I used to live on an iceberg

“‘My fellow Americans, I drank a pint of walrus milk once for a bet.
I speak fluent Eskimo. I once ate all the gherkins in Belgium. My brother’s
got a yak in his loft. I fell asleep on a night bus once and woke up in
Munich, and had to get a lift back on a camel. I used to live on an iceberg.
I’ve got a waffle-maker that works underwater.’”

Temporary Village

our visual ray

—Henry David Thoreau, quoted by Victor Carl Friesen in A Tonic of Wildness: Sensuousness in Henry David Thoreau; from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.

the warm colors

“Of the warm colors, red is Thoreau’s favorite: he loves to see any redness in vegetation. It is the color of colors, he says in ‘Autumnal Tints,’ and speaks to our blood. Red foliage, he writes, shows nature as being ‘full of blood and heat and luxuriance.’ While Thoreau delights in the feast for the eyes provided by reds, oranges and yellows, he realizes that they cannot be the staple of his diet. Thus he writes of yet another warm color, but one sober in its aspect: ‘Brown is the color for me, the color of our coats and our daily lives, the color of the poor man’s loaf. The bright tints are pies and cakes, good only for October feasts.’”

an amethystine hatchet

“Thoreau is . . . rapturous at times about cool blues and azures, but these tints, found predominantly in the sky above and in the waters which reflect it, are often wedded to meditation. These color suggest a limitless space to Thoreau and serve as a stimulus for far-reaching thoughts. For example the sight of his ‘elysian blue’ shadow on snow causes Thoreau to reflect about the nature of his own being: ‘I am turned into a tall blue prussian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in raptures at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature?’”

domesticity and witchcraft

“Touch, taste and smell. The sensory bases of both domesticity and witchcraft. One of the horrors of witchcraft, in fact, was that it made use of the domestic instruments and practices that were intended to keep women safely at home to transgress the social and cosmic order. A pot might be used for cooking dinner or for brewing a spell, a needle might be used for sewing clothes or for piercing an effigy, a broom might be used for sweeping the floor or for flying out the window. The tactile, gustatory and olfactory practices which were expected to keep women confined to close quarters, were transformed by witchcraft into media for mastering the world.”

—Constance Classen, The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity; from Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by David Howes, 2005.

Equation Bookshelf

the Art of the Business Card

Fold-ins, Past and Present

ABC3D

(Thank you Matt Monguillot.)