B is for Beams

Week B | Thursday | Glimmer time ✨

I’ve come across this so many times but it never fails to make me smile and strengthen my spine.

Wallpaper in the Mark Twain house, photo by visitor Joyce Carol Oates. I did a voiceover of an excerpt from her On Boxing for a BBC programme on … boxing … many years ago, and now enjoy her Twitter account daily.

Speaking of Great Americans.

Am still a trifle Bey-obsessed. If practice makes perfect was a person, honestly. And 13-year-old Blue there is clearly taking lessons.

Harry Wingfield painted this for the Ladybird Second Picture Book, 1970. I loved those books as a child and still get inspired by them even now. I find this one sublime. AI will never capture the beauty of ‘ordinary’ things in this way.

These look so modern but they’re actually Victorian, from circa 1870. The fish appear to float because they were painted onto the back side of rock crystal, a method called reverse intaglio.

bell hooks

Ran across this recently and found it very helpful.

Great twist. Made me laugh.

Shadow puppetry tutorial, Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858).

Been seeking out old photos of Paris to adore while catsitting here (arrived on Saturday night). Perhaps someday when I have more time here I’ll wander about and find the exact same places today. Or then again, despite a heartening amount of conservation here, that might be more dispiriting than glimmery.

I wanted to accompany these lovely words with some Ghibli images but apparently it’s now impossible to find any that aren’t copyright-violating AI slop. Not very glimmery, apologies, but I keep butting up against the world as it is and not as I wish it would be.

Yet still we persist, and connect. Thank you for being here, my friends.

---