After I had finished and scheduled the two parts below, IG fed me a post by a silver-haired 53-y-o model and anti-ageism advocate that just said (under side-by-side photos of herself with her previously dyed hair and her real hair), “In case you need a reminder today: It’s ok to look older.” The message, of course, being that “older” isn’t inherently worse than “younger,” especially with regard to looks (ffs), although we’ve all been trained to think so. But it got me musing on that age-old irony: that when we’re kids, all we want is to seem and look (and indeed, be) older, and then at some point the script flips, and suddenly simply appearing older is a fate worse than death. What popped into my head was a day last spring when I was out wandering with my sister (K) and my then 15-y-o niece (N) in Winter Park FL —
We were in a store my sister had wanted to shop in, full of what I would describe as generic, age-neutral sportswear — like a Gap sort of thing, but locally owned. K said bemusedly, “N thinks this is a store for old people who want to look young.” I said, “What’s old?” and N shrugged and replied, “I dunno. 30?” K and I giggled and shook our heads. Then we went off down the street to the store N had wanted to check out. As we approached the storefront, I took one look at the slinky, revealing dresses in the window — the kind that teenagers think makes them look all grown up — and said to her, “Ah. This is a store for young people who want to look older.” To which she replied (I love her so much), “Touché.”
It’s not uncommon for the fashion industry to periodically try to show their (momentary) commitment to diversity in various ways, only to quickly fall back into the habit of only featuring very young, very thin, and mostly white models. Hopefully this isn’t just another such anomaly, but ‘More old(er) models walked on the runways this season, marking a step in the right direction for age representation.’ (NYT Gift Link) At least as far as the images included in the article go, they are still all thin and mostly white (like scientists conducting a lab experiment, they apparently can only change one variable at a time), but how great to see these women showing how it’s done.
Time measures Nothing but itself. —W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water
The sun makes days, seasons, and years, and the moon makes months, but people invented weeks. —Jill Lepore, How the week organizes and tyrannizes our lives
I do not plan to start anew in January that is for spring —David Gate, @davidgatepoet
. . .
Daylight Savings is my Christmas morning. The day on the calendar I look forward to with anticipatory glee. The most wonderful time of the year. Just as the shortness of winter’s days (lengthening though they may be) becomes insufferable, and evidence of spring is tauntingly everywhere, this brilliant thing happens. Literally overnight, the day is longer.
For me, a weight lifts. But for others, despite the fact that we all “lose track of time” on a regular basis (muttering things like “2:00 already?!” and “Where does the time go?”), the loss of that lone hour upon “springing forward” is experienced as a bodily misalignment, and there is a documented increase of strokes and other health risks in the 48 hours after the time change. That we can be so bad at tracking time with our bodies and senses throughout the year, and also so impacted by the time change is a modern mystery. But then again, time is a bit of a mystery: one of those seemingly unquestionable things that, the more you think about it, the more questionable it becomes.
What is time? Why are we so ruled by it, so attached to measuring it? And can it really be lost?!
. . .
There was a piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker a few years ago called How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives, in which she discusses the history of “the week” — a concept not only man-made but changeable! — and it will twist your mind into a pretzel trying to imagine how the world would function without the construct of weeks, so fundamental are they to 21st-century life. If we only minded days (marked by the rising and setting of the sun) and years (by the repetition of seasons) how would anyone know when it was the right day to do recurring things involving other people, like attend a church service, or watch a broadcast TV show, or play a game of sports?
Not to mention the week’s central role in how modern-day, Western calendars are typically laid out, with the grid of weeks stacked into months, which then form years. (“Months”! That imperfect tool for trying to align the calendar, the year and the moon’s cycles.) But nothing about calendar time is set in stone. To this day, cultures around the world mark different start dates for a new year, and even in Christian Europe, as Jason Farago notes in his exquisite 2023 art-essay Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar, “for many centuries … the new year didn’t start on Jan 1. It began on March 25.” Spring was a fresh start in even more ways than it is today. Plus not all modern-day calendars across the globe have the same number of days or months from one year to the next, or dates that repeat or are fixed in any sense, like ours are.
Farago’s piece includes a look at many calendars from different places and eras, but it is primarily a deep dive — both funny and fascinating, a lesson in seeing — into a stunning hand-painted early-15th-century calendar, the private datebook of a wealthy French duke, known as the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. I really urge you to click through and enjoy the ride he takes you on, but what struck me most (which I’ve been chewing on in the year since I first saw it) is the discussion of time being cyclical on the left-hand pages of the duke’s datebook, and linear on the right. “We perceive time only through change,” Farago writes (and those of you who know my past struggle living in seasonally monotonous places will understand how vigorously I nodded my head). “But what kind of change? Do our lives evolve in history or do they repeat themselves? Is time an arrow or a wheel?”
I was, at that moment, in the middle of recording both — in two separate journals.
THE CIRCULAR
In mid-2020, quarantined at home with my husband in Nashville, having closed down my business, and in the midst of that perilous election year, I saw a mention of someone’s 5-year journal and it seemed like a good idea at that particular moment in history. So I ordered one from Letts. I kept it simple: Each day I recorded what we ate for dinner (thinking it would give ideas to future me), noted the temperature (for year-over-year comparison), and added a sentence or two about the day’s events. Similar to the duke’s perpetual calendar, with a 5-year journal you start back at the beginning every January, so by the time Farago’s piece came along in April 2023 I was on my fourth pass through the book, entries stacking up on top of each other. Each day was not only itself but its past selves, remaining present.
Sept 30 — as the random example it fell open to — was the day that one side of our tiny NY galley kitchen was completed (2023); that we flew to TX for my grandma’s funeral (’22); picked up dear friends who came to visit us in FL “post-Covid” (’21); and that I finished emptying out my old business studio space in TN (’20). Others ranged from mundane to amusing to aggravating all over again.
Like the calendars that fill store shelves every year in our world, the duke’s 1410 calendar contains 12 monthly spreads, each with a calendar opposite a pretty picture. His pretty pictures (intricately handpainted by a trio of Flemish brothers, and topped with a half-circle of cyclical time) depict how central the seasons — and more specifically the management of land and crops — are to the wheel of his trés riche life. Up until my parents’ generation, my people were middle American farmers. Every March, my ancestors prepared to sow and harvest. In the years contained in my 5-year journal, every March I packed or unpacked our belongings.
THE LINEAR
My second journal, kept simultaneously, was the version of a DIY datebook I’ve developed for myself over years and iterations. In late 2020, I settled on the form I’ve been using ever since. People familiar with the bullet journaling community would call it a “bujo,” despite that the only thing it has in common with Ryder Carroll’s inspiring Bullet Journal method is the linear 1-31 date list — which, as the duke’s book shows us, is a tradition as old as calendar-making. I couldn’t help but feel an affinity with this handmade datebook from 1410, as extraordinarily different as it is from mine, and wonder what of its features I might be able to incorporate. Farago compares it to an almanac; mine does track the weather.
. . .
Time is not only how we experience the world, it’s also how we describe it. Halfway through writing this, I became aware of time-based language piling up in the sentences, completely unintentionally: time as metaphor (“my Christmas morning”), as compulsory citation (a piece published “a few years ago“), as a point of comparative reference (“21st-century” life) or indicator of current relevancy (“modern-day” calendars) and as common parlance (“to this day”). Would we be able to tell each other stories without the components of time to lean on? But also why do we lean on it so hard?
On January first of this year, when it was time to start a new #bujo for myself and also turn again to the first page of the 5-year journal, I decided to let the latter go. Living in the present means letting the past be in the past, for better or worse. Whether like a wheel or an arrow, time moves forward, and I have my book of days to keep me on course.
I was in college, studying graphic design and design history under a Cranbrook alum, circa 1990 just as Mid-Century Modern revivalism was at peak fervor. In other words, I was bathed in it both at school and in the home decor magazines I hoarded. But while MCM’s main manifestation — both originally and in the early ’90s — was the bright, spare, mid-century-only look, I’ve always favored the more layered and eclectic Ray Eames approach. You know, the undersung Ray!, wife of Charles Eames, who was his partner in life and design, and whose design style is on full display in their iconic Pacific Palisades home, aka Case Study House No. 8. Their life as a creative couple — and the ways in which that whole group collaborated and influenced each other — is the most interesting thing about them, to me. But I hadn’t known about their friendship and playful collaborations with illustrator Saul Steinberg (and his wife Hedda Sterne) until I ran across this fantastic, magazine-sized book, Steinberg Meets the Eameses*, in an email from one of my all-time favorite bookstores, William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco.
I love a beautifully designed show catalog or publication that sits right on the line between “book” and “ephemera,” and this one is a true gem, especially in how it incorporates various samples of Steinberg’s editorial work in ways that convey or even mimic the original formats. It’s the catalog for an exhibition organized by the Eames Institute,** also called Steinberg Meets the Eameses, which you can explore online. And there’s another of their online exhibitions, not to be missed, called Ray’s Hand.
*This one is not available through Bookshop so I have happily linked back to Stout for it, but remember you can leave a tip anytime! 😉 **Eames Institute apparently acquired Stout Books in late 2022 when I had my head turned!Wow.
TIP ONE: The most fun a book nerd can have on the Internet
If you ask me what’s the best oddball/grassroots concept the Internet ever made possible, I’ll launch into a rapturous digression about a once-weekly event called Layer Tennis and then say but definitely my idea of the thing that made the Internet worth having is the annual Tournament of Books. And the happy news is that it’s still going strong — in fact, the 20th tournament officially kicks off on Wednesday of next week, which means you have this weekend (if you aren’t already a fan) to dig into the history of the tournament and look over this year’s contenders and judges. I’m 1/3 of the way into James McBride’s incredibleThe Heaven and Earth Grocery Store*, but otherwise have read none of them — it’s ok, that’s part of the fun of it. Mark your bracket if you have read them, maybe order yourself a t-shirt, and get prepared to follow along!
TIP TWO: The hole in the Paris Review paywall
I just bought myself something I’ve wanted for a long time, that I’m not 100% sure why I’ve never indulged in: A subscription to The Paris Review literary journal. In addition to it being reliably great-looking and great-reading, their Art of Fiction author interviews (which date back to the 1950s) are among my all-time favorite things. I have all of the paperback compilations — The Paris Review Interviews: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4* (sent to me by the publisher back when I had Readerville) — and love dipping into them, but they only go up to 2009. A fifteen-year gap!
I think I haven’t subscribed to the journal because it robs me of the joy of buying an issue now and then when I find it on the table at some great little shop. But I’ve been hitting the paywall more and more lately, and decided finding the issue in my mailbox has to be just as thrilling as the random encounter, right? Plus, the archive!
With or without a subscription, here’s a hot tip for dipping into the vast archive:
They have a mailing list called ‘The Redux,’ and if you sign up for it you’ll get an email every Sunday linking to a few pieces from the past that they’ve made public for that week. This week happens to have been the three short stories from last year that just won them the ASME Award for short fiction. You can read them via these links if you click today or tomorrow (or anytime if you’re subscribed)—
Collapse and Delight 