QOTW 6-12 October 2024
Image description: doodle with text: historio sonic metaoperatic cat
Sunday
The frame of your days becomes so small when you’re unwell. Your energy contracts, and with it your capacity for plans, adventures, activities, tasks, errands, and to-do’s. Walking a small circle in your yard, stretching your legs to ward off blood clots from all the bed rest, becomes the day’s big feat. The screech of a blue jay is music. Two chipmunks chasing each other in roiling yin-yangs of velvet fur is the best entertainment you’ve seen all week.
Nnadi Rose / Half Waif, Rest is a mother: on making messes and letting the ball drop in her Substack, Ordinary Talk
PS: Please listen to Half Waif’s beautiful song, Lavender Burning
Rabbit hole alert:
I once burnt lavender in a stoneware pot, mixed with dried lapsang souchong tea leaves. I felt wild. It smelled like a wander thru a forest or a field, something green and purple and delicate and smoky and intense. This is how I spark my imagination, with scent.
Monday
[…]the poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, but the fragrance remained in his head. In 1985 researchers at Yale University found that the smell of spiced apple has a powerful elevating effect on people and can even stave off a panic attack. Schiller sensed this all along. Something in the sweet, rancid mustiness of those apples jolted his brain into activity.
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
Have you read Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses? It is my favourite of her nonfiction books; at least it is the one that I quote from most often.
Tuesday
The buildings are interesting, but I can’t look at bricks and not think about who has lived there. The building is what leads people in, but it’s the people behind it that really fascinate me.
Lawrence Cooper, quoted by Blaire Crawford in Monsieurlebun' and his gossipy Instagram glimpse into Ottawa's history, Ottawa Citizen, 2021.
And check out his instagram account.
Wednesday
Clad in its lurid livery, this lipstick red wall treatment is now a feverish memory. Of course, that highly festooned façade was designed for the very elaborate Imperial Theatre of 1914. From its opening on the eve of World War I, it was all downhill for this ill-fated venture.
Robert Smythe, Gone but not forgotten: Slices of Bank Street’s history, Centretown Buzz, 2024.
Thursday
Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?
Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
Gregory Betts (@funnomad) posted at 4:00 p.m. on Fri, Sep 20, 2024:
(https://x.com/funnomad/status/1837220285571027261?t=5sidEnyvjKQnEclPzIYRbQ&s=03)
Friday
We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.
Oscar Wilde (This was a Tightrope trivia question)
Saturday
Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
George Whitman, Shakespeare and Company
I came across this again recently while reading the Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl.
If you have inspiring and intriguing quotes to share, please reach out. I’d love to include them here.
Thank you to those who have supported my efforts via a paid or free subscription or by buying me a coffee.