Monday Memo

This week we're talking about...

• Insects—especially the sort (and the moments in our lives) that lend a little magic to illuminate a warm summer night—like Leslie Jamison's fireflies: " I was proud to have a place of my own and a life of my own that wasn’t happening in New York—where everyone else’s life was happening, it seemed—and proud to live where the air felt humid with possibility, and there were fireflies, and more readings than days in the week."
• Vermont’s Fairbanks Museum and their intricate mosaics made of thousands of actual beetles, moths, and flies, created by John Hampson in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and becoming more and more delicate with each passing year.
• Writer and filmmaker ​P​eter von Ziegesar's essay on beekeeping, where "Losing a Hive" is like losing part of the family: "​In truth, when one starts to keep bees one knows that failure to thrive is a possibility, just as when one starts a family—that deepest fear is the same.​"​
• Hauser & Wirth and the Poetry Society of America's copresentation of a reading and conversation with poets Ricardo Alberto Maldonado and Elizabeth Zuba in connection with “Eduardo Chillida,” the gallery’s inaugural exhibition of the Spanish artist’s work.
• B​astille Day, which is this Saturday. Our thoughts travel to France, and to Giorgio de Chirico's ​loving meditation on Paris from APS No. 26: "In Paris love and curiosity for all that which reveals spirit, intelligence, lyricism, and talent increases continuously."