This week has been a relative drag! Or as Kishori so aptly put it, it’s “giving such meh”. The thrill of last week’s Page 1 rewrite has now given way to Covid scares/tax prep/menstruation/video migration/emails that beget more emails… truly snooze city. The cold has been no joke, and it feels impossible that spring will spring in four little days. But we have this newsletter to warm the cockles of our hearts in the meantime…
I read cookbooks like novels (under the covers, cozy, before bed) and one of my recent favorites has been Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee's Pie by Petra Paredez. It was a Hanukah present from Mike and I’m still savoring it, even though I will most certainly never make any of the recipes from it. The interstitial chapters are really lovely, filled with personal profiles of the farmers and producers she works with.
That’s where I learned what a pippin is: a good-tasting apple from a tree that was raised from seed, which is actually quite rare. Commercial apple orchard trees are cultivated by grafting a stem of one tree (called scion wood) onto the rootstock of another tree, thus relying on humans for their Frankenstein-ing and propagation. As apple still-life portraitist William Mullan writes, “every time an apple tree grows from seed, an entirely new cultivar is born. The fruit from that tree will be the first and only of its kind, never known or tasted before.” The diversity of apples is truly dizzying.
I have been inhaling every single episode from Ruby Warrington’s new podcast “Women Without Kids”. Each one is from a different research interview she’s conducted for her upcoming book of the same title. As someone who does not want to be a mother (and has rarely found the words for it), it’s been a great way to unpack all the feelings around this particular life choice.
One episode that really resonated was with the incredible adrienne marie brown, who talks about the interdependent idea of care. Rather than producing more children, she suggests producing more “ways of being” as a way to show the children who do exist all the options they might have. She brings up the great bell hooks quote “Queer not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." As many ways of being as there are pippins?
Found via
- recipes engraved on gravestone epitaphs. Rosemary Grant (a.k.a. ghostly.archive) has been tracking down headstones across the country and making the recipes herself. They’re relatively rare, mostly on the graves of North American women whose obituaries say they loved to cook. The first one she made was Naomi Miller-Dawson’s recipe for spritz cookies in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, featuring seven ingredients and no method.Adam Shatz wrote a stunning tribute to Adolfo Kaminsky, who passed away on January 9 at the age of 97. From a young age, he understood the life-saving importance of papers - he was born in Argentina to Russian Jewish parents who then emigrated to France. As a Jewish teenager, Kaminsky joined the French Resistance and forged thousands of passports for people fleeing the Nazis. His knowledge of dyes and chemistry earned him the nickname the “Paris Forger”.
After the Liberation of Paris, he forged countless documents for Holocaust survivors emigrating to Palestine. For the next thirty years, he went on to make papers for “people fighting dictatorships, from Brazil to Argentina, as well as Haiti, El Salvador, Chile, Mexico, Francisco Franco's Spain and Greece under the Regime of the Colonels” not to mention American deserters during the Vietnam war, Algerian rebels and anti-apartheid activists. Where is this man’s biopic!
Kim Waldropt from TERRA-TORY makes the world’s best soaps and the only thing I’ll put in my hair… but also puts out amazing playlists. I’ve been toggling between Volume 3 for cleaning, 7 for bathing, and 1 & 3 for writing but they’re all so soothing.
Flaco the owl has been a recent bright spot in the bird-scape of New York. He may even have our wayward Townsend’s warbler beat in terms of paparazzi. He flew the coop six weeks ago when someone cut through the mesh of his Central Park Zoo enclosure. Officials at first tried to recapture him since he was born in captivity and had never hunted on his owl. But he’s been fending for himself quite nicely, feasting on our abundant rat population.
of recently made a pilgrimage out to visit Flaco, “the perfect local hero for a city like New York, full of nature-deprived dreamers, perennially torn between the promise of this place and the promise of leaving”. He turned thirteen yesterday, celebrating his first birthday as a free bird.The Grocery Spot is a community-supported free grocery store in the Grove Park neighborhood in Atlanta. Founder Matthew Jones originally opened it as a for-profit business in 2021 but residents couldn’t afford the prices. Now it’s donation-based, featuring products from local pantries and for-profit grocers that redistribute their excess food. They feed 400 people a day, three days a week. Donations welcome here.
The virtual tour of the the Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic is the sci-fi movie of my dreams. For the first time since it opened fifteen years ago, the public was allowed “inside” to check out the 1.2 million seed samples safeguarded from around the world. The collection is meant to withstand any possible apocalypse, preserving crop diversity for future generations. Poking around the unassuming warehouse, you can check out each species, sealed in an aluminum airtight bag inside one of 3,000 boxes.
So deeply charmed by the short documentary Agnès Varda made in 1967 about her distant relative Jean Varda, or “Uncle Yanco”. He was a painter with a heavy Greek accent living on a boat in Sausalito. Subtitled version available via the Criterion Collection.
I’m in awe of Ann Friedman who has reached the ten-year anniversary of her newsletter, week in, week out. To celebrate, she put out a call for everyone to share their decade-long practice and it’s a great read. As this newsletter nears its six month mark (!), I’m realizing how much having a weekly internal deadline has become an organizing principle for the rest of my projects.
It feels meditative at times, connecting things I didn’t think had anything to do with each other. I sometimes start out thinking there’s no way I’ll have enough elements of interest for a full letter, but by the end I always find myself having to cut back or punt items to a future week. So thank you for reading, and for responding/forwarding/screen-grabbing! Please keep spreading the word, truly the more the merrier over here. And if you have ideas on where else I could share this, my ears are wide open?
Till next time,
ASK
A poetic wake-up read here in Bagnolet. And I hear your voice.
Always a treat 💜