Letter no. 74: Eremophila alpestris
Good fucking day, ladies and germs! As you can see, we’ve migrated to a new new platform, one which will hopefully be less treacherous and easier to use than stupid EmailOctopus. Go on and try to write a letter to someone on there; I dare you.
As for this morning’s correspondence, I’m currently writing to you from the gleaming concourses of SEATAC, having flown almost all the way home (the sodium streetlights of Fresno, Calif., gleaming on the black land below me) then been rerouted all the way back to Seattle on account of fog. And now, having booked a 7am flight the following morning due to immediate and judicious application of my mom’s best White Lady Techniques, we’re informed that this one will also be delayed due to fog. As you can tell by the hour you received this. At least it’s not like the time I was flying on a redeye to Scotland and we got all the way to Iceland before turning back!
We’re going to take it easy with today’s newsletter and not provide too much editorial commentary. You sexy little sausages aren’t here for me, anyway, you’re here for…
Today’s Organism
Today’s featured organism is Eremophila alpestris, the horned lark or shore lark. This is a really cool true lark (family Alaudidae) found across the Northern Hemisphere, the only alaudid to be found in the United States. All the other stuff called larks here are wrong. Horned because the male in summer breeding plumage has these cute black featherlets on his head that resemble devilish little horns. In Europe, their common name is the shore lark, since they typically see them “on seashore flats in winter.” The first picture I saw of a horned lark crawling across seaweed was a ???? moment. Like, what the hell?
In my part of the world, you typically find them on open degraded ground—they really love even the rotten chewed-up bare earth that trucks drive over, as long as there’s a bit of natural ground cover nearby to provide some bug action! I’ve seen them toddling along on bare ground at semi-completed habitat restoration sites and in the cruddy invaded inland grassland right by the trailhead. Survivors? Or simply runners across bare ground, who love to squat, hunker, and skitter?
Sources: Wikipedia; personal experience.
A Recipe I Made and Liked
Pork shogayaki bento. Make a bento. (Don’t boil your egg as hard as the photographer did theirs. Or marinate it in soy sauce!)
Two great essays about art, medievalism, and the exotic(ized) in the 19th-century European imaginary, with a hinge point of William Morris, major figure in the British Arts & Crafts Movement. Number one:
Looking at the placards around works influenced by [William Morris], like [Mary Jane] Newill’s bedcover, I felt that the notions of Englishness sustaining Arts and Crafts and the Pre-Raphaelites were gestured to, but not addressed fully. The Pre-Raphaelites used the exotic to draw interest — like the lion skin worn by Morgan le Fay in Sandys’ painting, or Simeon Solomon’s indulgent, eroticised dark-skinned figure in Babylon hath a golden cup, or the forlorn Black child whose face and body Rossetti sketched for his work Beloved. With the exception of Solomon’s painting, these figures and motifs are satellites, revolving around and offsetting the central figure — almost always a beautiful white woman.
[…] I would love to know what drove artists like Newill to embrace Arts and Crafts: was it a desire to explore the possibilities of overlooked media? Nostalgia for the Middle Ages, fed by a desire to return to an imaginary brighter, cleaner past full of powerful and desired queens? At the same time, their positionality is so interesting: recognised for their crafts, in an era when most craft by women was made up of useful piecework, handstitched or mass produced in factories.
Read that one here. And the second, by the brilliant Kate Wagner:
“McMansionry” (let’s say) has many transferable properties. Among them can be included: 1) a diabolical amount of wealth that must be communicated architecturally in the most frivolous way possible, 2) a penchant for historical LARPing primarily informed by media (e.g. the American “Tuscan kitchen”) and 3) the execution of historical styles using contemporary building materials resulting in an aesthetic affect that can be described as uncanny or cheap-looking. By these metrics, we can absolutely call Neuschwanstein Castle, built by the architect Eduard Riedel for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a McMansion.
Constructed from 1869 through 1886 – the year of Ludwig’s alleged suicide after having been ousted and declared insane – the castle cost the coffers of the Bavarian state and Ludwig himself no fewer than 6.2 million German gold marks. (That’s an estimated 47 million euros today.) […]
It’s true that architectural eclecticism (the use of many styles at once) has a knack for undermining the presumed authenticity or fidelity of each style employed. But this somewhat misunderstands the crime. The thing about Neuschwanstein is that its goal was not to be historically authentic at all. Its target realm was that of fantasy. Not only that, a fantasy informed primarily by a contemporary media source. In this, it could be said to be more architecturally successful.
There’s more fun stuff about William Morris being a free-love advocate and things like that in Deborah Lutz’s fun and dishy Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. A great read! (Don’t quote me on the free-love bit. Maybe it was wife-swapping or mistress-slash-model-swapping. I read it a while ago.)
And from the first essay in the previous section, a 2017 poem by Shadab Zeest Hashmi reproduced here in full, Strawberry Thief Singing:
The thrush, caught jubilant, after stealing
ripe fruit from the artist’s garden, goes to
a prison of textile, serves a sentence
of centuries in cotton, needles passing
through her feathers, stitches on the sigh
(or the ghost of song) in her bill, on wings.
She will be stretched on Raj furniture
across the commonwealth, a souvenir
in chintz, her crime displayed on bedspreads.
She will hang from windows, a doll of the wind.
That’s all we’ve got, cuties. It’s nice to talk to you again. Please respond to this email!!! You click reply in your email client and write something, I get it right to my inbox. Your feedback, reactions, and life updates are what make this endeavo(u)r worth it.
Lots of love,
cactus kisser (I’m doing a new name now for more #operationalsecurity)