July ending, a list:
There was a line of large, transparent jellyfish on the grey beach at Ayr this past Wednesday—a tidemark of lives, but I wasn’t sure if those lives were over or not because it’s very hard to tell with jellyfish
I will frequently go to hang out laundry in the garden, which is shared, sort of, with others. On this occasion the neighbours had just returned from the river and were peeling off wetsuits, their terrier dog coming to sniff around at the far end of the garden with me, sitting itself down in a sun patch while I finished arranging various damp garments. By the time I’d completed laundry hanging, and the dog and I had done some further garden investigation in terms of seeing what was growing well, the neighbours had changed from swimsuits into clothes and made drinks and gone to sit in their courtyard, having shut the wooden gate which keeps it contained. The terrier and I approached the gate together, with me calling out something like ah, you still have a dog out here, and the neighbour looked surprised and expressed thanks and said her partner sometimes just forgot that he had a dog
Today the tapestry, which has now been worked on for perhaps as long as ten months, receives its finishing processes, like sewing webbing onto the reverse, and loops for a wooden dowel it will hang from once several hooks have been noisily administered to the wall. It’s adapted from a painting inside Everything, Beautiful, beginning as a supposed ‘winter project’, and at one time or another I painted it to imagine what it might look like once complete:
At a town meeting I watched an older man, putting his raincoat back on, struggle to find the second arm hole as so often is the case when you commit to completely putting on the first sleeve of something without much thought for what happens next—someone standing just behind the struggle noticed this and thoughtfully held up the second sleeve for him
Also at the town meeting: a black Labrador stood on my right foot for some minutes and this felt significant
This painting of Frida Kahlo by Magda Pach, 1933:
In a coastal second-hand bookshop I found a perfectly intact copy of Indelicacy by Amina Cain for £2
We forget to put the bin out for collection more often than we remember
The female sparrows clutch the feeder and choose carefully their seeds from the varied selection; the male sparrows hold on and use their beaks to enthusiastically rain the seed down in an indiscriminate way onto the roof and the windowsill before deciding what they would like to eat
An inheritance from my mother, and before this her mother, is to keep a varied but carefully-selected number of cards and envelopes (usually they are of paintings, or photographs, sometimes remnants of gallery or museum visits) to write and send to other people as and when needed
You don’t have to try and put the beauty back together
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
An episode of WNYC’s Radiolab inspired by my book Eating the Sun (Penguin, 2019) was revisited the other week, as it was produced by the brilliant Rachael Cusick, who has recently announced her departure from the show. The episode is called The Cataclysm Sentence, and I remember first listening to it during the initial COVID-19 lockdown, in rural France, upstairs in the attic bedroom of a tiny cottage with a shrivelling magnolia branch of pink flowers on the wall above me.
A painting left carefully wrapped and headed to southern France, near Parisot, for an exhibition at the literary festival held there in October, Festilitt.
And I got around to illustrating versions of my own book covers (both US and UK editions in the first three instances) as part of an upcoming and overdue website shift-around, which will see individual, more detailed informational pages about each individual work.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Photographs by Berlin-based Mustafah Abdulaziz.
“I am in at least three minds about all questions.”
— Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy
“How do some people stick in one life when even a word can have so many existences?”
— Joan Barfoot, Some Things About Flying
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Thank you Ella - your writing has the power to make me wonder and you have the delicate power to unlock memories or make me pay better attention to myself.
I also keep a box full of postcards (museum ones, cards I find in different locations as free perks) that I regularly send to friends. I haven’t inherited it from my family, it’s always been within me and always thought it was weird or yet again another of my nostalgia obsession.
However, shortly after I moved to Florence, I found by the bin many boxes, it looked like an apartment of an older person have been emptied. Amongst those boxes, one was full of these postcards. It’s very special to me, and I am happy that I am carrying on what I hope it was their passion too.
I wish you a serene Sunday ♥️
Lovely