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During the 10th century, a Japanese court woman wrote a collection of lists of her daily preoccupations entitled The Pillow book.
Here is her most famous entry :
Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster
Sparrows feeding their young.
To pass a place where babies are playing.
To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt.
To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy.
To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival.
To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure.
It is night and one is expecting a visitor.
Suddenly one is startled by the sound of raindrops, which the wind blows against the shutters.
Don't you feel like Perfectly Imperfect is like a giant, modern-age Pillow Book ?
Dec 28, 2024
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this recommendation may include:
countless pages of journal entries, playlists unfinished, messages unsent because you don’t want to be annoying, wishing on stars that you can’t see from your window that faces an alleyway, the chill in your bones when the wrong (or right) word is uttered from across the street by strangers who could never even attempt to know what it means to you, the feeling of the mind overtaking the heart overtaking the mind, looking at the crystals on your nightstand and telling them to do their thing, whatever that thing is, wanting to throw a ball of yarn into the sky and hoping it unravels at the right doorstep with your own heart and soul tied to it by a simple boy scout knot
and begging the universe to give you an easy work day so you can relive this feeling again tomorrow
Mar 12, 2024
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Bereft of a true home, I dwell instead in sentiment and practice the collection of numerous small tokens thereof: an olive-pin, a tea-tag, a berry-shell, a fortune. I treasure the incitement of memory brought about by these little markers in time-passed, as I do that incited by the more obvious strains: postcards and Polaroids and locks of hair … and these too I try to accumulate, these too light me! But perhaps what is most meaningful is the undisplayable — that which is gone — letters received and lost, letters writ and never sent and lost; a poem misplaced in the loose-leaf of a moulting notebook. A garland of flowers or bouquet that remains only in a blurred photograph; a collection of photographs drowned in a flood. Since my adolescence, some of most beautiful pictures I’ve made on my cameras have been the nonexistent — the mechanisms failed or my Nosferatuesque fingers blocked the lens or or the memory card betrayed me or the film was overexposed through actions entirely beyond control — yes, the most beautiful, I say! It is just so. I can picture them all behind my eyes in perfect clarity — so so beautiful — as beautiful as the flowers that nevermore will fragrance a room and all those words which forevernow lay unread. I can’t speak exactly to the wider benefit of this “recommendation”. But somehow this is the sort of thing that makes me happy.
May 10, 2023
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Before it came inside
I had watched it from my kitchen window,
watched it swell like a new balloon,
watched it slump and then divide,
like something I know I know -
a broken pear or two halves of the moon,
or round white plates floating nowhere
or fat hands waving in the summer air
until they fold together like a fist or a knee.
After that it came to my door. Now it lives here.
And of course: it is a soft sound, soft as a seal's ear
that was caught between a shape and a shape and then returned to me.
You know how parents call
from sweet beaches anywhere, come in come in,
and how you sank under water to put out
the sound, or how one of them touched in the hall
at night: the rustle and the skin
you couldn't know, but heard, the stout
slap of tides and the dog snoring. It's here
now, caught back from time in my adult year -
the image we did forget: the cranking shells on our feet
or the swing of the spoon in soup. It is real
as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal
is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street
and are there and are true.
What else is this, this intricate shape of air?
calling me, calling you.
May 7, 2024
Top Recs from @louise_the_robin
Feb 22, 2025
Not at all like a lot of « sensationalist » documentaries about space exploration, this is on the slower side, but it’s SO worth it !! It gets almost trippy at times, and some of the shots are so beautiful…
Being an astronaut in the 70s looks so fun !!
Also the Brian Eno soundtrack in this is INCREDIBLE.
Just watch it, it’s really good, AND it’s free on youtube (linked here)
Feb 5, 2025
This is one of my childhood films, it’s known in France and I don’t know if it’s been exported a lot but I love it !
It’s by Jacques Demy, THE French musical film director, and tells the story of donkey skin (based on a Grimm story I believe).
The costumes ! The Colors ! The songs ! Catherine Deneuve ! Random people with blue skin ! It’s all good
It all really creates a very whimsical fairy tale atmosphere that’s PERFECT
Anyway watch it with subtitles, I’m guessing dubbed musicals are really bad
Here is the trailer
Feb 9, 2025