“Angela is fiercest woman I have ever met and I come from a long line of fierce women. And I mean fierce literally, not academically. Her hatred’s are monumental and she has not sense of danger. Sometimes I think she cannot perceive it.  She is also incredibly, phenomenally disciplined. I myself do not believe her control when I see it…. It is important to note that I have been on extremely intimate terms with her, and am probably one of the three or four people who do not idolise her.” - T.M.

In defence of Davis’ autobiography draft https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/rbml/2022/01/18/toni-morrisons-memo-on-angela-davis/

“At first, I thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular . . . Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.” - Toni Morrison

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” ― Rebecca Solnit

Encampment, Wyoming

“Laura Nichols’s images from the first half of her life often depict what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, a historian of the nineteenth century, termed “the female world of love and ritual,” a domestic sphere of deep bonds between women.” -

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/a-womans-intimate-record-of-wyoming-in-the-early-twentieth-century  

For a deep look at the book watch: Alec Soth’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPiV31UlV44 and 

Madame X by John Singer Sargent

“She is so posed. Striking, certainly, but the life in her seems to stem from her awkward, wrenching, haughty stance. I suppose defiance is just the point he was trying to make?’ - Vanessa and her Sister

(image courtesy:wiki)

Gordon Square, Bloomsbury

‘Right away I took to white walls. Clean and punctuated with tall, fragile windows set in light, straight row. This house has not the anaemic leanness as 22 Hyde Park Gate. It is more generous with its proportions, a house that takes deep, pure breaths, lives on a  diet of ripe melon and cold milk, and goes for brisk walks in the early afternoon. We front such a genial square. It is a square built for gardens and gossip and indiscreet summer evenings, with curvy paths slipping through its green centre. This square makes me feel part of the world and less as though the world were happening somewhere else.’ - Vanessa and her sister

Of Monks and Astronomers

The Casino was soon replaced by a permanent building called the Monastery, (which came up next to the 100″), as a nod to one of Hale’s interests. He had been inspired by stories of the monks who sought solitude in monasteries perched high among the craggy peaks of the Levant in eastern Mediterranean. The night the building was ready for use, Hale and his follow astronomers entered with lighted candles, as if readying for a religious ritual. They lit a fire in the granite fireplace of the common room and sat down for an all-night discussion -  a start of the ‘elite fellowship’ of “optics, photography, mechanical engineering” to “the profound question of where the universe came from and how it looked”. - The Edge of Reason by Anil Ananthaswamy 

Chasing the Monsoons

Dawn revealed a deep cumulus overcast and flayed, streaming coconut fronds. The crows had been blown away (even now they were probably hurtling backwards, wildly cawing, over Goa) and replaced by flights of brown sea eagles. These had taken up station fifty feet above the brow of the cliff beyond my window, ranged along it like sentinels, perfect flying machines hanging almost motionless as they waited for fish in the boiling sea. 

Charleston Interiors. Bloomsbury Group. (Click for more) 

“For me, photography is pure fiction. I don’t believe that I am making any defined statement. Instead, I am expressing something, an echo of the world maybe.” —Sarah Moon (1941)

“For a moment to become reality, it needs to have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, it needs to be created but forgotten, in order to be found again. In a change gesture, in a burst of laughter, in a false step; it was hiding in a sign of life at the edge of the frame, in the wind from the fans, in the shadow of lights, in harmony or disharmony, but always in the fugitive and the ephemeral, the butterfly of misfortune, the stigmata of time.” - Sarah Moon

Seven Fires of Francis Mallmann

“There are so many details because it’s such a fragile thing to cook with fires. People think it’s a beastly thing, it’s a manly thing… But it’s not! it’s extremely fragile.” - Francis Mallmann

Of apothecaries, woodland herbs and practical moon magic

“The Apothecary is a place of plants and cats dreams and stories magick and ancestors prayers and play And most of all hope.” - https://www.instagram.com/p/CYXl-NIL7f6/

Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief

“In order to repossess the body, it’s necessary to dispossess it; in order to feel alive, it’s necessary to get in touch with what’s already dead. But when I say “despojo,” I don’t always mean to sound so serious. Sometimes I mean that I want very badly to pin somebody to the club wall with my butt.” 

And a photograph that is part Techno Berlin, part Kodachrome. But all summer and joy and skin and life. And NY. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/magazine/dancing-new-york-summer.html?referringSource=articleShare 

Photo creds OK McCausland for NYtimes

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Every frame. Every cast, vertical symmetry, diagonal asymmetry, the dark of the light, the dark of the dark, every framed frame. The granite hewn, liquid hot beauty of Denzel Washington. Joel Coen’s mind. And the crone wisdom and will of Francis McDormand. 

Mika Horie: Art and Life 

“She’d already boiled the fuzzy ribbons of fiber in a  cauldron of well water for four hours, drained the fibre in a large sieve, and placed the sieve the brook overnight to remove impurities and acids. When I arrived the next day, she pulled the sieve out of the brook, the fibre was the creamy flaxen colour and soft matted texture of wet wool. A breeze rustled the persimmon trees. 

She placed a handful of fibres on a large flats rock half buried beside the stream and showed em hot to pound the fibre into pulp with a large wooden mallet. She tells me that after a storm the pulp picks up bits of plant matter and debris from the rock and it becomes part of her artwork. “ - Wood, Water & Wild Things by Hannah Kirshner

Mika Horie: Art and Life 

“Mika lives among nests of shredded ganpi bark that hang from bamboo poles to dry - like art installations themselves. The ribbons of fibre drape from near the ceiling down to the floor, which is stained blue here and there with iron salts from her photographs.. ..bottles of soy sauce ad vinegar are wrapped in newspaper, so that their loud colourful typography won’t disrupt the serene aesthetics. Her own clothes tend towards the same indigoes, greys, and ivories of her artwork.” - Wood, Water and Wild Things by Hannah Kirshner