A Return of Shares

Links for the Weekend

Taking some slow, creeping steps towards returning to work…

If you are new here (or missed the news), I had a baby in early April and put this newsletter on hold for a bit. Based on what I had read online and heard from others, I had a completely unrealistic understanding of how much time I would have in the early postpartum period. I had heard talk of endless TV binges and perpetual Netflix viewing, which led me to believe that—even with intense sleep deprivation—I would be able to use that time not to binge shows, but to consume movies, books, and other media that would benefit my work. How wrong I was! Lack of sleep destroys me and silence throughout feeds and wakings is as much for my sanity as it is for hope of a quick return to sleep for both baby and me—no 3 a.m. movies for us.

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It's funny now to think back and remember everything I thought I would read and all the things I would get done. What a naïve child I was! That said, for the last few weeks I’ve been able to steal moments here and there, slowly reconnecting with the thirst for historical knowledge that is my lifeblood. My tiny babe is well on his way to being a historian as I’ve taken to reading aloud to him the books I need to read for upcoming interviews for this newsletter—thousands of pages on architecture and fashion later, here’s to hoping that it helps his future vocabulary (though mostly it just keeps him content while snuggled in my arms).

I plan to be back with my normal content in the coming weeks but, for now, here are some assorted links for articles, essays, and other things that have caught my eye and remained in my memory (very hard at the moment!):

• One movie I did watch over a few later nights was So This Is New York (1948); while not the funniest, it is always amusing seeing New York portrayed as a corrupting influence and the site of inevitable downfall. The best part are the costumes (by Elois Jenssen), very vague 1940s attempts at late 1910s and early 1920s looks: muddled for sure, but it does result in some intriguing silhouettes.

• Reading Hippie Food (I highly recommend) led me to look up Samuel Kayman, one of the many characters who make an appearance in Jonathan Kauffman’s impeccably researched journey through the development of counterculture cuisine, and find this very moving and loving obituary for him. A Brooklynite who had a business making inflatable clean rooms for the space industry, he left it all behind to join the nascent counterculture in the early 1960s, eventually becoming the leader of the organic food movement in America in the early 1970s before founding Stonyfield Farm organic yogurt (now found in every grocery store in the country and owned by a multinational). “He was an impassioned visionary, activist, advocate, and educator on behalf of the health of the planet and all of its inhabitants; a fervent and open-minded reader, thinker, farmer, gardener, and citizen of the natural world; a problem solver extraordinaire, woodworker, fixer-of-all-things broken, genius creator, and entrepreneur.”

• Janet Flanner on Edith Wharton, 1929.

• This photo of Joan Collins at home in 1995:

  

• For all 80s millennials who once lived for their sticker collections, Mrs. Grossman’s has a section on its website, “Andrea’s Attic,” where the company sells original items from the archives. There is no more pure form of nostalgia than scrolling through those stickers.

  

• Take a break from the news or the latest podcast in your feed and listen to the great Studs Terkel discuss modern dance with Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins, May 10, 1963.

• “What does Freud still have to teach us?” by Merve Emre

• An essay on the couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” from 1962.

• This amusing menu from the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, March 30, 1919. It is very thorough in its language—rather exacting in the pains it takes to explain itself. I started going to the GPI as a child and still love it, but I dearly wish I could have seen it at this time (six years after it was built)

  

  

  

  

  And now back to baby time…