Mingei encompasses all manner of everyday things, from clothing and furniture to utensils and stationery. These objects, Yanagi wrote, are “deeply embedded in the life of ordinary people”. They stand in contrast to aristocratic fine arts and eschew needless decoration. Works of mingei are crafted with quotidian use and owners in mind; they are typically the handmade creations of anonymous artisans possessing “unconscious grace”. In the parlance of the pandemic, mingei might be called the essential workers of the material world: “Since these utilitarian objects have a commonplace task to perform, they are dressed, so to speak, in modest wear and lead quiet lives,” Yanagi wrote. “They work thoughtlessly and unselfishly, carrying out effortlessly and inconspicuously whatever duty comes their way.”
The City We Became estranges us from the everyday operations of power so that we can, with new clarity, see how it works and how it can be unraveled and remade; like her Hugo acceptance speech, the novel declares that the stakes of social power, the significance of asserting that the world belongs to the marginalized, is nothing less than epic.
Like Donne's devotional on the intimacy of death that connects all human beings, Must I Go affirms the complex bonds of divergent characters who learn to navigate through loss. The novel also serves as a literary equivalent of Schrödinger's cat: In recapturing lost time through Roland's diary, Lilia can exist in an infinite loop between ending and beginning.
In her glorious and exuberant celebration of these biological flying machines, “The Language of Butterflies,” Wendy Williams takes us on a humorous and beautifully crafted journey that explores both the nature of these curious and highly intelligent insects and the eccentric individuals who coveted them. En route we discover, among other things, the remarkable interconnectivity of living things, the deceptions that insects deploy to trick predators and the complexities that present a significant challenge to our attempts to conserve the rapidly disappearing natural world.
Rain nails everything into place.
We can’t shift the house to look
south, can’t roll our glacial boulders
Listen. These dragon-tooth
icicles ferried by a season
between seasons, their icy fangs