I try to throw it away Or give it away […] When I say I love you, what I mean is today my world exploded into a million shards of granite and there you were, beaming There you were refracting the sun into a perfect star”

— William James, from “[I’m done trying to make sense],” The Shore (no. 12,  Winter 2021)

[exhaled-spirals]

— Joe Moran, “Why you should read this article slowly” in The Guardian

[soracities]

ALT

Philip Larkin, from "Be my Valentine this Monday", The Complete Poems [ID in ALT]

[soracities]

ALT

Yusef Komunyakaa, from "The Cage Walker", Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems [ID in ALT]

[almoststardust]

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world — all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form. – Many people are anxious when they’re about to be photographed: not because they fear, as primitives do, being violated but because they fear the camera’s disapproval. People want the idealized image: a photograph of themselves looking their best. They feel rebuked when the camera doesn’t return an image of themselves as more attractive than they really are. But few are lucky enough to be ‘photogenic’ — that is, to look better in photographs (even when not made up or flattered by the lighting) than in real life. That photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty, indicated that most photographs, of course, are not candid. …In the mid-1840s, a German photographer invented the first technique for retouching the negative. His two versions of the same portrait — one retouched, the other not — astounded crowds at the Exhibition Unverselle held in Paris in 1855. The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular. – Away of certifying experience, taking photographs I also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. – All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

— Excerpts from Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”