the midweek roundup
(Look, listen, read.)
It’s been a trying week here, with all manner of personal hell involving the American pharmaceutical and healthcare system; the downslope following my first Mother’s Day without my mother; utterly despicable politics made even more despicable because so many of our leaders seem frozen in place, unable to do anything to respond to the monsters who are hell bent for leather on dragging us back to the good ‘ol days of Reconstruction, when certain white-sheeted groups of men terrorized Black communities from north to south because they were certain it was their right. I rarely use this page to speak my political mind, but I am now living in a place of such raging brutality and hucksterism that it leaves me breathless with rage. I am 62, which means that when I was born in 1963, my Black friends and schoolmates had great-grandparents who had grown up in slavery. My grandmother marched as a suffragette in New York City when she was nineteen. My mother could not carry a credit card in her own name until 1974, which was also the year of her safe and legal abortion (I am comfortable saying this because if she were here, she’d be the first person to discuss it in the interest of Roe V Wade. Also, she likely would have been able to have one regardless of the law, as women always have since the dawn of time, because she was white and middle class).
And yet: here we are. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is hanging by a thread, and it turns my stomach.
Beauty and art are the way we metabolize grief, and the door to the grace that drives them is, by its nature, eternally propped open.
I have many readers, friends, and family in the UK, and I will tell you all this: whatever you’re seeing in the news? It is a sliver of a sliver of what is actually going on. AI and algorithms have made it hard to know truth from fiction, so please: be discerning when you seek out the news.
It sometimes feels asinine to pull together a list like this every week — commodification of our lives feels wrong — and I’ve sometimes felt guilty doing it, but in many of the things I discover every week, I find beauty, and I believe with ever fiber that beauty wins. At the most hideous times and in the most complicated places, beauty wins. Beauty and art are the way we metabolize grief, and the door to the grace that drives them is, by its nature, eternally propped open. (I say that as an agnostic with Quaker/Buddhist/liberal Judeo-Christian tendencies and as the granddaughter of an Orthodox cantor who favored Kabbalah so: ever hopeful.)
What I’m Seeing (and Loving)
Last Sunday — my first Mother’s Day without my mother — Susan blessed me with the day. Let’s go wherever you want to go, she said, and I was on the fence between The Cloisters (shockingly have never been) and any of the lovely small gardens that dot southern New England, where I live. Instead, we drove to Chatham, New York to visit Maira Kalman’s pop-up exhibit mounted in conjunction with The Shaker Museum, which is in the throes of a major renovation and two years away from re-opening. Maira’s exhibit is open from May 2nd to July 5th, and you really need to make the trip.
I’ve known and adored Maira’s work for years; it means more to me than I have words for. It became a fixture in my universe with her publication of The Principles of Uncertainty, which I found at a time of familial excision, great cruelty, and existential questioning in my life. Maira is compelled by the simple and the beautiful, which typifies Shaker design and life, so when I read about the exhibit, I knew that was how I wanted to spend Mother’s Day. We finally met last Sunday after years of brief emails and a conversation on the first iteration of Poor Man’s Feast. The exhibit combined her paintings with her hand-selected objects from the museum, and was nothing short of perfect. Also, I bought a pair of socks with the words NOLI TIMERE on them in Maira’s handwriting; these are the words I had tattooed on my left wrist, after seeing them in a video, tacked to a wall in her workspace.
In other news: I’ve inexplicably become besotted by wallpaper. I have no idea why. Have a look at this fabulous video about the founding of the 140 year old wallpaper company, Thibault, with a peek inside the founder’s work journal.
One of the things I love about Substack is that you never know who you will discover. This week, I found myself immersed in the Substacks of Laura Fenton and her LIVING SMALL, and The Illustration Department’s Notes on Illustration. Fenton first: I live in a smallish house that feels perpetually cluttered because Susan and I are both book fanatics — she is a book designer at Random House and I was an acquiring editor for many years before I became a full-time author — and there are piles everywhere. We also tend to be fans of repurposing and reusing; we love things with patina and history (and we generally loathe plastic). We have never been known to be particularly neat, and this also sometimes poses problems. Fenton writes about all of these things: the gestalt of living small both practically and psychologically, how to make the most of a smaller space, the beauty of naming things, and buying well. A lovely Substack, and I agree with all of it, especially now, when I equate living smaller with also living more quietly in a very noisy world.
Notes on Illustration: I tumbled down a rabbit hole here. I grew up surrounded by good illustration, and for the most part, I wasn’t even conscious of it. My father was a creative director at a large advertising agency in Manhattan, my cousin Nina was and is a great illustrator, and then I went and married someone who is secretly an excellent artist but is also very shy about it. Living with her for twenty-six years, I have become far more aware of the illustration around me, and how much I love it. Notes on Illustration is a Substack connected to the podcast The Illustration Department, which brings together the best of the best: Caldecott Medal winners and logo designers, artists specializing in mid-century illustration, minimalists, realists, and everyone in between. If you love illustration, this is for you.
The extraordinary India Knight’s Home hit number 1 on Substack’s new Home & Garden category. I love everything India does and writes, especially her book, Home, which I’ve read three times (it has given me courage to do a lot, most recently to consider painting the small, dark hallway from my living area to our bedroom/office/guest room Farrow & Ball’s Hague Blue, which feels counter-intuitive.)
I want to live in Christen Pears’ Devon house. Or at least her kitchen.
What I’m Listening To
I’m on a serious jazz tear:
When we were in Chatham last weekend, we popped into a shop where the proprietor was playing Ella Fitzgerald, on vinyl, and my response was instantaneous: I burst into tears. Ella was my mother’s favorite singer and performer, bar none, and since last weekend, I’ve been quietly listening to her entire catalogue, which I’ve been collecting for almost thirty years. This is the song that got me.
Ben Webster playing Over the Rainbow.
Django Reinhardt, in a rare 1945 clip.
In My Kitchen
Maybe for this weekend: Margot and Fergus Henderson cook Braised Duck Legs with Carrots.
Remember that scene in Moonstruck, where the Olympia Dukakis character is standing in the kitchen in a housecoat and slippers, making Uova nel Cestino, surrounded by every coffee-making apparatus known to humankind? I’ve been making it a lot lately, usually with whatever bread I happen to have on hand; I’ve made it with chicken eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs, I’ve added a spoonful of leftover steamed spinach, minced shallots, a pinch of minced garlic. Or nothing. If I have a jar of Calabrian peppers on hand, all the better, and then I use the pepper oil instead of regular olive oil for the cooking. A very delicious, very comforting, very inexpensive dish, unless you happen to have a black truffle sitting around and you decide to grate it over the egg while it’s cooking, which makes it not-inexpensive.
What I’m Reading
On May 19th, Katherine May will be leading a book chat about MFK Fisher’s 1943 memoir, The Gastronomical Me. On June 16th, Katherine and I will be having a live Substack conversation about it, and I cannot wait. Some years ago, my dear friend RF Jurjevics gifted me their mother, Laurie Colwin’s, 1954 copy of The Art of Eating, Fisher’s collected food writing containing The Gastronomical Me, and that’s what I’ll be reading along from.
Currently on my nightstand: Barbara Wansbrough’s Wild Things, a stunning epistolary elegy to her lost sister, written through the lens of the natural world as experienced on the author’s daily walks in Griffith Park. Truly a beautiful, mournful, breathtaking book that should be required reading for everyone moving through the strange planet that is grief, which means all of us.
I wish you all a good weekend of peace and art and deep breathing.
Please don't feel guilty about sharing your finds, your breadcrumbs are sustenance and a door to beauty when we desperately need them.
I was thinking how much I was loving this post, and how elegantly you articulate asininity/commodification/beauty - and then to find myself in it! Thank you so much. And do the hall in Hague Blue, it'll look amazing.