This week, briefly:
1. I thought I needed a lemon but I didn't
2. You were too busy dancing to see the green light
3. Wondering whether knowing someone, any someone, is a series of small distances—further away from them, closer to them, towards—if any decision or comment or question or thought moves you in tiny increments, degrees, the distances closed and then opened. I'm thinking of it as an overall closeness, or an overall moving-away-from, that all of the interactions you have with any one person add up, that you have a total, and that this total will either be a kind of distance, a kind distance or an emptier distance, or it will, when talking about the ones who know what shape your arms are, be a slow, ever-closer closeness.
4. Watching people look at absolutely everything except the eyes
5. It all looked absurd on Thursday, the sky appeared inverted and I was thinking a lot about the Southern Hemisphere
6. Line drawings, lying drawings
7. Knowledge is perhaps most valuable when it is passed from one person to another, in person, not over the phone or across a page, but speaking, speaking as if handing over a tender, breathing and shiny thing
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
Bookish included Eating the Sun in their 'Spring 2019 Must-Read* Nonfiction' list, and have probably described it better than I could:
'Ella Frances Sanders’ new book will give readers a gorgeously illustrated look at the scientific principles governing our universe. Readers will learn about evolution, the sun (as the title would suggest), the human body, and photosynthesis, among other things. All the while, Sanders uses a tone that will feel approachable to a wide variety of readers, not just those with a background in the sciences. This book manages to be highly informative and strikingly beautiful at the same time, and we bet you will find yourself utterly captivated.'
*It might be worth noting that these are not things that you must read, but rather books that you could read, and 'must-read' lists should likely be called 'could-read' lists, in order to prevent people from feeling that they have not done a very good job of reading.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
These impossibly ephemeral cloud sculptures by Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde, which I fell for primarily because they are at once so out-of-place-looking and so at-home-looking, which is, I think, often how humans appear.
“…and my desire is for nothing more
than that day with you in my lost country.”
— Homero Aridjis
The end.
Copyright © 2019 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.