Category: lifestyle

Posted on

reading: Bulgakov, Thucydides, Didion, Barthes, Cela

IMG_6735

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov – I’m still not sure what’s going on with this novel (quite a few pages in) but I’m interested. How did I ever even come to be reading this? I have no idea. The origins are lost.

The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides – Yup.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Joan Didion – Reading these essays feels like having a conversation with an admired friend. They are often funny in an understated way I tend to like, often reflective in a way I enjoy and want to emulate, often simply interesting in a way that makes me want to read more of anything the author has written. Other writers who do this for me: Renata Adler, JM Coetzee, WG Sebald, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Adrienne Rich…

The Fashion System, Roland Barthes – As dense a piece of fashion theory as you can ever hope to find. A fair amount of convoluted phrasing but not at all without interest.

Pascual Duarte and his Family, José Cela – Rarely have I felt so clearly that I am reading a translation. [Perhaps it is not a very good one, but that is not quite my point.] The types of inclusions and omissions, the reactions to stimuli…so foreign. Cela is writing [well, wrote] what is to me an unfamiliar style of fiction, which is so refreshing and healthy for the mind. Inspiring, too.

Posted on

crafted: multi-strand necklace ft. pearls, coral, lapis lazuli

I recently made a multi-strand necklace, inspired by a challenge on the pearl-guide beader’s forum to put something together with three strands or more. [If you’re here from PG, you may have seen this already.]

Provided it’s feasible*, I love to make stuff. Maybe even more than the making, I enjoy thinking up stuff to make. Or rather thinking up stuff I want and, when I can’t find it, concluding that I’ll have to make it. If I have or can acquire the know-how, there is that undeniable appeal of being able to make myself precisely what I want (and such good gifts they make, too), with no compromise. Well, unless I muck it up.

*at least roughly within my abilities, i.e. the project won’t be abandoned, or a disaster, or impossible, or an ‘educational experience’ with no tangible results…(there have been a lot of those)

IMG_6232

IMG_6236I used lapis lazuli chips, coral branches, and 5-5.5mm button pearls (all from JP Stachura). I knotted the pearl strand (on Power Pro, if you’re interested) and simply strung the others.

[Possibly you remember how much I  like pearls. How very much.]

IMG_6233

IMG_6235I love, love these colors together. Separately, too, but especially together. From the beginning I was set on weaving the strands together (rather than making a torsade), to emphasize the jagged quality of the elements, and break up the chunks of color.

IMG_6234Part of the challenge was naming the piece. With the coral and the pearls together it seems like the necklace of a sea nymph to me, so: The Nereid.

I like naming things.

x