An Archive of One's Own

This is my attempt to collect (and remember!) interesting things that I read.

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Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know

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Arabic alchemy manual, 18th C

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Wapping

1860-1864

James McNeill Whistler

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Authenticy vs originality, authenticity in heritage and culture

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bell hooks

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A man washes a rug the day before Nowruz or the Persian New Year, near Kohna Deh village in Afghanistan. Known as khāne-takānī, this spring-cleaning ritual keeps evil away, so people can bring fresh, new energy into their new year.

Kiana Hayeri

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“Somehow or other he blundered into magnificence” (about the architect of All Souls College, Oxford)

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“There are three sides to every question; your side, his side, and to hell with it” - Anon

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Silk Road(s)

Historic trade route between Asia and Europe

Term 'Silk Road' wasn't used by those who used the path, it was coined in the 19th C and mapped by German geographer Ferdinand von Richtofen as a single red line running west from China into Central Asia.

New research: more connected, and more expansive than we thought. Instead of a single route, there was a sprawling web of interlocking networks that spanned across Asia, Africa, Europe, Japan, Ireland, Madagascar -- by land, river, sea. Lots of exchanges including trade.

Objects travelled: weapons, spices, books, marble, ivory, gems, cookware etc. Ideas, technology, knowledge.

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The Circus Maximus held a staggering 200,000 people, largely unsegregated by class or gender, unlike at the Colosseum. A great, diverse mass of people whose mighty roars - according to the Roman writer Silius Italicus -

...surged to and fro, with a

noise like the sound of the sea...

So central to Roman life were the spectacular entertainments in the theatres, gladiatorial arenas and circuses, that a contemporary writer, Juvenal, famously commented that the Roman people now wanted only 'bread and circuses’

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“Lady Elizabeth Keppel” (1761) by Joshua Reynolds

Lady Elizabeth Keppel is shown adorning a figure of Hymen with garlands of flowers. Her dress is the one she had worn recently as a bridesmaid to Queen Charlotte at her wedding to George III. As one of ten attendants chosen from the eldest unmarried daughters of dukes and earls, she helped to carry Charlotte's train. Her dress of silver tissue complemented the Queen's. Here, her own attendant also wears a rich dress, of silk or cotton which is painted or embroidered. She was a real person who sat to Reynolds twice, according to his sitting book, though her name is not recorded, and it's not known if she was Lady Elizabeth's servant.

Lady Elizabeth married Francis, Marquess of Tavistock, the eldest son of the 4th Duke of Bedford, in 1764. He died in a hunting accident three years later. The Marchioness of Tavistock survived him less than two years, dying of consumption at the end of 1768. Two of their sons succeeded as Dukes of Bedford.

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If you step back, you can see it all on the horizon: your mother’s death, the children grown, their smooth eyelids crossed with veins like saffron filaments. Further still, and see your smiling grandmother treading the cold ocean, tiny lakes in her collarbones, your great- great grandchildren drawing their names in the sand with sticks. The seas rising and falling, ice scraping the earth, and pockets of life surviving — lee sides, hot springs, protected places. First light on the first day of your life, and first light of first stars. And in this way, every death, each apparent ending, might, in the mind of spacetime, be woven into one memory, so that always is this tree, and the long days of falling in love over the intricate pattern of bark and leaf, and the first green cell learning to swallow sun.

The Whole of It by Hannah Fries