Dear friends, family, fellow travelers,
I dropped the ball on a newsy newsletter this month ... but here we are juuuuust under the wire! Enjoy the usual mix of cats, news, and book squee. I hope everyone is sliding into summer feeling more or less the level of busy they want to be.
Image: Christopher basking in the sun on our back porch in his favorite wicker basket (we had no idea he missed it so much during the winter!)
Image: Teazle lounges on the back of the couch, alert to a sudden noise from the kitchen.
Hanna and I and the cats are all doing pretty well. Teazle lets us sleep a wee bit longer in the mornings now that we can leave the back door open all night and she can roam to the porch and back at her leisure. Christopher had to have some dental work done (to the tune of about $2,000 -- whee!) and is now down three teeth and up one feline toothbrush (hahahahahahahaha). He was not happy with the mean mommies who confined him in his carrier and took him to the pokey place twice, and sang of his displeasure on the entire car ride to the vet both times. But he's mostly forgiven us.
Incidental to the dental work (which involved sedation), the vet discovered that Christopher has a slight heart murmur. No heart enlargement, but they will be keeping an eye on it moving forward. Please think good thoughts that he has many sun-soaked years ahead of him!
Image: My right hand (wedding tattoo visible) holding a waffle cone with five tiny ice cream scoops in five different flavors -- salted caramel, cream fraiche, chocolate, honey, and coffee crunch -- making up the Dizzy Izzy!
This past weekend, over Memorial Day, I few out to Minneapolis to visit friends Molly, Eric, Noah, and Simon. It was the second year in what may (schedules and finances willing) turn into an annual start-of-summer ritual. We had a leisurely four-day weekend despite the heat (mid-90s and humid!), visiting the Hennepin County Library, the Mill City Farmer's Market, Dock 6 Pottery, Turtle Bread, Izzy's Ice Cream, Minnehaha Park, and the Minnesota Science Museum. We also watched lots of Sarah & Duck, and the first half of Noah's performance in "Close to Home," an original musical written and composed by a member of their Unitarian Universalist congregation who writes one from scratch every year. So cool.
Molly's family involvement with a UU congregation was part of what encouraged me to try Arlington St. Church out this past year, year and a half, so that is another nice connection.
Image: A squared-off spiral design in variegated purple floss on white Aida cloth.
I couldn't easily take my Crafting Democracy project (more below) on the trip, so I used the opportunity to work on a few improvised 4" x 6" cross stitch pieces using my new ombre embroidery floss. I'm really digging these colors. All of these pieces, when finished, will go up on Persistent Stitches at $20/piece for various social justice organizations.
Image: An improvised seaweed pattern in variegated blue-green floss on navy Aida cloth.
Today, I submitted my Persistent Stitches I piece (still in progress) to the Crafting Democracy exhibition; if accepted, it will go on display in November 2019 in Rochester, N. Y. I'm excited about how it's coming together! I will be adding embroidered vines crawling across the quilt with words and images submitted by friends and family -- representing the ways in which they have carried on since the 2016 election -- "blooming" along the vines. I'm still working out the details of how those words/images will be attached -- possibly some sort of three-dimensional jewelry or charm technique. Watch for updates!
Image: A long five-panel quilted hanging in gold, white, purple, and blue.
I've been in a romance reading mood these past few weeks, and raced through Jordan Hawk's SPECTR series of paranormal romance novellas. Modern day alternate university in which a U.S. government agency (SPECTR) is responsible for combatting "non-human entities" they percieve as evil; when a young artist-cum-coffee-shop-barista, Caleb Jensen, is accidentally possessed by an entity while searching for his brother's spirit-napped body, the excorcist assigned to his case -- John Starkweather -- ends up falling head over heels in love with both Caleb and the entity whom he's been assigned to destroy. Whoops.
In non-fiction, I read White Kids: Growing up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America by Margaret Hagerman (September 2018), The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs (August 2018) and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility: White it's So Hard for White People to Talk About Race (June 2018). All three were good, thought-provoking reads. White Fragility helped me think about how white anxieties around race operate, particularly within institutions like the workplace -- something I've been thinking more about as I step back from New England Archivists and think about making change in my own institution. Alan Jacob's book echoed some interesting scholarship I've read in the past couple of years about the rise of "Western Civilization" courses in U.S. colleges and universities, and the role that vision of history and culture plays in perpetuating white supremacy. Hagerman, my most recent read, focuses on white, affluent families and attempts (with partial success) to center children's experience of white identity.
Online, a few pieces that spoke to me in the past few weeks:
Kelly Davio's gorgeous meditation "The Fantasy of Discipline: The Body That Can't Run Marathons" at Medium (h/t Anne Helen Petersen).
This thread on "alt-liberalism" and its discontents clarified a lot of things for me about rockstar white male academics (Pinker, Petersen, Harris, et. al.) and their love affair with scientific racism.
"Between Obama and Coates" by Toure F. Reed at Catalyst asks us to reconsider the relationship between race and class and the remedies we might practically achieve for both types of inequality (h/t to Ray and Andrew at Trotsky and the Wild Orchids)
...and I finally tracked down Richard Rorty's 1992 essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" and found it to be adorable (is it wrong to find Richard Rorty adorable?).
And it's dinnertime so I'll leave you with a watercolor painting by Louise Wheelwright Damon (1889-1973), painted in June 1956. We hold a box of thirty works in the MHS collection and you can see a few more examples of her work in this blog post.
Be kind, be courageous,
Anna
I dropped the ball on a newsy newsletter this month ... but here we are juuuuust under the wire! Enjoy the usual mix of cats, news, and book squee. I hope everyone is sliding into summer feeling more or less the level of busy they want to be.
Image: Christopher basking in the sun on our back porch in his favorite wicker basket (we had no idea he missed it so much during the winter!)Image: Teazle lounges on the back of the couch, alert to a sudden noise from the kitchen.Hanna and I and the cats are all doing pretty well. Teazle lets us sleep a wee bit longer in the mornings now that we can leave the back door open all night and she can roam to the porch and back at her leisure. Christopher had to have some dental work done (to the tune of about $2,000 -- whee!) and is now down three teeth and up one feline toothbrush (hahahahahahahaha). He was not happy with the mean mommies who confined him in his carrier and took him to the pokey place twice, and sang of his displeasure on the entire car ride to the vet both times. But he's mostly forgiven us.
Incidental to the dental work (which involved sedation), the vet discovered that Christopher has a slight heart murmur. No heart enlargement, but they will be keeping an eye on it moving forward. Please think good thoughts that he has many sun-soaked years ahead of him!
Image: My right hand (wedding tattoo visible) holding a waffle cone with five tiny ice cream scoops in five different flavors -- salted caramel, cream fraiche, chocolate, honey, and coffee crunch -- making up the Dizzy Izzy! This past weekend, over Memorial Day, I few out to Minneapolis to visit friends Molly, Eric, Noah, and Simon. It was the second year in what may (schedules and finances willing) turn into an annual start-of-summer ritual. We had a leisurely four-day weekend despite the heat (mid-90s and humid!), visiting the Hennepin County Library, the Mill City Farmer's Market, Dock 6 Pottery, Turtle Bread, Izzy's Ice Cream, Minnehaha Park, and the Minnesota Science Museum. We also watched lots of Sarah & Duck, and the first half of Noah's performance in "Close to Home," an original musical written and composed by a member of their Unitarian Universalist congregation who writes one from scratch every year. So cool.
Molly's family involvement with a UU congregation was part of what encouraged me to try Arlington St. Church out this past year, year and a half, so that is another nice connection.
Image: A squared-off spiral design in variegated purple floss on white Aida cloth.I couldn't easily take my Crafting Democracy project (more below) on the trip, so I used the opportunity to work on a few improvised 4" x 6" cross stitch pieces using my new ombre embroidery floss. I'm really digging these colors. All of these pieces, when finished, will go up on Persistent Stitches at $20/piece for various social justice organizations.
Image: An improvised seaweed pattern in variegated blue-green floss on navy Aida cloth.Today, I submitted my Persistent Stitches I piece (still in progress) to the Crafting Democracy exhibition; if accepted, it will go on display in November 2019 in Rochester, N. Y. I'm excited about how it's coming together! I will be adding embroidered vines crawling across the quilt with words and images submitted by friends and family -- representing the ways in which they have carried on since the 2016 election -- "blooming" along the vines. I'm still working out the details of how those words/images will be attached -- possibly some sort of three-dimensional jewelry or charm technique. Watch for updates!
Image: A long five-panel quilted hanging in gold, white, purple, and blue. I've been in a romance reading mood these past few weeks, and raced through Jordan Hawk's SPECTR series of paranormal romance novellas. Modern day alternate university in which a U.S. government agency (SPECTR) is responsible for combatting "non-human entities" they percieve as evil; when a young artist-cum-coffee-shop-barista, Caleb Jensen, is accidentally possessed by an entity while searching for his brother's spirit-napped body, the excorcist assigned to his case -- John Starkweather -- ends up falling head over heels in love with both Caleb and the entity whom he's been assigned to destroy. Whoops.
In non-fiction, I read White Kids: Growing up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America by Margaret Hagerman (September 2018), The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs (August 2018) and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility: White it's So Hard for White People to Talk About Race (June 2018). All three were good, thought-provoking reads. White Fragility helped me think about how white anxieties around race operate, particularly within institutions like the workplace -- something I've been thinking more about as I step back from New England Archivists and think about making change in my own institution. Alan Jacob's book echoed some interesting scholarship I've read in the past couple of years about the rise of "Western Civilization" courses in U.S. colleges and universities, and the role that vision of history and culture plays in perpetuating white supremacy. Hagerman, my most recent read, focuses on white, affluent families and attempts (with partial success) to center children's experience of white identity.
Online, a few pieces that spoke to me in the past few weeks:
Kelly Davio's gorgeous meditation "The Fantasy of Discipline: The Body That Can't Run Marathons" at Medium (h/t Anne Helen Petersen).
This thread on "alt-liberalism" and its discontents clarified a lot of things for me about rockstar white male academics (Pinker, Petersen, Harris, et. al.) and their love affair with scientific racism.
"Between Obama and Coates" by Toure F. Reed at Catalyst asks us to reconsider the relationship between race and class and the remedies we might practically achieve for both types of inequality (h/t to Ray and Andrew at Trotsky and the Wild Orchids)
...and I finally tracked down Richard Rorty's 1992 essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" and found it to be adorable (is it wrong to find Richard Rorty adorable?).
And it's dinnertime so I'll leave you with a watercolor painting by Louise Wheelwright Damon (1889-1973), painted in June 1956. We hold a box of thirty works in the MHS collection and you can see a few more examples of her work in this blog post.
Be kind, be courageous,
Anna