Week TWO and still going strong! Here’s your midweek(ish) round-up of internet things I found interesting…
Well, now we know how a cat would wear pants.
I promise this Substack newsletter won’t simply be a list of links to other, more notable Substack newsletters, but Lyz Lenz wrote a lovely essay “on motherhood, writing, being selfish, and doing it anyway.” I immediately connected to the idea of snacking while writing (or working, or doing anything that temporarily suspends the physical reality that we are bodies, ideally, in motion).
I wonder if the food and the hunger is an anchor. I wonder if it’s my body’s way of trying to maintain some grasp on reality. To remind myself I’m not just a mind.
It reminds me of the Transformer toys of the 80s. I remember playing with one as a little girl and thinking there must be something similar going on in my brain, controlling the rest of my body like how the little gold dude in the head-shaped cockpit controls the machine.
I spoke with The Oaklandside’s education reporter Ashley McBride about why families choose OUSD (a companion piece to her article from a few weeks ago, about why nearly 40% of families here choose charter or private schools). It’s about Oakland, but it’s also about supporting public education in general.
The first (only, so far?) dead body I saw was my Mom’s. "The first dead body you see should not be someone you love...we should be able to separate the shock of grief from the shock of seeing death for the first time." I agree that we should talk more about death and dying and those who die after they die, but I’m really not sure how I feel about this statement. We should be able to do a lot of things, but we’re not always in control of the order of such things.
On a much lighter note, I finally found a conditioner bar I actually like (I’ve been using these shampoo bars for awhile now). One of these days I’ll do a plastic-free/zero waste goals roundup here.
On Saturday, I dragged the kids to the little collection of art galleries on 25th Street in Oakland to see the work of artist and former curator Carrier Lederer. A big fan of her curatorial work at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, it’s so nice to see her spending more time on her art, in her studio, and in the gallery since retiring. Artists who hang in there with day jobs or careers outside of their creative practices (and raise a kid or two, to boot!) but keep going in the evenings and on the weekends will forever be my people.
This essay by Kathryn Jezer-Morton made me think of this project in grad school. “Everything round invites a caress” really is a line from a book: Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (from a chapter on “The Phenomenology of Roundness”). I know I have a copy of it somewhere, probably in a box in the garage (one day I’ll have more than two shelves in my 120 square foot studio for ALL my books), and when I find it I’m going to look up that passage again to better remember the context.
A food writer after my daughter’s heart.
Finally, it’s not a poem (as I ended with last week) but I leave you with this, an index card I found in a stack of other random notes. I’m not sure if I copied it or wrote it myself or why, but I suspect hydration was equally important to past me as it is now, and I rather like the second line which I highlighted before adding this to the bulletin board in my studio.
Make art. Experience art. Elevate art.