Friday Links

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1. I’m a little late today because we have another summer Friday for Juneteenth. Now I’m plotting how to get 4-day weeks until Labor Day and might be doing this later:

 

2. No one was more surprised than me to learn that Provo has a (kinda) jazz kissa? They listen to more than jazz and I’m not sure there are coffee drinks but otherwise it’s the same. The Kids These Days are discovering listening to an entire album and I am trying to be supportive of them and not roll my eyes! (Review from their Instagram.)

 

3. Anthropeum is a game that has you guess “where in the world, and when, does this human artifact belong?” It’s incredibly difficult!

How To Read More

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I saw this essay by John Paul Brammer, “How I Learned to Read Way, Way, More” making the rounds in my different newsletters. When I read it last week, I realized he was the same author who wrote the piece about applying for Global Entry and the urge to conform I posted last summer. This one is wonderful–talking about attention and curiosity and developing a reading habit.

I had a long dry spell of reading in my late 20s/early 30s when I was still reading what was on my shelves but I just didn’t seek out anything new. Then I started walking to the library from my office job, and then I finally got a Kindle and discovered library e-books. Now I’m reading about a book a week. And no, they’re not all capital-L Literature, but as Brammer says in his essay:

I don’t need to go on about the benefits of reading, but here’s a brief paean: it has dramatically improved my quality of life. I’m less anxious. My thoughts feel cleaner. Thinking itself is more pleasurable. Pain is less mysterious. My brain is just better. Books are a privileged medium. We’re grammatical beings. We talk to ourselves in sentences.

RIP, David Hockney

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The painter died at 88 last week. I don’t talk about art a lot here but a postcard of his “Mount Fuji and Flowers” from the fancy mall stationery store lived in my high school locker and then on the walls of my first office cube. I’m forever on the lookout for an exhibition poster of his “A Bigger Grand Canyon,” and I lived for any story of him in his old age, still out there making art, like this one (from LACMA’s tribute):

During the pandemic, sequestered in his home in rural Normandy, he greeted every day by walking around his gardens, noticing the changes in nature, iPad and stylus in hand. Each day, he created something new, quickly crafting a tree about to bloom or a branch or a flower, observing how his subjects changed each day with the passage of the seasons. And he would share these images with his friends; each morning I would awake in L.A. and be greeted by an emailed iPad drawing from David, reminding me of all the beauty in the world. “Don’t worry,” he’d say with his characteristic sly wit, “they can’t cancel the spring.”

 

David Hockney's "Mount Fuji And Flowers," with flowers in a red vase in front of turquoise mountains.

David Hockney's "A Bigger Grand Canyon" hanging in a museum, with a group of visitors.

Text on a cream background that says, "I'm 82, I'm going to die. We die because we are born. The only things that matter in life are food and love, in that order, and also our little dog Ruby. I truly believe this, and for me, the basis of art is love. I love life. David Hockney Letter to Ruth Mackenzie April 2020"

Tuesday Project Progress: Moar Sweater!

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I guess it’s the Year of the Sweater because I started another one even before my “J. Crew” rollneck was finished. This is even in the same yarn as the last one (Cascade Cantata); I decided a sweater’s worth of yarn would be my “Easter basket” back in April and started it the next week.

A sweater being knit in shocking pink yarn. It's about three-quarters done.

I’m not using a PetiteKnit pattern this time, but another super-popular one–the Lakes Pullover from Ozetta Knitwear. I like the big collar and the loose fit, especially around the biceps (ahem). A woman modeling a loose fitting chunky gray sweater. It has saddle shoulders and a high ribbed neck.

It’s getting close, especially after some solid car knitting time over the weekend.

Tour Of The Mountain West

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We took a long weekend to drive our nephew over to the Air Force Academy for a leadership camp, maybe the last time we’ll have to drive him anywhere since he has his learner’s permit now.

We split the drive there into two days–SLC to Moab, then Moab to Colorado Springs on I-70–but we went north on the way home and took 40 through Steamboat and Vernal in one long day. Both routes were just gorgeous and I kept thinking, “I bet Wallace Stegner has something to say about this country.”

Boy does he–I looked up the source of this quote from another adventure with Skyler and found an article Stegner wrote in 1981 that’s most of the Sierra Club magazine:

Brought here blindfolded, I would know I was in the desert West by the smell of sage and dust and brittle weeds. Given a glimpse of the ground. I would know from the raw earth and the tufted, clumpy vegetation… that I was west of the 100th meridian. Allowed to see the sky, I might guess from the darkness of its blue and the whiteness of the cumuli that float across it that I was in Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico or Arizona. But give me the briefest look at the horizons and I would know I was in Utah, in the high plateaus.

 

Tall red cliffs with blue mountains in the distance in Garden of the Gods

Red cliffs and clear blue sky with the Colorado River in the foreground in Moab

A tall teenage boy with a camo duffel bag stands in front of an aircraft display

Thursday Links

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1. It’s a Summer Friday tomorrow so I’m wrapping things up early. From the vintage children’s bookseller account: An illustration from a children's book of a mouse in a leaf hammock in a field of daisies. Text says, S is for Summer when we're on vacation.

 

2. Vacations are important for mental health, as is taking a break to primal scream sometimes: Screenshot of two Threads posts. Post one says "Hey guys I know it's really hard to be conscious of your health right now, so please remember that after every hour muttering "wtf" while scrolling on your phone you should stand up and banshee scream for at least 5 minutes to stretch out your lower back." Post 2 says "You joke but my friends therapist recently told her to verbally acknowledge how forked up things are so her brain doesn't absorb it as acceptable"

 

3. Here’s a short piece about the online life of Snoopy as a meme, how he remains wholesome, and how he was a symbol of resistance in the Vietnam War (something I didn’t know!). Quote: “[Snoopy] is the last sacred thing in a sea of the profane.”

Wednesday Poem

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This is a new one to me and so nice (and giving echoes of William Carlos Williams). Also, the next time I outgrow another pair of pants, I’m going to say, “My hips are ripening” instead and then it will be poetic. 

 

Tomatoes
by Joy Sullivan

I waited so long for love
and suddenly, here it is
standing in the garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.

Soon, we’ll make a supper of them.
Salted slabs between slices of bread.
Your beard silvers. My hips ripen.
The mail piles up.

Phone calls go unanswered. Forgive us.
Our mouths are full of tomatoes.
We are so busy
being small and hungry and alive

Tuesday Project Roundup: 80s Shirt

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I don’t wear a lot of my mom’s clothes, but I did take a camp shirt she made back in the late 80s in a cowboy print, when Ralph Lauren’s “RL Country” Western aesthetic was everywhere.

I do have all of her patterns, though, and since I love the boxy fit of the cowboy shirt and I was missing my mom, I thought, “Why not find the pattern she used for that and make another shirt?” Comparing the actual shirt to the different camp shirt options was pretty easy; it turns out she used the contender I liked best, an old designer one from The Gap before they got their modern logo (!).
A pattern envelope from the 80s, with illustrations of men and women wearing a shirt and pants or shorts

 

Like Mom did with the cowboy shirt, I used a quilting cotton in a fun print. (I bought the last of it from Sewtopia so I can’t link it, but I’m pretty sure it was a Kokka import.) I like how the clouds behind the tigers can also be breath/fart clouds 🤣
A navy blue short sleeve shirt with Japanese-style yellow tigers and blue clouds on it.

 

I decided to go full 80s when I wore this out of the house, with my light jeans and huaraches for Magnum P.I. Summer vibes. A woman takes a mirror selfie. She's wearing the tiger shirt, classic cut light blue jeans, a military belt, and woven shoes.

Still Green

Karen

We had a really hot day with wind over the weekend so the valley is starting to get a little crispy, but the mountains are still green and still doing their “enchanted forest in bloom” thing.

The side of a mountain against a blue sky, with bright green new growth on the evergreens

A closeup picture of ninebark, a shrub with white flowers

A patch of yellow daisies in the woods

Friday Links

Karen

1. More hating on AI? Don’t mind if I do!

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Emily Mattheson (@emilymattheson)

 

2. “But Karen,” you may be asking, “What about hating on American politics?” We have that, too!Screenshot of a post that says, When I paid $200 for 3 bags of groceries today, I thought to myself, "'m sure glad they're having a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

 

3. Please enjoy “the 74 most incredible lines in Moby-Dick.” I thought this one was fantastic: “I looked around me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.”