Eileen in Wonderland

 

Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper

“In an undated note bequeathed to the Tate Archive in 1992, Eileen Agar (1899–1991) writes of her admiration for the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: ‘Lewis Carroll is a mysterious master of time and imagination, the Herald of Sur-Realism and freedom, a prophet of the Future and an uprooter of the Past, with a literary and visual sense of the Present.’ The same could be said of Agar, whose long career as an artist spanned most of the twentieth century and intersected with some of the prevailing movements of the time, including Cubism and surrealism. Her timeless work—including the oil painting Alice with Lewis Carroll—will be on view through August 29 at the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,’ the largest exhibition yet of the sui generis artist’s oeuvre. A selection of images from the show appears below. ...”

The Paris Review

W - Eileen Agar

Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy (Audio)

Tate: Note on Lewis Carroll, describing him as ‘a prophet of surrealism’

 

Photograph of Agar wearing Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, 1936

​Mapping the Field

 

Fuller

“Yet another semester online, yet another group of 22 amazingly dedicated, creative, intellectually generous, mutually supportive students representing ten or so programs from across The New School! Rather than working around our geographically distributed, mediated condition, we sought to center it — to map and reflect on the social and technical and ecological networks that connect us. ... Our fabulous teaching assistant, Emily Bowe, led us through some fantastic mapping labs, and three thematic student groups designed a few of our sessions, complete with thoughtfully conceived mapping exercises. This was a difficult year. ...”

Mapping the Field: Our Final Projects

Mapping the Field

 

Ashley’s “Exploring Foodways + Infrastructures of East New York” 

​Inside Laraaji’s Beautiful Meditation Music

 

“This month, Numero Group reissued Vision Songs Vol. 1, a collection of 11 pieces culled from a self-released 1984 meditation tape by New Age music legend Laraaji. These ‘celestial sounds,’ as Laraaji calls them, were originally released as a short run of 60-minute cassettes designed to guide and soundtrack transcendental meditation. Constructed in the artist’s Manhattan studio, Laraaji used an MT-70 Casio synthesizer, drum machine, and his long-standing signature instrument, the zither, to create works of longform electronic ambience. Vision Songs Vol. 1 was one of over 20 Laraaji releases that, in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, were almost exclusively available in a constellation of New Age book shops in cities along the East Coast of the United States. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Laraaji: A Life in Music and Meditation (Video)

2021 February: The Eternal Life Aquatic with Laraaji

From Ritual to Romance - Jessie L Weston (1920)

 

“From Ritual to Romance, published in 1920, is perhaps most well known today for being the first work T S Eliot lists in his ‘Notes on The Waste Land’, where he says that Weston’s book suggested ‘Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism’ of his poem. Eliot, of course, later said these notes were a publisher’s requirement to bulk out the book publication of The Waste Land, which has led some to dismiss them entirely, or to see them as one more layer of obfuscation around the poem, and Eliot himself later said he regretted sending so many readers ‘on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail’. But From Ritual to Romance, which aims to trace a link between medieval Holy Grail romances and the earliest fertility rituals, certainly had its influence on what the poem says and how it says it. ...”

Mewsings

W - From Ritual to Romance, W - Jessie Weston

Voice: Joseph Campbell, Myth Master (1988)

W - Holy Grail

From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston [1920]

10 of the best Latin American novels – that will take you there

 

Plaza Fernández de Madrid (The Cartagena pictured in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera

"A sense of place often has a political edge in Latin American writing. Even magic realism – which takes fantastic liberties with the contours of cities and pueblos, jungles and rivers – is rooted in the living, breathing, dying and warring world of its characters. Over five centuries, Hispanic authors have loaned from and contested European ideas about their world, adapting imported traditions (from naturalism to crime fiction to stream-of-consciousness) and reworking them to bring to life the vibrancy and vicissitudes of their youthful continent. The best novels are as alluring and stimulating as the most atmospheric places. To choose just 10 was only possible by imagining I was packing for a long road trip with limited baggage. I would take these, a comfortable hammock and a sturdy pillow. ...”

Guardian

Guardian: Fiction and hyper-reality

Guardian: The undefeated

 

Pelourinho, the historic centre of Salvador. Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado

​The Sharp Game

 

(after Marcel Duchamp)

“I was down on my knees before the chess set. Not out of deference, though I did feel a bit of that. I knelt because Irving Finkel, a board game expert and a curator at the British Museum, which displayed these chess pieces among its extensive collection, suggested that patrons view it that way. ‘When you look at them, kneel down or crouch in such a way that you can look through the glass straight into their faces and look them in the eye. You will see human beings across the passage of time. They have a remarkable quality. They speak to you.’ These were the Lewis Chessmen, and they composed perhaps the most important chess set in the world. They’re a centerpiece of the British Museum. ...”

The Ringer

2008 October: World Chess Championship 1972, 2009 January: Sicilian Defence, 2009 February: Mikhail Tal, 2009 February: Garry Kasparov, 2009 April: Vasily Smyslov, 2009 August: Chess960, 2009 November: Bent Larsen,2011 November:  The Lewis Chessmen, 2012 July: 40 Years Ago Today: Chess Rivals Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky Meet in the ‘Match of the Century’, 2015 September: The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes, 2018 December: The Last Chess Shop in New York City, 2019 May: Deep Blue, 2021 May: Chess in the arts

Mulatu Astatke & The Black Jesus Experience – To Know Without Knowing (2019)

“... The Black Jesus Experience are a truly cosmopolitan group of musicians based in Melbourne: a city that can lay claim to being one of the most vibrant in the world, and certainly the Antipodes, for contemporary jazz. The group’s primary musical influence is Ethio-Jazz, so Mulatu Astatke is their ideal collaborator, but the music has a more extensive range of influences that includes hip-hop and funk. The lead saxophonist and co-founder of the eight-piece band is Peter Harper who was introduced to Ethiopian music by his father, a music teacher for the Ethiopian Navy band in the 1960s. ...”

London Jazz News

Bandcamp (Audio)

W - Black Jesus Experience

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: To Know Without Knowing 58:39

2016 January: New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975, 2017 March: Mulatu Astatke - Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974, 2018 March: Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics - Inspiration Information (2009)

Brian Eno - Reflection (2016)

“Reflection is the twenty-sixth studio album by English musician Brian Eno, released on 1 January 2017 on Warp Records. It is a piece of generative ambient music produced by Eno, which plays indefinitely via an app, modulating its output at different times of the day. A pre-recorded version of the album is available on CD and vinyl, which runs for 54 minutes. Digital streaming versions of the album update on a seasonal basis. ... Reflection was released as part of Eno's series of ambient albums. Its structure is similar to that of Thursday Afternoon (1985), an earlier album of his that consists of a single track that runs for 60 minutes in length. ...”

Wikipedia

Pitchfork

amazon

YouTube: Reflection 54:00

Memory of Fire: Genesis - Eduardo Galeano (1985)

 

“In the South-American jungle, as history opens, jaguars teach men to build fires and hunt with bows. Columbus wades ashore in the Bahamas, asking the natives (in Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic) if they can lead him to the Great Khan. The Virgin Mary appears at Guadelupe, Mex., olive-skinned and speaking in Nahuatl. ‘I am not a historian,’ Eduardo Galeano explains of the scenes he sketches. ‘I am a writer who would like to contribute to the rescue of the kidnapped memory of all America, but above all of Latin America.’ Galeano is overly modest. He may not be a trained historian, but Memory of Fire: Genesis is a book as fascinating as the history it relates. Memory of Fire: Genesis is composed of 308 vignettes--scenes from the history of the Americas. ...”

LA Times

NY Times: DRAMAS THAT SCORCH

amazon

2015 April: Eduardo Galeano (3 September 1940 – 13 April 2015), 2017 August: Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1993), 2018 August: The Pan American, 2019 April: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971)

Cézanne Drawing - Paul Cézanne

 

Still Life with Cut Watermelon (1900), pencil and watercolor on paper

“Best known as a painter, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) produced some of his most radically original works on paper. Cézanne Drawing brings together more than 250 rarely shown works in pencil and kaleidoscopic watercolor from across the artist’s career, along with key paintings, that together reveal how drawing shaped Cézanne’s transformative modern vision. Drawing almost daily on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, Cézanne made his process visible, from searching lines that repeat and transform to layered washes of watercolor that explore translucency and luminosity. ...”

MoMA (Video)

NY Times: The Cézanne We’ve Forgotten How to See

amazon: Cézanne: Drawing

2011 August: Paul Cézanne, 2014 November: Cézanne: Landscape into Art, 2015 March: Madame Cézanne, 2017 June: Portraits by Cézanne, 2017 November: Inside Paul Cézanne’s Studio, 2018 April: The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cézanne

​Noctilucent Cloud Show, a Mercurial Nova, and More

 

Resembling a sprawling nebula viewed through a telescope, noctilucent clouds blanket the lower third of the west-northwest sky an hour after sunset on June 27, 2021.

“Since mid-June I've been on a vigil. Every clear night at 9:55 p.m. I drive to a nearby location with an unobstructed view of the northern sky hoping to see noctilucent clouds. Half terrestrial and half celestial, these night-shining clouds form around 80 kilometers up in the mesosphere, far above the feathery cirrus and cauliflower cumulus of a summer's day. Lower clouds literally appear out of thin air when water vapor condenses on specks of dirt, salt, and industrial pollutants. Noctilucent clouds (NLCs) instead use soot shed by incoming meteoroids and, in some cases, sulfur-rich volcanic gases for that purpose. ...”

Sky & Telescope (Video)

W - Noctilucent cloud

How Often Do Air Conditioners Fall Out of NYC Windows and Kill People?

 

Hot town, summer in the city – only the bobbleheads are keeping cool.

“Ah, New York City in the summer! Generally, we really do love it, despite the on-the-way-to-work sweatiness and fish-in-an-old-sweat-sock smells. But with summer comes air conditioners, and with air conditioners come inept installations into apartment windows, and with inept installations come the occasional, every so often, reports that an air conditioner has fallen from the sky and bashed someone in the head. Which would be awful. Truly, truly awful. So, how much should we worry about this, really? We took to the Internet, place of great knowledge, to find out. ...”

Voice

​The Unheralded Music of Detroit’s Strata Records

 

“In the late 1960s, Detroit was a simmering cauldron of frustration and righteous outrage. ... Detroit’s Black community fought back against brutal police repression and struggled under the weight of a sharp economic downturn. Even the optimistic glow of Motown’s ecstatic Black pop romanticism was fading and within three years the company would relocate to Los Angeles. It was against this dynamic and volatile socio-political backdrop that Detroit-born composer and pianist Kenny Cox founded Strata Records in 1969. An emerging pianist with an imaginative playing style and tasteful compositions, Cox had played with the likes of Jackie McLean, Philly Joe Jones, Rahsaan Rolan Kirk, and Wes Montgomery. Cox also gained some notoriety playing with his own group, the Contemporary Jazz Quintet. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

STRATA: A Detroit Movement Defined by John Sinclair

The Archivist: “Motown were a Mafioso in Detroit” – The story of Strata Records with Amir Abdullah (Audio)

Strata

PBS: Detroit Jazz City (Video) 29:31

MixCloud: Hedonist Jazz - Strata Records, Detroit (Audio) 59:45, Spotify: Strata Records

Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot: The First Comprehensive Survey of Tarot Gets Published by Taschen

 

“The cards of the tarot, first created for play around 600 years ago and used in recent centuries for occult divination of truths about life, the universe, and everything, should by all rights be nothing more than a historical curiosity today. Yet something about the tarot still compels, even to many of us in the ever more digital, ever more data-driven 21st century. Taschen, publisher of lavish art and photo books, know this: hence, as we featured last year here on Open Culture, products like their box-set reissue of the tarot deck designed by Salvador Dalí. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

amazon

Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol

 

“A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.“

NY Times (Video) 40:32

NY Times: U.S. Capitol Riot - Visual Investigations (Video)

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 February: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack., 2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack , 2021 March: Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol, 2021 March 21: ‘We’ve Lost the Line!’: Radio Traffic Reveals Police Under Siege at Capitol, 2021 April: Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds, 2021 May:  Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence, 2021 June: Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot

​How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible

 

“... This instruction guided Ra for the rest of his life as a musician and a thinker. By the fifties, the signs of hopelessness were everywhere: racism, the threat of nuclear war, social movements that sought political freedom but not cosmic enlightenment. In response, during the next four decades—until his death, in 1993—Ra released more than a hundred albums of visionary jazz. Some consisted of anarchic, noisy ‘space music.’ Others featured lush, whimsical takes on Gershwin or Disney classics. All were intended as dance music, even if few people knew the steps. Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, to a supportive, religious family. He was named after Black Herman, a magician who claimed to be from the ‘dark jungles of Africa’ and who infused his death-defying escape acts with hoodoo mysticism. ...”

New Yorker

​Why Getty Keeps Some Photographs in the Fridge

 

Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2, 1986, David Hockney.

“Photography has undergone a dramatic evolution over the last 200 years. What was once a laborious process requiring metal plates and special chemicals is now just a button you push on a smartphone. Getty’s vast collection of photographs spans the entirety of that history. So, we invited our social media followers to ask the curators in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs—Paul Martineau, Carolyn Peter, and Karen Hellman—their burning questions about Getty’s vast collection of photographs. Have more questions about art? Join us on Facebook or Instagram to catch the next Q&A with Getty’s curators. ...”

Getty

​Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle

 

“Black Board Jungle, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, is a studio album by The Upsetters. The album, originally released in 1973 under artist name ‘Upsetters 14 Dub’, was pressed in only 300 copies and issued only in Jamaica. According to Pauline Morrison, this was the first ever dub album that came out, although there is a lot of speculation on the subject. Nevertheless, this was the first stereo dub album, as well as the first to include reverb. Later pressings released as Blackboard Jungle Dub have a different track listing. The album was re-issued as a 3x 10" colored vinyl box set as part of Record Store Day in April, 2012. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle 1:00:58

Flashback: Good Humor delighted generations with its curbside delivery of ice cream bars — and not even the mob could stop it

 

Al Cooney loads ice cream into his Good Humor truck at the start of the season at the Good Humor offices at 4825 W. Arthington St. on April 1, 1965, in Chicago.

“For Chicagoans of a certain age, the sound of bells on a hot summer evening is a hallowed childhood memory. It called a timeout to schoolyard softball games. Ball players would scramble to line up at one of the Good Humor trucks or three-wheelers, 150 in all, that roamed city and suburban streets in the 1960s. Their ting-a-ling-a-ling may have woken up older folks dozing on front porches, but their arrival solved a dilemma for kids with a few coins to spend on a treat. ...”

Chicago Tribune (Audio)

W - Good Humor

YouTube: Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks - Life in America

 

A group of boys crowds around a Good Humor ice cream truck in the 1940s.

2021 Tour de France

 

“The 2021 Tour de France is the 108th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's three grand tours. Originally planned for the Danish capital of Copenhagen, the start of the 2021 Tour (known as the Grand Départ) was transferred to Brest due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Copenhagen hosting four matches in the UEFA Euro 2020 and that event also being rescheduled to 2021 due to the pandemic. Originally scheduled for 2 to 25 July 2021, the Tour was moved to 26 June to 18 July 2021 to avoid the rescheduled 2020 Summer Olympics. ... In the lead up to the 2021 Tour de France, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Primož Roglič (Team Jumbo–Visma) were seen by many pundits as the top pre-race favourites for the general classification. Their closest rivals were considered to be Ineos Grenadiers trio Geraint Thomas, Richard Carapaz and Richie Porte. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: A Spectator’s Sign Felled Dozens of Tour de France Racers (Video)

Guardian (Video), steephill (Video), Le Tour (Video)

W - List of teams and cyclists in the 2021 Tour de France

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France, 2018 May: 2018 Giro d'Italia, 2019 July: 2018 Tour de France, 2019 July: Tour de France 2019

JUNO-60

 

“The Roland Juno-60 is a programmable 6-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer manufactured by Roland Corporation from 1982 to 1984. It followed the Juno-6, an almost identical synthesizer received months earlier. The synthesizers introduced Roland's digitally controlled oscillators, allowing for greatly improved tuning stability. It was widely used in 1980s pop, house, and 1990s techno music. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the introduction of the first digital synthesizers, such as the Fairlight CMI and Synclavier. Roland president Ikutaro Kakehashi recognized that the synthesizer market was moving away from analog synthesis, but Roland had no commercially viable digital technology. ...”

Wikipedia

Juno-60: The Whole Story (Video)

One summer night on a New York tenement roof

 

“Saul Kovner was a Russia-born artist who came to New York City in the 1920s. After attending the National Academy of Design and setting up a studio on Central Park West, he worked for the WPA in the 1930s and 1940s. Kovner captured gentle yet honest scenes in all seasons of urban life, particularly of working class and poor New Yorkers. In 1946, he completed ‘One Summer Night,’ a richly detailed depiction of tenement dwellers seeking refuge from the heat in a pre- air conditioned city. ... Here’s how John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and some wonderful unidentified illustrators captured the ‘fiery furnace’ of a New York heat wave. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Cinema of Cuba

 

Cine Praga in Pinar del Rio, Cuba

“Cinema arrived in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century. Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, about 80 full-length films were produced in Cuba. Most of these films were melodramas. Following the revolution, Cuba entered what is considered the ‘Golden age’ of Cuban cinema. … Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 the total film production was around 80 full-length movies. Some films are worth mentioning, such as La Virgen de la Caridad starring Miguel Santos and Romance del Palmar by Ramón Peón. ...”

Wikipedia

WALKER: How Are Revolutionary Cuban Films Still Revolutionary Today?

Guardian: The reality behind the revolution

Art, revolution and the ‘Golden Age of the Cuban Poster’

Guardian: The island of cinemas: Cuba's faded movie theatres – in pictures

amazon: The Cinema of Cuba: Contemporary Film and the Legacy of Revolution, Cines de Cuba

The Case for a 32-Team Euros

 

Portugal found a way through to the round of 16.

“Thomas Vermaelen’s header hit the ground first and then rose before colliding with the post near the corner where it meets the crossbar. As the ball spun out, sideways toward the middle of the goal, Lukas Hradecky, the Finland goalkeeper, was still turning around. It was all happening in the blink of an eye. Instinctively, Hradecky reached out a hand to try to swat the ball away. In that instant, on his fingertips, a substantial portion of Euro 2020 hung. Had Hradecky been able to claw the ball away from his goal, away from danger, Finland might have been able to hang on, to keep a vaguely interested Belgium at bay, to qualify for the knockout stages of the first major tournament it has ever reached. Denmark, playing simultaneously in Copenhagen, might have been sent home. …”

NY Times

Radio Territories

 

“Radio Territories is an ambitious collection of essays, writings, and audio files—probing histories, cultures, geographies, economies, communities, logics, ontologies, technologies, aesthetics, and politics—that examines  the performative potential of radio to create, erase, dislodge, and remake spaces. Yet its ambition is steadfastly grounded: each contributor is firmly located in concrete practices, i.e., sonic territories. The contributors are a mix of sound artists, journalists, theorists, and teachers. The contributions range from multimodal essays to performance scripts to radio/sound artists examining implications of their practices to historical examinations of key moments of radio culture. Through all of this seemingly discordant work, the theme of radio art as public praxis emerges as a zero-point of orientation, highlighting both performance and place, and delivering on the promise of the title. ...”

Liminalities (Audio)

Continuo

[PDF] Radio Territories

Discogs

​The Port of Missing Women

“For some time, I’ve imagined writing a novel titled The Port of Missing Women, a term I came across while doing research for my biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace. It refers to the many young women in Los Angeles who were suddenly going missing—and often turning up murdered in grisly ways. Coincidentally or not, many of these murders occurred in the years right after World War II, when a large number of servicemen were returning from overseas through the port of Los Angeles and finding, no doubt, that in many cases the women they had left behind were not the same as those they encountered when they returned. The war years had given women new freedoms in the way they acted and dressed and socialized, in part through jobs outside the home in the defense industry and other sectors of the labor force. ...”

Alta

2009 September: The Maltese Falcon, 2013 July: Raymond Chandler, 2014 November: Finding Marlowe, 2019 August: Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story

​50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’

 

"Just before embarking on the pivotal intercontinental voyage that would inspire much of her peerless 1971 album, 'Blue' — released 50 years ago this week — Joni Mitchell considered her grandmothers. One 'was a frustrated poet and musician, she kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm,' Mitchell recalled in a 2003 documentary. The other 'wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano and said, Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano. And I thought maybe I am the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women.' If she stayed put, she might end up kicking the door off the hinges, too. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

Open Culture: Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album (Video)

W - Blue

Discogs (Video)

vimeo: Blue (1971) 38:07

2015 July: Blue (1970), 2015 Novemer: 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited, 2016 August: On For the Roses (1972), 2016 November: Court and Spark (1974), 2017 February: Hejira (1976), 2017 August: Miles of Aisles (1974), 2017 October: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, 2018 March: Joni Mitchell: We look back over her extraordinary 50 year career, 2018 November: Free Man In Paris (1974), 2019 April: Mingus (1979), 2019 July: The Guide to Getting Into Joni Mitchell, the Blueprint for Human Experience

Strawberry Moon - Nina MacLaughlin

 

Watercolor illustration from Aurora consurgens, a fifteenth-century alchemical text.

“Summer now, and the petals are wet in the morning. The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. ‘Civilisations still fight / Over your gender,’ writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Dew is one of its daughters—or so the Spartan lyric poet Alcman had it in the mid-seventh-century B.C.: ‘Dew, a child of moon and air / causes the deergrass to grow.’ Cyrano de Bergerac, twenty-three hundred years later, imagined a dew-fueled way of getting to the moon. ‘I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast above me,’ he writes in his satirical A Voyage to the Moon, published in 1657. If dew rises to the sky, evaporating into the atmosphere, he reasons, enough ought to take him, too. ...”

The Paris Review