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Many of us have been—or will be—called upon to clean out the home of a loved one or cull our own possessions when moving or downsizing. When the antique-dealer parents of writer and professor Julia Ridley Smith passed away, they left behind a house chock full of furniture, books, artifacts, and paper. Smith wrote about the huge task of going through it all in her first book The Sum of Trifles. Her thoughtful, tender, and often funny memoir explores

the strange magic of objects,

what they mean to us, and

how hard it can be to let them go.

Smith... discusses how material culture shapes our identities, and how we often think of our possessions as defining who we are and even what we can do.

She talks about the challenges of tackling a house clean-out when grief makes it difficult to give up cherished objects. While the topic can feel heavy, she approaches it with humor, reminding us that there’s also room during a house cleanout for finding joy, discovery, and human connection.

There are  layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned... and she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. It's a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go. A wonderful exploration of grief and the joy left behind.

What does it mean to reckon with the trifles and treasures left behind by her parents, former antique store owners and perennial, opinionated collectors?

An examination of profound loss,

first the loss of beloved parents,

then the loss of the world they created, and

then, by extension, the loss of the myths that world embraced. 

This is for lovers and wranglers of ephemera, for amateur epistemologists, and for incorrigible musers. 

Book.

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MIKI MONTILLO, TUTORIAL for Digital painting step by step

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Anything AI can do, an artist can do better.

It will always be that way.

Artists create from human experience. Artists create from emotions. Artists create from the desire to create.

AI merely mimics.

Artists are authentic.

[Image by Tracie Grimwood]

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Seen on Insta:

Adam Walker-Parker (top and center)

Lanalot (bottom)

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Simon Palmer: ‘High Newstead Lane’ [watercolour with ink and gouache, 2023].

I'm ready to roll into spring!!

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Jérôme Pélissier, Pirate Bazaar

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Palestinian origins (DNA) via ancestral web

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Ancestral Brew

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Ancient Israelite DNA

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Lebanese DNA

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In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

by Rebecca Solnit /London Review of Books, February 2024

Long screed about how Silicon Valley ate San Francisco, the affliction that is tech billionaires and their inexhaustible hubris, a murder they blamed on the wrong people, and more — some excerpts:

After a childhood nearby, I moved to San Francisco in 1980 when street life and bar life were vibrant, but cafés were rare outside North Beach’s Italian neighbourhood. They proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s as places to hang out, maybe read, maybe chat to whomever was around or just people-watch.

The port town of Yerba Buena (was renamed) after the Italian saint. It has always been populated by dreamers, eccentrics and bohemians as well as opportunists and profiteers; until recently there was room for all of them.

I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area. I thought of this place in terms of liberation and protection; we were where the environmental movement was born; we were the land of experimental poetry and anti-war marches, of Harvey Milk and gay rights, of the occupation of Alcatraz Island that galvanised a nationwide Indigenous rights movement as well as Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ movement in San Jose and the Black Panthers in Oakland. We were the left edge of America, a refuge from some of its brutalities and conformities, a sanctuary for dissidents and misfits and a laboratory for new ideas. We’re still that lab, but we’re no longer an edge; we’re a global power centre, and what issues from here – including a new super-elite – shapes the world in increasingly disturbing ways.

[image by Sarah McMenemy)

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Which dogs live the longest? Small ones with long noses

Small dogs with long noses, such as whippets and miniature dachshunds, live for years longer than large flat-faced breeds such as English bulldogs, new research said ...

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Rabbit Tutorial from Lady Fiszi