If you know me in person, you should know that I’m going to routinely start asking you questions I think you know the answer to, if I haven’t already. I know this is aggressive, and it’s not that I don’t care that you’re busy, or that I don’t know Google exists. It’s that I care about our relationship, and our humanity — yours, mine and everyone’s. And I (like so many others) think we really need to talk to each other more, about all the things we know and care about. Please consider it a compliment if I interrupt your day with a question about a flower I could easily use an app to identify, or reply to a text about your obscure medical diagnosis with “What is that??”

I’ve come to believe that the passive-aggressive “let me google that for you” meme (along with its clever ad-derived cousin “there’s an app for that”) is among the worst things that have ever happened to civilization. For one thing, we’ve created absolute monsters through our dependence on tech and apps, our enrichment of their broligarch owners, and our utter abandonment of our privacy to them. Not to mention the environmental damage. But we’ve also lost each other in the process, and the inherent joy and value of sharing knowledge and experiences, human to human.

And now that we’ve spent decades committing all of our hard-earned knowledge and opinions to the internet, where it’s been scraped by AI in order to be muddled and regurgitated back by dystopian “agents,” we (not me, I should note) are asking them the questions we could have been asking each other all along anyway. So let’s do that! Let’s normalize talking to each other again instead of sitting alone with our phones typing in queries of various kinds in various capacities and feeling more collectively lonely with every passing day.

Let’s make time to share what we know. Maybe we’ll be wrong about some stuff sometimes, but the bots are making a mess of all the intel anyhow. This way, at least we’ll still have each other.

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. . .

p.s. Hello, Substack! I’m warming up the mic today after moving this short-lived blog from 2024 over here to resume publishing. I’m making no proclamations about subject matter or posting frequency just yet, and it’s also free to read for the time being, so do hit that subscribe button (no pledge required) and follow along as it takes shape.

• Interview with Machado from last fall (conducted by a high-school junior — well done!)
• Machado’s occasional Substack: Cup of Stars
• And a list of her online essays for diving into

I’m in the midst of an online lecture series organized by American Short Fiction, comprising three fiction writers teaching two classes each. Sandwiched between two writers I am familiar with and admire — Lauren Groff and Luis Alberto Urrea — is one I confess I hadn’t heard of, Carmen Maria Machado. (Why yes, I have been living under a rock for a few years, why do you ask?) As it happened, Machado’s talks were the pair that interested me most and persuaded me to sign up. They were jointly titled Every story is a haunted house story, and — breaking news — I’m (allegedly) attempting to write fiction these days, and one of the things I’m working on seems to have a ghost-story aspect to it. Regardless, I was particularly intrigued with the simple implication right there in the class’s title, and couldn’t wait to hear her elaborate on it.

Machado is a prize-winning short-fiction writer, essayist and memoirist — author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and In the Dream House: A Memoir, among other things — and a lecture she gave during the first of her sessions was so utterly moving and inspiring and mesmerizing that you could sense the entire unseen Zoom room swooning. We weren’t given a copy of the text, and although I cherish an ephemeral experience I’m not-so-secretly hoping it’s because it’s due to be published in some form. (If I ever see that, I will let you know!) But her imagination, vulnerability and storytelling capacity were on full display even in lecture form, and it made me eager to read her work. I started with a short story that was mentioned in class, and it’s so good I wanted to share it with you. It’s called Eight Bites (it also appears in her story collection linked above) and I hope you’ll find it as gripping and moving as I did. 

If you’ve already read her, let me know what you think!

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[ IMAGE: Carmen Maria Machado publicity photo by Art Streiber/August ]

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My first foray into gardening was when I was in my mid-thirties (c. the mid-aughts) and renting a little house in the town of Napa where the backyard — a tiny patch of grass bordered all around by beds — had obviously once been gardened but had long since “gone to seed,” as they say. The landlord was fine with me doing whatever I wanted and I had no idea what I was doing, but I was having a blast. I was at the local nurseries and chain stores first thing every Saturday morning, impulse-buying whatever plants wowed me, or that I had seen and fallen for in the gardening magazines I was hoarding at the time — trying things out, moving them around a lot (a LOT), going for a certain kooky, California desert-tropical look, which I felt pretty good about! One morning a year or two into this, our next-door neighbor, observing me over the fence from her second-story deck, said very politely, “Have you thought about using any native plants?”

I had no clue what that meant. And so began my research of and increasing dedication to the act of planting plants that belong where they’re planted; that are acclimated to the local soil and weather and thus need little to no human intervention in the form of water, fertilizer, pesticides, or soil amendments; and that are actively needed by the local birds, bees and butterflies — who literally give us life — among other creatures. In these last two decades, the native gardening movement has grown enormously (as the bee population has plummeted) — people organizing and teaching and campaigning about the harm we have collectively done with decades of poison-soaked lawns and raked-up leaves and landscape lighting, and how to bring back biodiversity, one pot or bed or yard at a time.

The little Hudson Valley house we moved to last year sits on a small, flat, treeless plot, carpeted with the thickest, greenest grass you’ve ever laid eyes on — seriously, everyone comments on it — due to the previous owner’s long, torrid love affair with lawn chemicals. For now, all we’re doing is not poisoning or watering it (it gets plenty from the sky). And we are planting trees! Two little flowering trees, so far. But I can’t wait to begin gradually giving every square inch back to nature.

In case you’re not already on board with a more natural approach to lawn care and gardening, as we head into peak season, I’ve rounded up some resources for you—

• Let Your Garden Grow Wild is a new TED Talk (just 12 mins!) by horticulturist Rebecca McMackin that is a really great introduction/primer/overview of the why of native gardening — and she does a great job of making the case that even if the only gardening you can do is a potted plant on your stoop, you can help the cause!

• Homegrown National Park, started by Doug Tallamy (who also came up here) is a whole world of resources in one — it’s well worth exploring the site and following along. 10 Things to Get You Started is a great place to start.

• This might seem odd when I’m talking about zeroing in on where you live, but I read a book a few years ago when I was making a garden in Florida called A Step-By-Step Guide to a Florida Native Yard that I would recommend to anyone anywhere. It’s not a very big book yet it addresses the hows and whys of every aspect of evolving a sterilized lawn back into a functioning ecosystem in a helpful framework. To the extent that specific plants are recommended here and there, which I don’t recall there even being much of, you’d simply adapt the principles to your location.

• Do a Google search for the Native Plant Society in your area, or check this list for state-by-state orgs in the US and home in from there. They’ll have native plant sales or swaps and learning opportunities of all kinds, as well as an online plant database you can consult for what’s native, recommended, and commercially available where you live. (What’s native to Oregon and Arizona is not the same! And not all native species are ideal garden plants.) Your state or area might also have an equivalent of Florida’s Florida-Friendly Plants list, which includes both natives and non-natives that are naturally suited to the soil and climate, and not invasive.

• The New York Times’ Margaret Roach writes routinely about native gardens and gardening in her In the Garden column, which I encourage you to poke around in. For instance, this article about replacements for turf grass (Gift Link) is full of inspiration and info.

• And of course look for plant nurseries in your area that specialize in native plants, or at least have an assortment grouped somewhere under that heading. Sign up for their mailing list and it’s sure to be a regular source of localized intel.

As you dig in, you’ll find everyone referencing, pointing to or conversing with others in the field, so it’s a perpetual joyful rabbit hole. 

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[ IMAGE: Butterfly photo by Ju00c9SHOOTS on Pexels.com ]

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“I can barely speak to a four-year-old in Ojibwe, let alone write in it. But I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words.”

—Louise Erdrich

When I put those Louise Erdrich interview links at the foot of Monday’s post, I knew they would surely be good reads for anyone who needed one (uh, two). But I’ve since read them and they are FAR TOO GOOD to have been eclipsed like that. So I’m claiming a do-over and giving them today’s full attention! If you’re not familiar with the novelist and her work, there’s a great overview/intro at the top of this first link—

• Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208 (2010, by Lisa Halliday)
In this 2010 interview — which is outside the Paris Review paywall for the week — Erdrich talks about everything from her dad’s letter-writing skills to the difficulties of learning the Ojibwe language, to why she changed her name, tied herself to a chair, voted for Richard Nixon, rewrites her work even after it’s published, and so many other things. It is long and wide-ranging! But more than that, every answer is a total wow of a different sort from the one before it.

• A Conversation with Louise Erdrich (2024, by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain)
With HolyWhiteMountain, Erdrich talks much more about her bookstore, her influences (Native and non), and the collective fight for Native sovereignty, “joke by joke, book by book, political win by political win.” (I believe this one lives outside the paywall.)

The first Erdrich book I read was Tracks, in a continuing ed class I took with my sister and a friend right after I graduated from college. (I don’t remember what the class was called but I remember we read The Bluest Eye and The House on Mango Street and In the Time of Butterflies … it was a great class.) Now I wish I could read her rewrite. The most recent Erdrich I read was Future Home of the Living God, which I liked many things about, but I didn’t quite love the whole of it. (Now I’m curious if this was the book she was talking about in the 2010 interview — “I suppose I could go back to my eternal science fiction novel …”) Somehow I think I’ve never read Love Medicine, so I’ll rectify that, but these interviews most made me want to read The Night Watchman. And you?

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Speaking of collective experiences, I’ll be in a car today headed toward one, whether barreling or crawling, with my fingers crossed. We live a couple hours east of the Path of Totality for today’s eclipse and decided to attempt it as a daytrip — quite possibly along with tens of thousands of others in the area. Which means maybe we’ll get to our chosen viewing destination in time, maybe we’ll make it to the Path and simply pull over on the side of the road wherever we are at that moment, or maybe stand-still traffic will leave us short of the Path, for the second time in seven years.

In 2017, when the Path encompassed Nashville — where we lived at the time and could have simply stood in our own backyard or hung out with friends — we didn’t realize what a big deal it was, and inadvertently made plans to visit family in Pennsylvania that weekend. We did our best to make it back that morning, but wound up pulling over somewhere in Kentucky to watch an ordinary partial eclipse, so uneventful we might not have even noticed had we not known to look up. The next day in Nashville, everyone we knew responded as if we’d just told them a loved one had died when they heard that we missed the total eclipse, with its midday nightfall, 360-degree sunset, and magical hush. (Every single one of them used the phrase ‘life-changing.’) So this year, we’re giving it another shot! Wish us luck.

Where are you today, and will you see total eclipse? If you’re in the Path, or have been before, I’d love to hear about your experience! Hell, tell me about any life-changing experience you’ve had! I’ll be in the car all day …

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If you’re looking for a good non-eclipse-related read today, this week’s unlocked gem from the Paris Review archives is the Art of Fiction interview with Louise Erdrich from 2010, which you can pair with their new follow-up interview.

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[ IMAGE: Total eclipse photo by Eclipse Chasers on Pexels.com ]

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There was a period of time when I absolutely loved Monday mornings — my favorite part of the week. Why? Mad Men aired on Sunday night, and Monday morning was all about reading critics’ assessments and talking to friends, comparing notes, everyone abuzz with observations and theories, easter eggs they’d spotted and sub references they’d caught that cast new light onto what we had watched, right down to whatever song had played over the closing credits. Even then, those sorts of shared-timing cultural experiences were becoming diminishingly rare. But on top of the simple joy of “appointment viewing” and the water-cooler camaraderie the next day, there was the draw of a written thing that rewarded close reading, and the collaborative experience of mining it. I’ve been reminded of that this week by the whole world listening to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (available wherever you get your music) and the utter, delightful flurry of people unpacking all that it contains. (I mean, wow, just look at that scope of that Wikipedia page already.) In addition to enjoying the hell out of things like the recasting Dolly Parton’s Jolene from “begging” to “warning,” I have truly learned something new from the album and the ensuing conversation every day since it dropped, from Linda Martell and the Chitlin’ Circuit, to the fact that Paul McCartney wrote ‘Blackbird’ with black women in mind, and so much more.

Rather than do a round up here, for anyone who might have missed all of this, I’m going to point you to Danyel Smith (aka @danamo): both her roundup and her commentary on MSNBC. Danyel is an old friend of mine from the Readerville days, but far more importantly she’s the former editor of Vibe and Billboard, among other things, and the author of Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.

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[ IMAGE: promotional poster featuring the songfest from Cowboy Carter ]

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Hands down the most moving thing I’ve watched lately is the documentary American Symphony, about musician Jon Batiste and his partner (now wife), writer Suleika Jaouad. And what I mean is I felt like my heart was in a vise the entire time.

I came at it knowing only what pretty much anyone would know about him — extremely talented and charismatic musician, Stephen Colbert’s bandleader, all those Grammy noms — and all I knew about her was that their Brooklyn townhouse had been featured in Architectural Digest in November, and that she had collaborated with Hudson Valley designer Hallie Goodman on it, which is why I knew that. I had seen the photos on Instagram via Hallie (who I follow) and simply thought wow, gorgeous people, gorgeous home, what a nice life. 

The photos were so good that I bought that issue of AD, which is a rarity for me. As much as I love a shelter magazine — and loved what I had seen of Batiste and Jaouad’s highly personal, idiosyncratic, antiques-filled home — I’m not generally interested in the sort of high-end designer houses that AD is full of. So even after I bought the issue, it sat unread for a while.

A couple of months ago, I turned on the documentary, American Symphony, being forever interested in creativity and creative people. A few minutes into it, I knew my husband would also want to see it, and by the 30-minute mark, there was that aforementioned vise around my heart, and I turned it off so we could watch it together another time, which we finally did. 

In short, it is, conceptually, a behind-the-scenes look at a year in Batiste’s life, during which he is composing a symphony (also called American Symphony), to be performed at Carnegie Hall, while working on the Colbert show, touring, and being on the receiving end of the most Grammy nominations of the year — but also, as it happened, while Jaouad was being treated for leukemia after a decade in remission. As powerful as the film is, I knew there was even more to the story, because I had read the AD piece in the meantime, which turned out to be her first-person account of the renovation that was happening during that same period. The documentary shows us them getting quickly married in a bare living room without mentioning it was the living room of the house they had just bought — to be their first home together — and had only begun renovating when they got her diagnosis. It shows us her taking up painting in the hospital, when she couldn’t write, but not that she was also collaborating on the design of the house from that hospital bed, an act not just of creativity-as-a-lifeline but of profound optimism.

You’ve heard the expression about having compassion for everyone you meet because you never know what battles they may be fighting, and we associate it (or at least I do) with people who are rude or withdrawn or something, but it was all I could think about as Batiste goes necessarily about the job of being a performer, entertaining crowd after crowd while bearing the load of that treacherous time in their private life offstage. Talk about ‘living in the world of collapse and delight.’ After his performance at the Oscars last month, the camera panned to Jaouad in the audience, beaming with pride and joy. Had I not known what I did then, I would have thought oh that’s his lovely wife who made that beautiful home. But seeing her there, dressed up and enjoying herself, took on so much more dimension at that point, even before I had watched the rest of the documentary. 

This is kind of a long post for a quick recommendation, yet dreadfully short of an actual review. Without saying too much about it, I’m saying it’s a powerful story, powerfully told, and I highly recommend both the movie and the AD article. And for more of Jaouad, her book is Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, and her current project is The Isolation Journals over on Substack.

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[ IMAGES: Photo of the magazine by me + the official movie poster for American Symphony, directed by Matthew Heineman, streaming on Netflix ]

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It’s that time again, where I turn the month’s posts upside down, shake out all the links, and organize them into neat piles for you by type. Each item’s original post is linked by its post number so you can see what the context was, and what was said! I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog, and if you were to buy a book, I sure would appreciate it! Thanks for being here, and happy weekend—

ARTICLES & ESSAYS
• How to savor life like an astronaut by Jancee Dunn, NYT Well newsletter (#24-18)
• 7 Things to Know About Daylight Saving Time by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (#24-20)
• How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives by Jill Lepore, The New Yorker (#24-20)
• Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar by Jason Farago, The New York Times (#24-20)
•  ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything by Cory Doctorow, Financial Times (#24-22, see post for paywall workaround)
• The Trees Saved Me by Alan Burdick, with photos by Nicholas J. R. White, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-23)
• Why You Should Plant Oaks by Margaret Roach, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-23)
• 5 Ways Walking Can Boost Your Brain Health by Martha Murphy, AARP.com (#24-24)
• Want To Reduce Your Meds? Take a Walk in the Woods by Peter Urban, AARP.com (#24-24)
• The nature cure: how time outdoors transforms our memory, imagination and logic by Sam Pyrah, The Guardian (#24-24)
• Cells of people living in greener areas age more slowly, research finds by Katharine Gammon, The Guardian (#24-24)
• Why an East Harlem Street Is 31 Degrees Hotter Than Central Park West by John Leland, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-24)
• Since When Have Trees Existed Only for Rich Americans? by Ian Leahy and Yaryna Serkez, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-24)
• Very cool: trees stalling effects of global heating in eastern US, study finds by Oliver Milman, The Guardian (#24-24)
• (Don’t) Act Your Age by Caroline Paul, Oldster Magazine (#24-25)
• Virginia Woolf’s Forgotten Diary by Harriet Baker, The Paris Review (#24-26)
• Various writings by Virginia Woolf for the Times Literary Supplement (#24-26)
• These Skiers Are Still Chasing Powder in Their 80s and 90s by Charley Locke, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-27)
• ‘Age Is Not a Problem’ by Elizabeth Paton, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-27)

SHORT FICTION
• This Is Everything There Will Ever Be by Rivers Solomon, The Paris Review (#24-17)
• My Good Friend by Juliana Leite, translated by Zoë Perry, The Paris Review (#24-17)
• Helen by James Lasdun, The Paris Review (#24-17)

BOOKS & MAGAZINES
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (#24-17, #24-21)
• The Paris Review literary journal (#24-17)
• The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 1 introduction by (series editor) Philip Gourevitch (#24-17)
• The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 2 introduction by Orhan Pamuk (#24-17)
• The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 3 introduction by Salman Rushdie (#24-17)
• The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 4 introduction by Margaret Atwood (#24-17)
• Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown (#24-18)
• Steinberg Meets the Eameses: Artifacts from the Eames Collection** by Eames Institute (#24-19)
• Eames by Gloria Koenig (#24-19)
• Case Study Houses by Elizabeth A. T. Smith (#24-19)
• The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi (#24-23)
• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers (#24-23)
• Oldster Magazine (online/Substack) edited by Sari Botton (#24-25)
• Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking—How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age by Caroline Paul (#24-25)
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (#24-26)
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (#24-26)
• The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (#24-26)
• Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell (#24-26)
• Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (etc.) by Leonard Woolf (#24-26)
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1915-1919 (etc.) (orig. ed.) by Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (#24-26)
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf** volumes 1-5 (Granta reissue, UK) (#24-26)
• A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf, edited by Leonard Woolf (#24-26)
• A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary by Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (oop) (#24-26)
• Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann** by Harriet Baker (pre-pub, UK) (#24-26)

PODCAST/TRANSCRIPT
• Did Hurricane Ian Bust Florida’s Housing Boom? on The Daily (NYT) (#24-24)

ARTS, EVENTS & MISC
• Layer Tennis (#24-17)
• The Tournament of Books (about, 2024 overview, merch) (#24-17, #24-21)
• Paris Review The Redux newsletter (#24-17)
• Cranbrook Academy of Art (#24-19)
• The home of Charles and Ray Eames (#24-19)
• Saul Steinberg foundation/archive (#24-19)
• William Stout Architectural Books (#24-19)
• Eames Institute (#24-19)
• Steinberg Meets the Eameses online exhibition (#24-19)
• Ray’s Hand online exhibition (#24-19)
• Bullet Journal method (#24-20)
• The final page of Virginia Woolf’s handwritten diary (#24-26)
• This unidentified 94-year-old sky diver (#24-27)
• 89-year-old track star Flo Meiler (#24-27)

*NYT Gift Links expire 30 days from their creation date, so may have reverted to subscriber-only 
**All book links are Bookshop.org affiliate links except these. Buying through the Bookshop links helps make this blog possible, thank you!

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We were in a store my sister had wanted to shop in, full of what I would describe as generic, age-neutral sportswear — like a Gap sort of thing, but locally owned. K said bemusedly, “N thinks this is a store for old people who want to look young.” I said, “What’s old?” and N shrugged and replied, “I dunno. 30?” K and I giggled and shook our heads. Then we went off down the street to the store N had wanted to check out. As we approached the storefront, I took one look at the slinky, revealing dresses in the window — the kind that teenagers think makes them look all grown up — and said to her, “Ah. This is a store for young people who want to look older.” To which she replied (I love her so much), “Touché.”

PART ONE: The Bold

Adding to my list of role models the following:
• This unidentified 94-year-old sky diver
• 89-year-old track star Flo Meiler
• and the entire Wild old Bunch of Alta (NYT Gift Link)

PART TWO: The Beautiful

It’s not uncommon for the fashion industry to periodically try to show their (momentary) commitment to diversity in various ways, only to quickly fall back into the habit of only featuring very young, very thin, and mostly white models. Hopefully this isn’t just another such anomaly, but ‘More old(er) models walked on the runways this season, marking a step in the right direction for age representation.’ (NYT Gift Link) At least as far as the images included in the article go, they are still all thin and mostly white (like scientists conducting a lab experiment, they apparently can only change one variable at a time), but how great to see these women showing how it’s done.

ICYMI: In praise of Oldster Magazine

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Years after having dramatically downsized my library (which I’ll talk more about some other time), I’m finding myself frequently looking at what remains of it and feeling puzzled by past choices. One of the most puzzling is my lost collection of books by and about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, which I don’t recall consciously deciding to give up. And yet all that remains on my shelves are two of Woolf’s novels — To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway (that rare case of my having fallen in love with a book I was assigned in high school), both in stuffy, unread, navy-blue clothbound editions, you know the ones — and a well-thumbed, sun-faded paperback of A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (out of print), which according to the post-it bookmark still adhered to page 169, I left off at the entry for 15 October 1923. Probably fifteen or more years ago. 

Gone are Virginia’s other novels, the biography, Leonard Woolf’s multi-volume autobiography, various other books of their circle — books I had acquired and been given. Did I ever own the rest of VW’s diary (i.e., the complete five-volume set), or at least Leonard’s edit, A Writer’s Diary? And the letters? I no longer know. But while countless other books have gone unmissed, the Woolfs feel a bit like a phantom limb. A phantom shelf, you might say. 

Wandering through Instagram one day last week I saw a mention of a book that’s about to be published in the UK called Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker. In Baker’s feed there is mention of a piece she had written for the Paris Review last summer called Virginia Woolf’s Forgotten Diary, about the ‘Asheham Diary,’ which I knew nothing about — it’s neither included nor mentioned in the Shorter Diary. Baker’s essay is gorgeous, but also it’s how I learned that Granta has reissued the entire diary in five shiny new hardcover volumes, which contain the full Asheham Diary for the first time. Resisting the urge to eat mac and cheese for the next month and order the full set, I bought Volume 1.

Here’s how Asheham fits in: 

The 1915 Diary
On 1 January 1915, living at 17 The Green, Richmond (outside London), with her husband Leonard, Virginia started a diary that she kept until 15 February. Each day she wrote a paragraph or two about their day — who they saw or wrote to, or ate with, where they went, what they were working on. In his introduction to the original set, her nephew (and biographer) Quentin Bell sets the stage, like a Masterpiece Theater host:

“Virginia was living in a kind of vacuum and was still barely recovered from her [second] bout of insanity. Since she did appear to be getting well again and was able to work and to enjoy Leonard’s company [they married in 1912] she may be considered happy. But in other ways her state was not enviable; she had reached middle life without any great achievement to her credit [she was 32!], and all around her were younger people rapidly advancing towards fame. She was poorer than she had ever been. She almost certainly knew that her mental health was precarious. She had hardly begun to find the fictional form that suited her, the great literary adventure of her life still lay unseen in the future, and she awaited with dreadful anxiety the publication of her first novel.”

That novel, The Voyage Out, is alluded to only once, in passing, in the diary of the year it was published. As noted, this diary only lasted until mid-February — before the end of that month she had another mental breakdown.

The Asheham Diary (1917-18)
Recuperating at her rural Sussex rental, Asheham House, and finding a semblance of normalcy again, she made notes in a pocket-sized notebook from 3 August to 4 October 1917, at which point the Woolfs resumed life in Richmond. That much was always included in the “complete” set of the diaries, but she wrote in it on future visits to Asheham, later in the year and into the next. Those remaining entries are what’s newly included — as Appendix 3 — in the first volume of the Granta reissue.

The entries she made in this smaller diary are generally much shorter and more note-like (pictured above). The war is even more felt, and the notes are often about the price of eggs — literally, she keeps track of how much she paid to whom — as well as the things they can’t get due to rations or scarcity. They walk, bicycle or take the train wherever they go, and frequently forage for mushrooms and blackberries, often coming up empty. She remarks that she couldn’t go to social events if she wanted to because her clothes are all too shabby. She isn’t writing this diary, she (for the most part) is simply recording facts and visitors, weather and expenses, what’s blooming or hatching or molting (and even a laundry list, not published), but it is no less a compelling picture of the time and her state. And as Baker notes, there are anecdotes and imagery that reappear in her later novels.

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The Main Diary (1917-1941)
Upon their return to Richmond, on 8 October 1917, she opened a new notebook and wrote: “This attempt at a diary is begun on the impulse given by a discovery in a wooden box in my cupboard of an old volume, kept in 1915, & still able to make us laugh at Walter Lamb. This therefore will follow that plan — written after tea, written indiscreetly, & by the way I note here that L. has promised to add his page when he has something to say. His modesty is to be overcome. We planned today to get him an autumn outfit in clothes, & to stock me with paper & pens. This is the happiest day that exists for me.” And then she describes the rest of their day in the remainder of the one paragraph: it rains; they go for an errand-walk around London, with observations about a fellow shopper; they visit Dr. Johnson’s house (by then a museum); and while dropping off a review she’d written for the Times Literary Supplement, they also trade some gossip. She would keep up this diary — which altogether spanned 30 notebooks — until her suicide in 1941.

It is indiscreet and gossipy and occasionally outright horrifying, the things she says. It’s also a remarkable window on a fiercely intelligent couple and their friends and family, many of whom were highly influential, boundary-breaking figures at a key time in European history. It is constantly both ordinary and extraordinary in that way. I think what I had decided all those years ago was that the Shorter Diary would be enough for me and I could always read the longer one if I felt unsatisfied at the end of that, which, as noted, I never got to. Reading them side-by-side now, I’m happy to have both the yearly introductions in the shorter and the extensive footnotes in the longer.

In her preface to the original 1977-84 five-volume set, Anne Olivier Bell (Quentin’s wife, known as Olivier) — whose editing and annotating of the diaries is itself a masterwork that took her ten years — wrote “Virginia Woolf’s interests and observations range over so wide a field — art, literature, politics, people, and her surroundings — that some supporting explanation seems necessary. In deciding how much annotation is appropriate, I have to take into account the probability that — for reasons of cost and copyright — there is not likely to be another edition of these diaries for perhaps half a century.” At that point Leonard had already published his edit (in 1953), and Olivier’s “Shorter” edit would publish in 1989. But she was almost exactly right that it would be 50 years before another complete set would be produced. And here we are. Hopefully there will be a US edition. I could only find the new Granta hardcovers in the US at Amazon, and I hope I can justify buying the next and the next by finishing them one at a time before they go out of print. Meanwhile, perhaps someone will also publish updated hardcovers of the two edited versions. But I’ll be hanging onto my worn copy of A Moment’s Liberty regardless.

As I’m writing this, on Sunday March 24th, I turned to the final page of the shorter diary — and confirmed online that it is indeed the final entry — to see what Virginia’s last sentence was. (You can see it in her handwriting here.) It was four days before she drowned herself in the Ouse. The last sentence: “L. is doing the rhododendrons …” The date: March 24th. 

[ IMAGES: Photos © Karen Templer of The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1915-19, published by Granta in 2023 ]

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“Ultimately, I’m my best self in the outdoors—curious, brave, and present. That in turn gives me confidence and optimism. All these seem like character traits I should hold on to as I age.”

—Caroline Paul

I’ve chosen this quote from a million possibilities, as it happens to resonate with me, make the point, and continue a theme, but the thing about Oldster Magazine, a Substack-based publication I’m here to rave about today, is that I find myself wanting to save a handful of quotes from every piece I read there. (This one happens to be from a very funny excerpt of Caroline Paul’s new book, Tough Broad.) By way of both introduction and possible disclosure, Oldster is the creation of writer-editor Sari Botton, who I feel like I probably have friends in common with and might have met before?* (If that’s true and you know me and know her, please introduce us!) Or maybe she’s just one of those people you feel a kinship with even though you’ve never met. Anyone who describes themselves as a “late-blooming Gen X weirdo” is ok by me.

She describes Oldster like this: “Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures. Regardless of age, we’re all the oldest we’ve ever been, which makes every one of us feel, well, old.”

While I recently turned 55, I’m not even anyone’s mother, much less grandmother – I’m still just me — so it’s taken until now for me to accept the term “middle aged.” It just seems mathematically inarguable at this point, right? But while I am by no definition old, I’m increasingly aware that society thinks I am, and feel ever more pressingly the urge both to understand what that means along with people my age and older, and to disabuse younger women, in particular, of the idea that there’s anything wrong with aging. We all age (those of us who get the opportunity), and so for young women to perpetuate harmful and derogatory stereotypes about older women is to literally lay a trap for oneself. 

But ultimately, I love Oldster because it is frank and irreverent and entertaining — just like a life well-lived.

//

*Also, I’m 100% certain I have friends in common with Caroline Paul, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.

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• 5 Ways Walking Can Boost Your Brain Health
Research suggests you should lace up your shoes and hit the road

• Want To Reduce Your Meds? Take a Walk in the Woods
New study reaffirms the value of getting back into nature for your well-being

• The nature cure: how time outdoors transforms our memory, imagination and logic
Without engaging with natural environments, our brains cease to work well. As the new field of environmental neuroscience proves, exposure to nature isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity

• Cells of people living in greener areas age more slowly, research finds
Greener neighborhoods can slow aging process of human cells but effects of environmental racism can erase any benefits

• Why an East Harlem Street Is 31 Degrees Hotter Than Central Park West
If you want to map inequality in New York, you can just count trees (NYT Gift Link)

• Since When Have Trees Existed Only for Rich Americans?
Across the nation, the wealthier and whiter your neighborhood is, the greener the view from your window is likely to be (NYT Gift Link)

• Very cool: trees stalling effects of global heating in eastern US, study finds
Vast reforestation a major reason for ‘warming hole’ across parts of US where temperatures have flatlined or cooled

Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have said “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and I’m sure some have been conceived while stationery. (Not all truly great thinkers have had the use of their legs, for starters.) But one thing I’ve known about myself for years is that I do my best thinking (writing, problem-solving …) when I’m walking, and also that my mental health suffers when I’m not. Also, while walking around a city block is helpful, it’s no match for a walk in the trees.

The connection, for me, is clear as a bell, so it comes as no surprise that study after study after study in the past few years has proven it to be a general truth that walking literally improves brain function (even growing new neurons), as well as that spending time in nature, and living among plants and trees, not only lowers our exposure to extreme heat but improves our physical health in numerous ways — impacting our risk of everything from asthma to hypertension to dementia and beyond — right down to the cellular level.

Our ancestors didn’t need studies to tell them that nature is vital to human well-being, but understanding this fact — and how uneven access to it is — has never been more critical, as even just the headlines above make clear. But I hope you’ll dig in. Each story is a world of jaw-dropping intel unto itself (if you only click one, make it the 3rd in the list), but what they add up to is vitally important.

There’s one more observation I want to add that I haven’t seen written about anywhere. As you may know, we recently spent two years in Florida, and while I had certainly witnessed tree canopy cover disparities like those detailed in the links above, being a participant in Florida’s very broken home insurance market, where so many people are underinsured, at best, gave me a new perspective. Where we were, you can’t help noticing that the wealthier neighborhoods are jungle lush, while the poorer ones are comparably barren — even the palm trees are scarce. That lack of trees’ cooling properties is not only perilous in the increasing Florida heat, but what I came to understand is that it’s not only a question of civic investment in trees and parks, or who has the money for a yard full of plants, or even who can afford the time or landscapers for tending to them — although all are no doubt factors. It’s also a question of who can afford to have a tree fall on their house in a hurricane. Who could rebuild and replant, and who would do without trees, just to be safe — forgoing not just the beauty but the health benefits as a result. I feel like more attention needs to be paid to that part of the story.

So with all of that said, happy Spring! Get out there and walk, if you’re blessed with mobility, as often as you possibly can. Reap the benefits of whatever green space you have access to, in whatever ways you are able. And heed the old saying: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the next best time is today.

p.s. For a look at how magical trees are, in and of themselves, see last week’s post, Tree Fever.

[ IMAGE: Photo of the forest around Kaaterskill Falls, Catskills Mountains, New York © Karen Templer. Do you feel calmness and clarity just looking at it? ]

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Spring officially starts next week, and with a warm breeze already blowing through the house, the grass greening three weeks earlier than last year (I know! equal parts thrilling and alarming) and tiny blooms beginning to form on the little dogwood we planted in the fall, I’ve got major Spring Fever and trees on the brain. Lots more to say about it next week, but for today I wanted to share these three (or four) gems with you:

• The Trees Saved Me by Alan Burdick with photos by Nicholas J. R. White (New York Times Gift Link)
This fairly short but beautifully produced story about the Forest of Immortal Stories, a community effort to document and protect 2,544 beech trees in the Romanian mountains (“a land of fog, fictional vampires and real-life wolves, as well as several thousand brown bears and roughly two-thirds of the remaining virgin forest in Europe”) is deeply moving to me.
(See also: Why You Should Plant Oaks. “The oaks in my yard are not just oaks, they are vibrant communities of hundreds of species,” Mr. Tallamy said. …)

• The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi
One of the biggest (literally) treasures in my small library — pictured above, hand for scale — this book is indescribably great. Created for landscape designers, it is chiefly an atlas of tree species, rendered in fine pen-and-ink drawings, with and without foliage, and in a scale proportional to each other and to the book itself. It contains a few intro/essays that I found utterly fascinating, despite not being a landscape designer (to my frequent chagrin), and pages of spirographs depicting shade patterns and of ink splots acting out seasonal coloration, along with plant-catalog-style descriptions of each of the trees depicted, plus glossary and index. It’s just incredible.

• The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
And if you are a person who loves, or even worships, trees — or is open to learning why we all should! — and you haven’t read Richard Powers’ The Overstory, I highly recommend it. It’s sort of a lesson on trees (magical beings, so vitally important) in novel form, with at least one character and moment I will never forget until the day I die. Patricia, for years a solo soul, “takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground.” It’s not a perfect book (or my favorite Powers) but the Patricia chapters, among others, are some of my favorite chapters I’ve ever read.

Have a lovely weekend, thank you for being here, and I’ll see you Monday!

//

[ IMAGES: Photos of the book The Architecture of Trees © Karen Templer ]

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If I could convince everyone I know to read one thing right now, it would be this Cory Doctorow deep dive into the word he famously coined last year: ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. I would preface the link with my standard soapbox speech about Facebook being the downfall of civilization, but Cory covers most of it — and then so much more. It’s deeply important stuff, and yet in a perfect enactment of his term, I have to tell you how you can get to it if that link doesn’t work:

1. Go to the IG feed of @ft_weekend (in your browser or the app)
2. Tap/click the link in their profile
3. Scroll to the image of neon green slime spewing out of a computer monitor in front of a cloudy blue sky
4. Tap that and read the piece!

PART TWO: The verb ‘to tweet’ and where I’m doing it

In the early days of Twitter (speaking of enshittified things), there were several similar services, and before a term for using them could come into fashion, they died off. One’s Twitter feed was composed of individual “tweets,” and the verb for using Twitter was “to tweet.” Then along came Elon Musk, who of course abandoned the name Twitter in favor of X, and in the wake of that came Meta’s Twitter clone Threads and Substack’s Twitter clone Notes, along with the ascendance of Mastodon and Bluesky, and who knows what. If I were to say “I’m tweeting on Substack Notes,” I would sound like a digital rube who’s confused about the lingo. But I think there’s a case to be made for adopting “to tweet” as a platform-free verb for the action of posting on those kinds of services. It’s a perfectly good verb! Certainly more descriptive than “posting,” and after all Musk doesn’t want it.

Which is a long way to say, “Hey friends, I’m toying with tweeting on Substack Notes!” If you are using it — either tweeting there yourself or using it as a feed reader — follow me on Notes @karentempler for blog updates and likely other random chitchat. (I say ‘toying with’ because it feels like a really slippery slope. We’ll see, but I’m there.)

ALSO: If you’re following @collapseanddelight on (the highly enshittified) Instagram for blog updates, make sure you are engaging with the posts (like/save/share/comment) so Instagram knows you actually want to see them — and/or better yet, turn on post notifications! by going to the feed and tapping the little alarm bell in the upper right. (For updates beyond the blog, I’m also @karentempler) And don’t forget you can always see what you chose to follow (rather than what they’re pushing at you) by tapping the Instagram logo and choosing “following” — although you have to do it every time.

If you really want to make sure you never miss a post here, use the subscribe button at the bottom of the page to sign up for email notifications.

Thank you for following along, by whatever means! I appreciate your support. 

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The final 1/3 of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a really good book, but the first 2/3 might be one of my favorite books I’ve read in ages. James McBride can spin a yarn: There’s enough plot and characters in here for a good dozen novels, but they seem to come so easily to him that he doesn’t need to hoard them. It’s 1936, and in the early parts of the book we meet just about everyone in the titular grocery store’s neighborhood (and then some), and even minor characters receive introductions that span years and parentage — the erstwhile parents with their own lively, richly described histories — all within a few paragraphs. Take Bernice Davis, for example, who lives next door to Heaven & Earth and is the estranged best friend of its proprietress, Chona Ludlow:

“She was second cousin to Earl ‘Shug’ Davis, driver for the vice president of Pottstown Bank; second cousin to Bobby Davis, who once worked as an all-around handyman for Buck Weaver, the great Pottstown baseball player who played for the Chicago White Sox; and also, by dint of a twisted, convoluted intermarriage between her grandfather and his son’s stepdaughter, was great-aunt to Mrs. Traffina Davis, the wife of Reverend Sturgess, meaning Bernice was actually twelve years younger than her great-niece. She also served as stepsister to Rusty Davis, the handyman who fixed everything; fourth cousin to Hollis Davis, the Hill’s only locksmith; and polished it off by being niece to Chulo Davis, the legendary jazz drummer who left Chicken Hill to play with the famous Harlem Hamfats in Chicago before he was shot dead over a bowl of butter beans.”

And that’s him just warming up. You get the idea someone could say “tell us a story” at the dinner table, and he’d improvise an entire novel on the spot. In drawing them so vividly, he creates characters you genuinely care about, and while occasionally heart-wrenching, it’s also an incredibly funny book. I was going back and forth between reading and listening — it makes a great audiobook — and so could often be seen walking around my neighborhood by myself in recent days, earbuds buried under my beanie and puffer hood, laughing out loud.

The book is set in the poor, tight-knit, Black and Jewish neighborhood of Chicken Hill, in otherwise WASPy Pottstown PA. It opens with a flash forward to 1972, wherein we’re told a body has been found in a well, setting up a mystery and an eventual reveal. But who winds up dead in the well isn’t ultimately all that important in the grand scheme of the book, so as the narrative builds toward its big dual-track action scenes (leaving some of the main characters and the grocery store behind), it ironically loses some steam. But that’s faint criticism for a fantastic book.

So I was sad when it ended, I’ll miss the characters, and I’m eager to read more McBride. It’s rare for me to have read so much fiction – and especially so much new fiction — in the span of a few months, but as with Sigrid Nunez, McBride is a writer I’ve been wanting to read for years, and I jumped right on their latest. Like Nunez, McBride has left me happily wanting more.

(Coincidentally, today is Heaven & Earth’s Round 1 match in the Tournament of Books; I’m eager to see what the judge has to say!)

[ IMAGE: Photo of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store among other books ]

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Time measures
Nothing but itself.
—W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water

The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks.
—Jill Lepore, How the week organizes and tyrannizes our lives

I do not plan to start anew
in January
that is for spring
—David Gate, @davidgatepoet

. . .

Daylight Savings is my Christmas morning. The day on the calendar I look forward to with anticipatory glee. The most wonderful time of the year. Just as the shortness of winter’s days (lengthening though they may be) becomes insufferable, and evidence of spring is tauntingly everywhere, this brilliant thing happens. Literally overnight, the day is longer. 

For me, a weight lifts. But for others, despite the fact that we all “lose track of time” on a regular basis (muttering things like “2:00 already?!” and “Where does the time go?”), the loss of that lone hour upon “springing forward” is experienced as a bodily misalignment, and there is a documented increase of strokes and other health risks in the 48 hours after the time change. That we can be so bad at tracking time with our bodies and senses throughout the year, and also so impacted by the time change is a modern mystery. But then again, time is a bit of a mystery: one of those seemingly unquestionable things that, the more you think about it, the more questionable it becomes. 

What is time? Why are we so ruled by it, so attached to measuring it? And can it really be lost?!

. . .

There was a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker a few years ago called How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives, in which she discusses the history of “the week” — a concept not only man-made but changeable! — and it will twist your mind into a pretzel trying to imagine how the world would function without the construct of weeks, so fundamental are they to 21st-century life. If we only minded days (marked by the rising and setting of the sun) and years (by the repetition of seasons) how would anyone know when it was the right day to do recurring things involving other people, like attend a church service, or watch a broadcast TV show, or play a game of sports?

Not to mention the week’s central role in how modern-day, Western calendars are typically laid out, with the grid of weeks stacked into months, which then form years. (“Months”! That imperfect tool for trying to align the calendar, the year and the moon’s cycles.) But nothing about calendar time is set in stone. To this day, cultures around the world mark different start dates for a new year, and even in Christian Europe, as Jason Farago notes in his exquisite 2023 art-essay Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar, “for many centuries … the new year didn’t start on Jan 1. It began on March 25.” Spring was a fresh start in even more ways than it is today. Plus not all modern-day calendars across the globe have the same number of days or months from one year to the next, or dates that repeat or are fixed in any sense, like ours are.

Farago’s piece includes a look at many calendars from different places and eras, but it is primarily a deep dive — both funny and fascinating, a lesson in seeing — into a stunning hand-painted early-15th-century calendar, the private datebook of a wealthy French duke, known as the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I really urge you to click through and enjoy the ride he takes you on, but what struck me most (which I’ve been chewing on in the year since I first saw it) is the discussion of time being cyclical on the left-hand pages of the duke’s datebook, and linear on the right. “We perceive time only through change,” Farago writes (and those of you who know my past struggle living in seasonally monotonous places will understand how vigorously I nodded my head). “But what kind of change? Do our lives evolve in history or do they repeat themselves? Is time an arrow or a wheel?” 

I was, at that moment, in the middle of recording both — in two separate journals.

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THE CIRCULAR

In mid-2020, quarantined at home with my husband in Nashville, having closed down my business, and in the midst of that perilous election year, I saw a mention of someone’s 5-year journal and it seemed like a good idea at that particular moment in history. So I ordered one from Letts. I kept it simple: Each day I recorded what we ate for dinner (thinking it would give ideas to future me), noted the temperature (for year-over-year comparison), and added a sentence or two about the day’s events. Similar to the duke’s perpetual calendar, with a 5-year journal you start back at the beginning every January, so by the time Farago’s piece came along in April 2023 I was on my fourth pass through the book, entries stacking up on top of each other. Each day was not only itself but its past selves, remaining present. 

Sept 30 — as the random example it fell open to — was the day that one side of our tiny NY galley kitchen was completed (2023); that we flew to TX for my grandma’s funeral (’22); picked up dear friends who came to visit us in FL “post-Covid” (’21); and that I finished emptying out my old business studio space in TN (’20). Others ranged from mundane to amusing to aggravating all over again.

Like the calendars that fill store shelves every year in our world, the duke’s 1410 calendar contains 12 monthly spreads, each with a calendar opposite a pretty picture. His pretty pictures (intricately handpainted by a trio of Flemish brothers, and topped with a half-circle of cyclical time) depict how central the seasons — and more specifically the management of land and crops — are to the wheel of his trés riche life. Up until my parents’ generation, my people were middle American farmers. Every March, my ancestors prepared to sow and harvest. In the years contained in my 5-year journal, every March I packed or unpacked our belongings.

THE LINEAR

My second journal, kept simultaneously, was the version of a DIY datebook I’ve developed for myself over years and iterations. In late 2020, I settled on the form I’ve been using ever since. People familiar with the bullet journaling community would call it a “bujo,” despite that the only thing it has in common with Ryder Carroll’s inspiring Bullet Journal method is the linear 1-31 date list — which, as the duke’s book shows us, is a tradition as old as calendar-making. I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with this handmade datebook from 1410, as extraordinarily different as it is from mine, and wonder what of its features I might be able to incorporate. Farago compares it to an almanac; mine does track the weather.

. . .

Time is not only how we experience the world, it’s also how we describe it. Halfway through writing this, I became aware of time-based language piling up in the sentences, completely unintentionally: time as metaphor (“my Christmas morning”), as compulsory citation (a piece published “a few years ago“), as a point of comparative reference (“21st-century” life) or indicator of current relevancy (“modern-day” calendars) and as common parlance (“to this day”). Would we be able to tell each other stories without the components of time to lean on? But also why do we lean on it so hard?

On January first of this year, when it was time to start a new #bujo for myself and also turn again to the first page of the 5-year journal, I decided to let the latter go. Living in the present means letting the past be in the past, for better or worse. Whether like a wheel or an arrow, time moves forward, and I have my book of days to keep me on course.

[ IMAGE: Photo of DIY datebook and journal © Karen Templer ]

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I was in college, studying graphic design and design history under a Cranbrook alum, circa 1990 just as Mid-Century Modern revivalism was at peak fervor. In other words, I was bathed in it both at school and in the home decor magazines I hoarded. But while MCM’s main manifestation — both originally and in the early ’90s — was the bright, spare, mid-century-only look, I’ve always favored the more layered and eclectic Ray Eames approach. You know, the undersung Ray!, wife of Charles Eames, who was his partner in life and design, and whose design style is on full display in their iconic Pacific Palisades home, aka Case Study House No. 8. Their life as a creative couple — and the ways in which that whole group collaborated and influenced each other — is the most interesting thing about them, to me. But I hadn’t known about their friendship and playful collaborations with illustrator Saul Steinberg (and his wife Hedda Sterne) until I ran across this fantastic, magazine-sized book, Steinberg Meets the Eameses*, in an email from one of my all-time favorite bookstores, William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco.

I love a beautifully designed show catalog or publication that sits right on the line between “book” and “ephemera,” and this one is a true gem, especially in how it incorporates various samples of Steinberg’s editorial work in ways that convey or even mimic the original formats. It’s the catalog for an exhibition organized by the Eames Institute,** also called Steinberg Meets the Eameses, which you can explore online. And there’s another of their online exhibitions, not to be missed, called Ray’s Hand.

See also: the Taschen books Eames and Case Study Houses

*This one is not available through Bookshop so I have happily linked back to Stout for it.

**Eames Institute apparently acquired Stout Books in late 2022 when I had my head turned! Wow.

[ IMAGES: photos of the book Steinberg Meets the Eameses © Karen Templer ]

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You’ve likely heard Brené Brown’s phrase “dress-rehearsing tragedy” (from her book Dare to Lead), and if not, you probably immediately get what it means. According to Brown’s research, 90% of us do it: “Something wonderful happens, and for a brief second you let the joy wash over you — and then five seconds later, the excitement is gone and you’re panicked about a bad thing that’s going to happen to counter the positive. When’s the other shoe going to drop?”

In the face of joy, we imagine terrible scenarios, tell ourselves we’re bracing, preparing, practicing, in an effort to lessen the impact of the imagined inbound pain or disappointment. We’re dress-rehearsing tragedy. The antidote to this thoroughly pointless tendency, she tells us, is gratitude. Simply appreciating the good things in our lives as they happen — and actively, outwardly expressing that on a regular basis — can help break the catastrophizing habit and allow more joy into our lives.

I can attest to that, but a recent NYT Well newsletter by Jancee Dunn, on the power of savoring, contained an idea by a professor of social psychology named Dr. Fred Bryant that goes one step further:

“Dr. Bryant amps up his appreciation for the present by imagining himself in the future, pining for his current life. He has a 7-year-old granddaughter, and sometimes he’ll pretend that she is all grown up, has moved away, ‘and that I would give anything, just for one more day with her,’ he said. Then he opens his eyes and tells himself that his wish is granted.”

Corny? Maybe. But effective.

I do a version of this when it comes to sleep. If I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, or too early in the morning, with enough time left for at least a nap’s worth, I imagine I’ve already been up (or sometimes I actually get up for a minute and walk around the cold house) and that I get to slip back into bed for a precious nap. Imagining and savoring that stolen moment of curling up and tuning out the day, which I get to do so rarely, is often enough to put me right back to sleep.

[ IMAGE: A scene from an experience I routinely, actively savored in recent years — kayaking the river behind our house in Florida during our brief stint there, photo © Karen Templer ]

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TIP ONE: The most fun a book nerd can have on the Internet

If you ask me what’s the best oddball/grassroots concept the Internet ever made possible, I’ll launch into a rapturous digression about a once-weekly event called Layer Tennis and then say but definitely my idea of the thing that made the Internet worth having is the annual Tournament of Books. And the happy news is that it’s still going strong — in fact, the 20th tournament officially kicks off on Wednesday of next week, which means you have this weekend (if you aren’t already a fan) to dig into the history of the tournament and look over this year’s contenders and judges. I’m 1/3 of the way into James McBride’s incredible The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store*, but otherwise have read none of them — it’s ok, that’s part of the fun of it. Mark your bracket if you have read them, maybe order yourself a t-shirt, and get prepared to follow along!

TIP TWO: The hole in the Paris Review paywall

I just bought myself something I’ve wanted for a long time, that I’m not 100% sure why I’ve never indulged in: A subscription to The Paris Review literary journal. In addition to it being reliably great-looking and great-reading, their Art of Fiction author interviews (which date back to the 1950s) are among my all-time favorite things. I have all of the paperback compilations — The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4* (sent to me by the publisher back when I had Readerville) — and love dipping into them, but they only go up to 2009. A fifteen-year gap!

I think I haven’t subscribed to the journal because it robs me of the joy of buying an issue now and then when I find it on the table at some great little shop. But I’ve been hitting the paywall more and more lately, and decided finding the issue in my mailbox has to be just as thrilling as the random encounter, right? Plus, the archive!

With or without a subscription, here’s a hot tip for dipping into the vast archive:

They have a mailing list called ‘The Redux,’ and if you sign up for it you’ll get an email every Sunday linking to a few pieces from the past that they’ve made public for that week. This week happens to have been the three short stories from last year that just won them the ASME Award for short fiction. You can read them via these links if you click today or tomorrow (or anytime if you’re subscribed)—

• This Is Everything There Will Ever Be by Rivers Solomon
• My Good Friend by Juliana Leite, translated by Zoë Perry
• Helen by James Lasdun

You can sign up for The Redux here, as well as their Morning Poetry list, which will get you one poem in your inbox every morning.

*Huge thanks to anyone who might buy books through these affiliate links, or otherwise support this blog

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It feels like I’ve done more blabbing than linking this month, and yet here is the extracted and categorized list of all the links embedded in February’s posts and it’s a whopper! As before, each post is numbered and linked so you can trace the item back to its context, and I’d love to hear what you’ve gotten the most out of.

Housekeeping note: I’ve been posting every-other weekday in Feb and am going to try M/W/F throughout March and see how that feels. I so appreciate your being here and hope you’ve found value in the blog this month! Thank you for your time and support—

ARTICLES & ESSAYS
• The ‘Barbie’ outrage is missing a very important point by Hannah Ryan, CNN.com (#24-07)
• Ava DuVernay on “Disappointing” Awards Recognition for ‘Origin’ by Abbey White and Zoe G. Phillips, The Hollywood Reporter (#24-07)
• ‘Barbie’ Is Adapted? ‘Maestro’ Original? Let’s Fix the Screenplay Categories by Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-07)
• After Affirmative Action Ban, They Rewrote College Essays With a Key Theme: Race by by Bernard Mokam, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-07)
• I Sing the Bioelectric by Willow Defebaugh, Atmos (#24-08)
• Michael Cohen says he unwittingly sent AI-generated fake legal cases to his attorney by The Associated Press (#24-09)
• The new Luddites aren’t backing down by Brian Merchant, The Atlantic (+Apple News link) (#24-09)
• Our Rodent Selfies, Ourselves by Emily Anthes, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-11)
• Stinge Watching Is the Opposite of Binge Watching by Jason Kottke, kottke.org (#24-11)
• Legacy of Japan’s Nakagin Capsule Tower lives on in restored pods by Justin McCurry, The Guardian (#24-12)
• In Tokyo, Rescuing the Residential Spaceship That Fell to Earth by Tim Hornyak, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-12)
• The Immortals: meet the billionaires forking out for eternal life by Hollie Richardson, The Guardian (#24-12)
• The Silicon Valley Elite Who Want to Build a City From Scratch by Conor Dougherty and Erin Griffith, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-12)
• A Peter Thiel-Linked Startup Is Courting New York Scenesters and Plotting a Libertarian Paradise by Ali Breland, Mother Jones (#24-12)
• The People of Solano County Versus the Next Tech-Billionaire Dystopia by Gil Duran, The New Republic (+ Apple News link) (#24-12)
• Sigrid Nunez, The Art of Fiction No. 254 by Lidija Haas, The Paris Review (#24-13)
• Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in the Village’ by Teju Cole, The New Yorker (#24-15)
• Okwui Enwezor, Curator Who Remapped Art World, Dies at 55 (2019) by Jason Farago, The New York Times (Gift Link)* (#24-15)
• Bisi Silva, Founding Artistic Director of Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Has Died at 57 (2019) by Alex Greenberger, ArtNews (#24-15)
• Distance of Days (Two Elegies) by Teju Cole, Brittle Paper (#24-15)

BOOKS**
• Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (#24-07) (haven’t read yet)
• Tremor by Teju Cole (#24-07, #24-13) (highly recommended)
• Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian (#24-12) (haven’t read)
• Every Day Is for The Thief by Teju Cole (#24-13) (good, but Tremor is better)
• One Day by David Nicholls (#24-14) (haven’t read)
• Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole (#24-15) (highly recommended)
• Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (#24-15) (partially read)
• Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole (haven’t read)

PODCAST/TRANSCRIPT
• Teju Cole: Sitting Together in the Dark, ‘On Being’ with Krista Tippett (#24-07)

MOVIES
• Origin written and directed by Ava DuVernay (#24-07) (haven’t seen yet)
• War Games directed by John Badham (#24-09) (recommended)
• Before Sunrise, written and directed by Richard Linklater (#24-14) (recommended)

TV & VIDEO
• One Day, Netflix limited series (#24-14) (highly recommended)

ARTS & MISC
• Slow-motion video of magnificent roseate spoonbill by Deborah Sandidge (#24-08)
• A customizable Penguin Classics pullover pattern by Catherine Waterfield (#24-11)
• Library-card sketches of people reading on the subway by Chris Schwaar (#24-11)
• Make your own State Smock by State the Label (#24-11)
• “Small acts” that add up by Morgan Harper Nichols (#24-11)
• Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa and the Metabolism movement (#24-12)
• California Forever (#24-12)
• Fyre Festival (#24-12)

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*NYT Gift Links expire 30 days from their creation date, so may have reverted to subscriber-only
**These are Bookshop.org affiliate links