![\"FindingVivianMaier_500x500\"](\"http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/a4d21-findingvivianmaier_500x500.jpg\")
We had an unintended, somewhat depressing, Netflix theme going recently: documentaries of forgotten women who led enigmatic lives. Given the attention they have received in recent years, it’s as if their lives only became interesting after their deaths. You can certainly read all about the stories of Joyce Vincent and Vivian Maier on Wikipedia, but from such sources you only get, as Emily Dickinson would say,“the facts but not the phosphorescence.”
\nWhat makes these documentaries necessary are the detective work the filmmakers perform as they answer the questions we as viewers have about their subjects’ lives. More to the point, the films attempt to find and interview the people who knew these women and whose recollections, of necessity, can construct only incomplete pictures.
\nFor Finding Vivian Maier, pictures is the operative word.
\nThe filmmaker, John Maloof, bought a trunk of her belongings at an auction house, discovered sheets of her negatives, and was intrigued by their content and artistry. He sought out everything else she had squirreled away and stuffed into a crammed storage unit.
\n
It was clear from what she left behind that Vivian was a hoarder: newspapers, clothes, hats, shoes, trinkets, election badges, receipts, bills, uncashed tax refund checks, bus and rail tickets – ephemera of all sorts. But along with all of that were thousands and thousands of B&W negatives, hundreds of rolls of unexposed B&W film, color slides, and Super–8 movies from the early 1970s.
\nMaloof was captivated by her guerrilla street photography, her formal experiments with self-portraits, and the sometimes playful pictures she took of the children and families for whom she worked as a nanny. As a photographer, she got close to her subjects in ways that were extraordinary. Based on the evidence of her negatives, she took her craft seriously and knew that she had an eye.
\n(Maloof’s web site contains galleries of her photos and I strongly urge you to spend some time with them, if you’ve never seen them before. They’re both time capsules and timeless.)
\nTo Maloof, and to others who saw these pictures, she was clearly an artist. Why, then, had no one ever heard of her? Why did she make so few prints of these remarkable images and do nothing with them? Her life – which this intensely private woman held close to her – and her choices were a mystery he felt moved to solve.
\nMaloof’s documentary (co-directed with Charlie Siskel) starts out being about him, his background, and his discovery of and increasing obsession with Maier. As the movie goes on, though, the detective work on Maier’s life takes center stage and Maloof wisely steps into the background where possible.
\nThe most fascinating interviews, for me, were with the adults whom she had looked after as children and their memories of seeing Maier’s behavior when she was unobserved by her employers. While it was clear to all who met her that she was an eccentric, the children sometimes – in some cases, often – saw that eccentricity veer scarily to either aloof or threatening behavior.
\nThe persistent question from Maloof, the professional photographers and artists he interviews, and Vivian’s acquaintances (she never really had “friends”) is: why did she keep her amazing photos a secret? Why did she do nothing with them? The impression given is that Vivian could have had a career as a significant artist had she only gone public with her photographs.
\nThe film cannot answer that question, of course, though it seems to Maloof the primary mystery of Vivian’s legacy. But it didn’t strike me as a mystery at all. To me, the obvious answer to why she never cashed in on her remarkable photographs is, “Because that’s not why she took them.” She evidently got out of her picture-taking exactly what she wanted. Putting aside the fact that she appeared not to know any artists nor sought out any sort of artistic community nor even bothered to properly care for her film and negatives, it seemed clear to me that Vivian had no ambitions or inclinations to be a professional photographer.
\nShe did not treat her photography the way most of us treat a hobby, as a refuge or comfort or renewal from our daily grind. Picture-making did not seem to give her any emotional comfort or reward. At times it appeared to be a compulsion, certainly, but not something that gave her pleasure.
\nWhy take all those pictures then? Because the camera offered Vivian a way to hoard ephemeral things: moments, images, impressions, anything that caught her attention. As long as she knew she had the negatives or undeveloped film, then she knew she could get back to them “someday.” One of the interviewees said Maier had so many newspapers stacked in her attic room, her father had to install a steel beam to bolster the sagging floor. She treated her negatives the same way as she treated her receipts, hats, clothes, and newspapers: it was all the same to her.
\nVivian clearly suffered some trauma in her life that led to her eccentric behaviors. Taking pictures may have been a way to use the camera, which was always around her neck, as a buffer between her and the world while still enabling her to participate as an observer and collector, as someone who could control the experience.
\nA new acquaintance asked her one time what she did. She answered, “I’m a spy.” The filmmakers imply she led a double life, working as a nanny while taking pictures of both the world and herself – a secret she held to herself as tightly as she did many others.
\nOf the two films, Dreams of a Life is definitely the sadder and more disturbing movie, and the one that gnaws at me when I stop to think about it. Finding Vivian Maier, while not a light piece, has the grace of Vivian’s art uplifting it and Maloof’s dogged detective work to uncover her life’s mysteries though not all her secrets. And there is the successful recovery of a trove of photographs that would otherwise have been lost forever.
\nDreams of a Life is more spare and troubling. Not least because Joyce Vincent left so little evidence of her life and activities. Former friends and co-workers who knew her can describe what she looked like, how she behaved, the stories she told, but these are only the outer edges of her life as observed by others with the center left tantalizingly, frustratingly blank. There is little to celebrate.![\"Dreams_of_a_life\"](\"http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/56339-dreams_of_a_life.jpg\")
The film starts with the death of Joyce Vincent – or rather, the discovery of her body. To the best anyone can reconstruct, the 38-year-old died in her bedsit in a rather shabby part of London in December 2003. But her body wasn’t discovered until January 2006. What was found were her skeletal remains; as one interviewee chillingly put it, her body basically “melted into the carpet.” With no soft tissues available for forensic examination, no one can know how she died. She was only positively identified via dental records.
\nThe story angle picked up by the media was what one would expect: how could this have happened? Where was her family? Her friends? Why did no one try to find her or call her or look her in over 2 years? Where was the landlord? The neighbors? And where were the public services? When her body was found, the television and heating were still on. And another grim, poignant detail: her body was surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents with no name tags. Her death – and the absence of concern about her absence from the world – became a metaphor about the lack of personal relationships in a crowded, always-connected modern society.
\nIt’s a haunting story that caught the attention of the filmmaker Carol Morley. She took out ads soliciting information from anyone who knew Joyce, slowly locating and tracking down friends, acquaintances, co-workers, former partners, an old roommate. The family declined to participate in the movie.
\nAs Vivian became Maloof’s muse, so Joyce became Morley’s. The timeline she created to track Joyce’s movements through her life, and particularly her difficult last years, is glimpsed throughout the film. The jumble of whiteboard notes, photographs, and news clippings introduce episodes in Joyce’s life, interview subjects, and even suggest events that Morley did not or could not include. Without information from Joyce’s older sisters to fill in needed gaps, and without eyewitnesses to key points in Joyce’s life, the movie’s narrative is maddeningly patchy with too many questions left unanswered.
\nBut Morley deftly turns that lack of information into an opportunity. What had been blank space instead becomes an empty canvas where every interview subject can paint their own picture of Joyce.
\nThey describe Joyce as beautiful, funny, charming, someone who held increasingly responsible jobs – she was the person who looked absolutely put together and undoubtedly led a remarkable life. She was the center of attention – especially men’s – when she walked into a room. She seemed an innocent and trusting soul. How could anyone so attractive and charming not lead a fascinating life?
\nBut other details of her personality emerge from the interviews. She didn’t talk about her family. She said her father was dead when he wasn’t. The most significant detail to me was how she took on a new boyfriend’s circle of friends as her circle yet never spoke or talked about any other friends she might have had before. When a relationship ended, she drifted away from the circle and was rarely seen by them afterward. It was as if, with every new job and every new relationship, she shed her old skin – old apartment, old friends – and re-entered the world as a new person. A blank slate for everyone, including herself.
\nThe most compelling interviewees, to me, were a former boyfriend Martin and her no-nonsense former flatmate Catherine. Martin seems the quintessential, conventional nice guy who tried helping Joyce and wonders if he could have done more. Catherine, on the other hand, is quick with her judgments and clear on what she knows. Her story of the last time she saw Joyce had me gobsmacked – not just Joyce’s behavior, but Catherine’s cool, unsentimental reaction to it. Catherine and Martin would have been great friends to have in your corner and may have counter-balanced Joyce’s maddening lack of focus. But Joyce deliberately pulled away from them as she pulled away from everyone and seems mainly to have drifted through her life.
\nMorley enjoys throwing her interview subjects a curveball on-camera to get their reactions. In one, she plays a tape of a song Joyce had recorded, ending with a giggly sign-off. They’re startled to hear her voice. They laugh and then say the cute sign-off sounds just like Joyce. Except for Catherine, who says it sounded not at all like Joyce. These contrasts become an interrogation of not only who Joyce really was – something no one will ever know – but how she is remembered and how incomplete those memories are.
\nIf every one has their own image of Joyce, then Morley does too. Her dreams of Joyce’s life are presented in re-created scenes from Joyce’s childhood and adult life based on stories Joyce told her friends. The actress Zawe Ashton plays Joyce in scenes – a disastrous birthday party, dancing at a club – that are recollected by the interviewees. The movie re-creates the discovery of Joyce’s body and the subsequent cleanup and forensic investigation of the apartment but with no attempt to visualize her corpse (I am thankful that Morley does not reproduce any photographs taken at the scene). The movie cuts between scenes of a vibrantly alive Joyce and the grim clean-up of her desolate apartment.
\nI don’t like recreations, as a rule; I can see the need to visually liven up a stretch of the film that would otherwise only have talking heads. But if you can’t document what actually happened, then it’s not a re-creation, it’s a fabrication. One moment particularly angered me. In it, Ashton portrays Joyce singing along to a record with a hairbrush as her microphone, echoing an earlier scene when the 5-year-old Joyce “performs” for her sisters and mother. As the record finishes, the adult Joyce stops the singalong and breaks down in tears. I understand that this is Morley’s vision of the Joyce she feels she has come to know, but to me, it was needlessly sentimental glop and a violation of Joyce and her memory. Her story is sad enough without this scene gratuitously amping it up.
\nVivian and Joyce kept the world at arm’s length for reasons no one will know. They were solitary women seeking a family, I think, and never quite finding it or quite fitting in. These movies record how the people who knew them saw them, interpreted them. And the movies themselves are not objective; they frame their subjects just as interpretively.
\nVivian’s life is a mystery full of clues, and her legacy is the body of work she knowingly created, albeit without any plan. Was she an artist, as so many of the commentators in the movie think? Is that why she took all of those pictures? Or was taking pictures something she was compelled to do, the same way she hoarded newspapers and receipts? Fortunately, these questions don’t have to be answered to enjoy her remarkable photographs. Vivian found a place in the world, at last. And her story, the mysteries of her life, add a captivating allure to the images the world was very close to losing.
\nBut it’s Joyce’s story that moves me on a deeper, sadder level and that I think will stick with me longer. Partly for the simple pathos of dying alone and forgotten. Partly because this was a tragedy that could have been prevented. I want to believe that she could have reached out more and that others could have tried a little harder to reach her (though the film makes clear that in her last months, she was deliberately in hiding and was avoiding contact with everyone from her old life). In the end, it was easier to lose touch than to maintain it.
\nAnd her story moves me to ask questions of my own life, as Morley intended it to. Because we’ve all known people for intense periods of time, however fleetingly: work, school, the other parents in the playgroup, hobbies, church. When I look back over my life, I have carried very few people with me into the present-day from previous jobs, from all the arts classes and community theater productions I did. I spent four very intense years getting my master’s, worked on many class projects with my fellow students and teachers, and got to know a few very well. Yet today, I am in only occasional touch with two or three. How well did we all really get to know each other? That’s the haunting question Joyce Vincent’s life raises: will anyone come looking for me?
\nBy the way, I referred to both women here using their first names rather than their last names because I think it gentler than treating their shades as simply fodder for a stupid blog post. Kindness should be extended to these women even after the fact of their deaths.
\nUpdated on 2026-08-06: Originally posted on March 5, 2015, but the post got eaten by micro.blog gremlins. Republishing.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-06T19:51:15-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/08/06/documentaries-dreams-of-a-life.html", "tags": ["Favorite Posts"] }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/07/16/greater-forensic-emphasis.html", "content_html": "“Greater forensic emphasis”
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/lost-bar-harbor.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-07-16T12:29:30-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/07/16/greater-forensic-emphasis.html",
"tags": ["Commonplace Book"]
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/23/finished-reading-gods-children-by.html",
"content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781625842886/cover.jpg\")
\nFinished reading: God’s Children by Archibald Rutledge, Henry Middleton Rutledge, Seldon B. Hill 📚Bought at a bookstore on Front Street in Georgetown, SC. A reprint of a 1947 book of reminiscences by Archibald Rutledge, a poet, writer, and essayist on natural history topics in his day, particularly his beloved Low Country landscape of coastal South Carolina. Rutledge had been in the running for the Pulitzer for poetry and the Nobel for his body of work, but the arch, patrician voice of the essays seems almost quaintly mannered to my modern ears. Also dated is his paternalistic attitude to the black workers (the “Children” of the book’s title) who live and work on the remains of his generations-old family plantation. He writes of the black workers he grew up with with great respect and praise for their skills and knowledge, and there is much talk of the affection that exists between he and them. But when Rutledge gives them an order to do something, it’s expected that they will do it. A modest volume that is disquieting for what it does not say about life on an old plantation in the Old South.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-23T20:55:14-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/23/finished-reading-gods-children-by.html", "tags": ["Review"] }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/18/pages-a-day.html", "title": "50 pages a day", "content_html": "I tend to read first thing in the morning in my rocking chair, with my coffee, with the morning light coming in over my shoulder onto the page or Kindle.
\nA trick I picked up to keep my reading habit from flagging is from Andy Miller’s book The Year of Reading Dangerously. The way he got through his reading project was to read 50 pages in the morning before getting on with the business of the day.
\nI find that rate very compatible with my current life circumstances, as the morning is the only time I really control before the day’s obligations sink their claws into me. Depending on the book, a reading session can take 60-90 minutes, and I can get through a ~250 page book in about five days, more or less. By reading that much material in a session, I am less likely to lose track of the plot or characters and it keeps my interest in the book alive. If I’m facing time constraints or I miss the morning pages, then I’ll aim to read 25 or so pages later in the day.
\nIt’s too easy to set a book down and say, “I’ll get to it later.” I’ve put off profligate reading for many, many years, and now is the time of my life to sit down with my coffee and enjoy all the pleasures I’ve been waiting to do “someday.” Someday is today.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-18T11:54:11-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/18/pages-a-day.html", "tags": ["Diary"] }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/17/finished-reading-keeper-of-the.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780312114053/cover.jpg\")
\nFinished reading: Keeper of the House by Rebecca T. Godwin 📚 From the Durham NC Public Library. Inspired by the Sunset Lodge, what’s most remarkable about this novel is the voice of its black first-person narrator, Minyon Marigault, who arrives at the Hazelhedge brothel at 14 years old from her Gullah community as a housekeeper and becomes, eventually, keeper of the house and its secrets. I became a little impatient with some of the melodramatic events and the somewhat stagey characters – Miss Addie, the madam, among them. But I was completely captivated by the voice of Minyon, her language, her turns of phrase, and her growing sense of her power and place in the world.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-17T21:39:40-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/17/finished-reading-keeper-of-the.html", "tags": ["Review"] }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/16/review-sunset-lodge-in-georgetown.html", "title": "Review: Sunset Lodge in Georgetown: The Story of a Madam", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781467143660/cover.jpg\")
\nFinished reading: Sunset Lodge in Georgetown: The Story of a Madam by David Gregg Hodges 📚 Purchased at the Rice Museum gift shop in Georgetown, SC.
\nA fun book of local history by South Carolina native Hodges that is actually three smaller booklets jostling uncomfortably alongside each other.
\nThe first – and best – booklet is the history of the Sunset Lodge brothel that operated three miles south of Georgetown, SC, from 1936 to 1969. The madam, Hazel Weisse, operated her business with ironclad rules for her “sporting ladies” and an equally disciplined relationship with the local community. She was always careful to never rub the town’s nose in the Lodge’s business, she contributed large amounts of money to local charities and the local economy, she cultivated relationships with local law enforcement and rich protectors, and so the community largely turned a blind eye to her brothel. Even while the sheriffs shut down other brothels, hers remained in business from the Roosevelt to the Nixon administrations.
\nHodges, an amateur historian, also provides an excellent, compact history of the Georgetown County region from pre-Civil War days to the ’70s, and a glimpse at the industry of prostitution that dotted the Atlantic coast’s harbors and military bases.
\nA short chapter on Hazel Weisse’s life, from her early years in Chicago to managing a brothel in South Carolina, is necessarily sketchy. She protected her past as carefully as she did her reputation, and Hodges doggedly found and reported every scrap of documentary info he could find. But Weisse remained an essentially unknowable character and hovers over the narrative rather than dominates it; despite the book’s subtitle, Sunset Lodge in Georgetown: The Story of a Madam is not a story of her life. Rather, Hodges can report only the externals of her life and the stories of those who remembered her. She remains a tantalizingly unknowable presence. So the book instead becomes more a remembrance of Sunset Lodge and the stories that grew from it.
\nThe second booklet – which takes up most of Sunset Lodge in Georgetown – is a storytelling project where Hodges reproduces in smoothed-out one- to three-page narratives some of the interviews he conducted with people who visited the Lodge, worked there, did business with Weisse, or otherwise had stories to tell about this legendary place and its inhabitants.
\nThese are odd little narratives. Their titles reflect job roles – “IRS Agent,” “Deputy Sheriff,” “Minister,” “Cab Company Owner” – or stories of experiences – “Father and Son,” “First Time,” “Christmas Eve.”
\nHodges states in his introduction that he anonymized the interviews and often combined some stories into a single narrative; sometimes, all he had was a punchline and then he worked backward to create a suitable narrative lead-in. If that’s the case, was this a story worth telling? I could never be sure how much of what I was reading was actual experience versus a useful fiction needed to fill in a story’s gaps.
\nThe bulk of the book is taken up by these stories and reading them feels … odd. There’s little of the satisfying detail of corroborated history, but there are flashes of everyday life in Georgetown, of remembered history, that show how the locals accommodated the house: a little girl who stares wide-eyed at the sporting ladies entering the doctor’s office for their weekly check-up while her mother stiffens with outrage, the dress shop owner who carries the latest fashions to outfit the working girls, the postal worker who knows to mail packages sent by the girls to their families in plain brown wrapping, the sheriff who shuts down the clergymen gathered in his office to demand the house be closed.
\nBut then there are other stories that limp to the finish line, or barely have anything to do with the Lodge or Weisse, and carry zero emotional weight. Or there are stories with the well-rounded shape of oft-told jokes or anecdotes that could be said about any whorehouse.
\nThe lighthearted tone of this grab bag of stories jostles uncomfortably alongside the third booklet: Hodges’ mixed feelings about taking on the Sunset Lodge as a history project.
\nHodges describes his own history of stumbling across the Lodge, and the fun he had doing the detective work of consulting newspapers and census records to corroborate facts. He especially enjoyed being a guest speaker at community clubs, where afterward people would tell him stories about the Lodge or put him on the trail of other people to interview.
\nBut he’s also ashamed of enjoying himself a little too much and of the attention his topic brought him. As a conservative man and an elder in his church, Hodges makes it clear in several places he considered Weisse’s operation immoral and wrong. How many families, he asks, how many marriages were damaged because the menfolk frequented the Sunset Lodge? Fair enough. Only a few stories really push against the “good, clean, dirty fun” aspect of the Lodge legend: one where a father pays for his son’s first sexual experience, another where a group of high school girls joy-ride through the Lodge’s driveway and one of the girls recognizes her father’s car.
\nThe last sentences of his book, after acknowledging Weisse’s business prowess: “It is not an excuse to do well that which should not be done at all. Perhaps other houses of prostitution will find it impossible to stay in business if local laws are vigorously enforced.”
\nWow. After spending a whole book practically reveling in stories about the Lodge and documenting the light that sex work, and proximity to sex work, throws on human behavior, and considering how much he enjoyed talking to groups about and researching the Lodge (still giving pleasure long after its demise!), collapsing all that emotion and legend and history into a grim middle-class “crime shouldn’t pay” bumper sticker pops the balloon. It does Hodges’ work a real disservice.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-16T18:27:05-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/16/review-sunset-lodge-in-georgetown.html", "tags": ["Review"] }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/12/finished-reading-seven-lessons-for.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780578737652/cover.jpg\")
\nFinished reading: Seven Lessons for Dreamers and Makers by SCAD 📚
\nPurchased at the SCAD gift shop in Savannah, GA. April 2026. A decent pamphlet for SCAD students and prospective students, with some good tips on developing healthy creative habits and creative/professional networks while in school, with supporting examples of SCAD alums getting jobs with major corporations or starting their own businesses. Probably very useful to an undergrad after their 7th or 8th read. And maybe they’ll have a good time in school, too, though reassuring students – and their parents – that creative activities will eventually pay off seems more the emphasis here.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-12T21:56:58-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/12/finished-reading-seven-lessons-for.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/12/neighborhood-newsletters-filling-a-gap.html", "content_html": "Neighborhood newsletters: filling a gap left by local newspapers’ decline - 9th Street Journal
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-12T20:56:26-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/12/neighborhood-newsletters-filling-a-gap.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/05/08/authors-can-vanish-completely.html", "title": "\"Authors can vanish completely\"", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/ba2502f4c0.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-05-08T10:57:42-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/05/08/authors-can-vanish-completely.html",
"tags": ["Commonplace Book"]
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/04/24/and-i-cannot-stop.html",
"title": "\"And I cannot stop.\"",
"content_html": "![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/diaries-1942-1954-unless-i-write.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-04-24T16:50:09-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/04/24/and-i-cannot-stop.html",
"tags": ["Commonplace Book"]
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/03/18/spent-hours-yesterday-fixing-a.html",
"content_html": "Spent 5.5 hours yesterday fixing a stupid Wix page on our web site. God, I hate Wix.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T08:01:07-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/03/18/spent-hours-yesterday-fixing-a.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/03/01/art-is-what-gets-away.html", "title": "\"Art is what gets away with you\"", "content_html": "![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/jeanette-winterson.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-03-01T10:00:24-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/03/01/art-is-what-gets-away.html",
"tags": ["Commonplace Book"]
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/02/25/what-can-i-tell-you.html",
"content_html": "“What can I tell you that I haven’t already told you?”
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/a4b8eead47.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-02-25T09:24:12-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/02/25/what-can-i-tell-you.html",
"tags": ["Commonplace Book"]
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/02/13/house-burping.html",
"title": "House Burping",
"content_html": "A good idea — open windows and patio door once a day for 5 mins or so to bring in fresh air — given the internet meme treatment.
\nIf we called it “domocilic eructation,” it would have never caught on.
\nPopular Mechanics: What Is House Burping? Why the German Practice Lüften Is Everywhere Right Now
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-13T18:30:31-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/02/13/house-burping.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/02/06/haiku-tu.html", "title": "Haiku tu", "content_html": "I sent the previous haiku to my haiku-loving friend, Rani. This is her favorite:
\nHaikus are easy
\nBut sometimes they don’t make sense
\nRefrigerator
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-06T15:14:21-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/02/06/haiku-tu.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/02/06/haiku-time.html", "title": "Haiku time!", "content_html": "This is the first line.
\nThis is the one after that.
\nHere is the last one.
\n(from a recent Durham County Library newsletter)
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-06T14:40:49-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/02/06/haiku-time.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/02/03/ios-app-weather-strip.html", "title": "iOS app: Weather Strip", "content_html": "I’ve tried Carrot Weather and a few other third-party weather apps, but the recent Mac Power Users episode on weather apps convinced me that, for my needs, Apple’s default Weather app is fine.
\nHowever, I do like a more visual representation of the data and forecasts, and for some years now I’ve been using Weather Strip (don’t remember where I first read about it; Daring Fireball, maybe).
\nI like the side-scrolling, the clever graphics, and seeing the highs and lows drawn out for an entire week instead of isolated numbers in columns and tables. When prepping for a post-prandial walk, I can see at a glance the “feels like” temperature, sunset time, and a micro-forecast for the next hour. During the summer, I like keeping an eye on the dotted dew point line; when it’s riding close to the forecasted temperature, I know I’m in for a sweaty walk.
\nA Weather Strip subscription includes ability to use weather data from providers other than Apple, widgets, and family sharing.
\n![\"Weather](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/1e916da248.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-02-03T18:27:39-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/02/03/ios-app-weather-strip.html"
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/27/you-belong.html",
"title": "You Belong",
"content_html": "Captured this sidewalk inscription on a walk through the Old West Durham neighborhood
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/10307/2026/93d2be66f5.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-01-27T15:54:32-04:00",
"url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/27/you-belong.html"
},
{
"id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/23/hats-and-fountain-pens.html",
"title": "Hats and fountain pens",
"content_html": "Two things that, in my mind’s eye, are perfect for me, yet that I can never seem to pull off:
\nHats. At various times I’ve tried wearing a wide-brimmed Stetson type hat, a Tilley adventure hat, a cloth cap like the other oldsters wear, even a derby when I was in high school (shut up). My hat-wearing is now less fantasy self-image and more utilitarian: a ball cap when I’m out walking to shade my nose from UV rays, a Tilley-type hat in summer to protect my ears and neck from the sun, and in winter what in my day we used to call a toboggan.
\nFountain pens. I get along with the disposable Pilot fountain pens, but I’ve never been able to stick with a better class of pen. I would use a Lamy Safari, say, at home occasionally in my journal or at my desk but never often enough. I never felt comfortable making them an everyday writing instrument. I couldn’t stick it in my pocket and carry it with me, I never traveled with it for fear it would leak, and today, after inserting a full cartridge, the nib would not let a single drop emerge even after I tried a checklist of methods to unstop it.
\nI find I favor utility over style. I have some Zebra Sarasa pens sitting in my pen cup on my desk, one in my pocket (a folded bit of paper in my back pocket is all I usually need for scribbling a quick note), a couple in the tray by my bed, and a couple in the kitchen by the scratch pad. They’re cheap, portable, and reliable.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T21:22:15-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/23/hats-and-fountain-pens.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/23/carbesity-a-short-report-from.html", "content_html": "Carbesity - a short report from Duke University journalism students
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T21:10:29-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/23/carbesity-a-short-report-from.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/12/doomsday-for-is-saturday.html", "title": "Doomsday for 2026 is ... SATURDAY", "content_html": "Knowing this can give you the day of the week for any date in 2026.
\nFor the details:
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-01-12T13:19:31-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/12/doomsday-for-is-saturday.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/09/what-weve-been-watching-and.html", "title": "What we've been watching and reading - July 21, 2015", "content_html": "Reprinting a “lost” post that somehow got dropped during migration to Micro.blog many years ago.
\nIn response to Michael’s post of recommended films, here’s my list of the various media we’ve been ingesting (movies, TV, books, performances) the last several months. Not all are enthusiastically recommended. But maybe you will get a sense of what I like and don’t like, and can then judge whether to trust my appraisals. This is one value that critics and reviewers provide, if nothing else\nMovies were seen via Netflix, Amazon Prime, or at the mighty Carolina Theatre.
\nGod, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man : a saltwater Geechee talks about life on Sapelo Island by Cornelia Bailey with Christena Bledsoe (2000). I read to Liz before she goes to sleep and we’ve found over the years that memoirs tend to be our favored material. This book is an oral history told by Bailey about her life on the Georgia barrier island of Sapelo, populated by the descendants of slaves who had worked cotton on the island. The memoir covers her life from when she was born in the ’50s to the present-day, with lots of cultural history and stories going back to pre-Civil War times. Even in the ’50s, the inhabitants lived in a supernatural world alongside the natural one; she talks about “haints,” interpreting dreams, and the ghosts of dead ancestors always close by as daily companions. Bailey’s easy way with a story and lively memories make this a delightful reading experience. We’ve not gotten there yet, but we will soon hear about the decline of the old ways as the young move off of the island and the few residents who remain fight off pressure from the State of Georgia, which owns nine-tenths of the island. The book’s title derives from the Geechees’ (cousin to the Gullahs) belief in the equal power of God, “Dr. Buzzard” (voodoo), and the “Bolito Man” (luck).
\nTig (dirs: Kristina Goolsby, Ashley York, 2015). A documentary of standup comedian Tig Nitaro, who lived through one of the most hellish years one could imagine and her struggles with transforming some of those experiences into jokes and material, along with rebuilding her life and career. I don’t want to say more, as I came to this knowing nothing of her struggles; as her story would turn a corner and go somewhere new and unexpected, I was swept along and as shocked or delighted as she was. Her bravery in so many aspects of her life – not just shakily rebuilding her career but taking bigger and bigger personal chances too – had me shaking my head in admiration.
\nSilicon Valley, season 1 (2014). So great to have a Mike Judge TV series again and this one is so smart and so spot-on in its satire of the Silicon Valley culture. The culture is already so over the top, it’s hard to see how it can be lampooned, but Judge and his writers do it. The skeletal and spectral Jared is my favorite character. Be warned that it can be pretty raunchy, particularly the last episode.
\nThe Overnight (dir: Patrick Brice, 2015). When did quirk become the new normal? A thin piece that, after the mysteries are explained, starts rousing to some kind of strange life – and then it’s over. Afterward, I started writing an essay in my head on how the story sets up the characters and its themes, deconstructing why do the leading ladies and leading men look alike?, and finding evidence that at film’s end things are still not as they seem … when I wondered why I was polishing my bucket to hold a drop of water. One of the quips I’ve seen all over the web lately goes, “Some things once seen cannot be unseen.” This is especially true of Adam Scott and Jason Schwartzman’s skinny-dipping scene.
\nHello Ladies, the series (2013) and the movie (2014). How much of this series you can tolerate depends on how much you like the cringeworthy comedies that Stephen Merchant has created with Ricky Gervais. His hapless ladies’ man and lame cool guy routine gets routine pretty quickly, while his character’s willful ignorance, inability to learn his lessons, and punishing trials never seem to go further than trying to raise a larf. When I could get past the plots, though, I enjoyed watching his character Stuart hanging out with his friends and particularly his attractive tenant Jessica, and following their stories with more interest. The characters’ craving for something they can’t have blinds them all, one way or another. Merchant and his co-writers also have an uncanny ability to suggest tenderness and vulnerability peeking out from under the farce’s bedsheets. The series’ last two episodes were the high point, focusing on the characters with the comedy taking a back seat. The movie wraps up the series’ loose threads with a hackneyed plot in the first half that shifts gears in the second to a serious study of this damaged character and his redemption. I was actually cheering for him at the end. And the movie sports one of the funniest sex scenes ever, so there’s that.
\nAlice Gerard & Rayna Gellert, Laurelyn Dossett. We went to Duke’s Music in the Gardens series to see these great folk performers. Because live performance by real musicians is what it’s all about. Support your local artists.
\nMe & Earl & The Dying Girl (dir: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, 2015). A self-absorbed white high-school boy shakes off his cloud of mope after alienating his black friend and breaking the heart of the dying girl. Oooooo-kay. What makes the movie work is its kinetic storytelling (reminded me of Thank You For Smoking, for some reason) and the movie parodies. And maybe it’s me, but I was really offended by the popular girl offering herself as Greg’s prom date. Why did these characters give Greg the time of day?
\nThe Audience (dir: Stephen Daldry, 2013) Seen via the National Theatre’s live stream into selected movie theaters. An entertaining collection of vignettes showing Queen Elizabeth II’s relationships with her prime ministers, from Churchill to Cameron. Funny, middlebrow, fast-moving, a few piquant observations on the queen’s role in her country, Mirren is as masterly as they say, and I didn’t believe any of it for a second. I prefer The Queen (2006).
\nI’ll See You In My Dreams (dir: Brett Haley, 2015). So good to see Blythe Danner onscreen again, even in a posh Hallmark Channel type of movie; the supporting actors are great, the lines are funny, and Sam Elliott is sly and dry as the man who wakes Danner’s character out of her late-in-life lethargy. Warm, affecting, encouraging. Despite a few lapses (are post-pot-smoking hunger binges really that funny?), everyone acts like grown-ups and it’s nice to spend time with characters who don’t make me cringe. As with most every movie we’ve seen this year, the performers are all appealing and make the material they play shine brighter.
\nTrue Stories (dir: David Byrne, 1986). An art-student type vanity project by Byrne that doesn’t have a proper story, but that’s also not the point. IMDB says there are 50 sets of twins in the movie. Why? Who knows? They’re just there, the way the Talking Heads songs are there, the way the preacher is ranting on SubGenius themes, the way David Byrne stiffly narrates a day in the life of a small Texas town and its amusing small-town characters but never, I think, makes mean or mocking fun of them. He seems to simply enjoy them as they are. I enjoyed the movie’s oddball stance and easygoing pace. John Goodman, in one of his earliest roles, is there with his screen persona fully-formed and grounds the movie with his heart and vulnerability. And, God, but “Wild, Wild Life” is a fun number.
\nA Serious Man (dirs: Ethan and Joel Coen, 2006). Larry Gopnik is a nice man, but not a serious man, in the sense that his Jewish community in the Minneapolis suburbs would recognize. And when the trials of Job start assaulting him, he has no idea what to do or where to go for help. No blood, no gangsters, over the top in all the right ways, funny, fantastic period detail (the mid- to late-Sixties), anchored to a fine lead performance by Michael Stuhlbarg. The Coens never explain everything in their movies so there is usually something unresolved at its center. I like having some undefined spaces in a story.
\nLove & Mercy (dir: Bill Pohlad, 2014). Because we had seen The Wrecking Crew documentary a few weeks before, I got a kick seeing them portrayed onscreen in several scenes where Brian Wilson is crafting songs for the next Beach Boys album; for me, these scenes were the most fun of the entire movie. Paul Dano is incredible as the young, strung-out Brian Wilson who finds himself as isolated from the people around him as his 40-year-old strung-out self is under the care of a really creepy therapist. I never really bought John Cusack as the older Wilson. All of the “that can’t be true” moments I experienced seem to have mostly happened as depicted onscreen. Wow.
\nWelcome to Me (dir: Shira Piven, 2015) Kirsten Wiig is terribly appealing as an unbalanced young woman who wins the lottery, stops taking her meds, and uses her winnings to stage her own Oprah-style show, dispensing bad advice and settling scores with everyone who she felt ever wronged her, from the second grade on up. The movie has the guts to take that premise to its logical conclusion and Wiig goes with it, as her at-first quirkily adorable character sinks into darker places. Hell is inside us and we take it with us wherever we go. This was a movie where, as I watched, I mentally charted the by-the-book plot points, reversals, higher stakes, final push, etc. An OK movie – not bad but not great.
\nPhilomena (dir: Stephen Frears, 2013). We were on a Steve Coogan kick after enjoying The Trip and especially after falling in love with his TV series Saxondale (2006-07). We’d missed this one on theatrical release. Philomena no doubt follows the same screenplay template as many of the other movies on this list, but I found the performers so appealing, the story so sad, and the anger so fresh, I didn’t notice. The movie tweaked the real-life story, of course, but the bones are there. Coogan and Dench make a good team. Worth your time.
\nStill Alice (dir: Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland, 2014). I remember seeing a TV movie decades ago with Richard Kiley and Joanne Woodward, where Woodward’s character, a poet, is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease and begins slowly falling apart while her husband bewilderedly tries to understand and cope with the loss of his wife. I’ve also just described the broad outline of Still Alice, which sports a fantastic performance by Julianne Moore, and which features a sequence from the novel that had me on the edge of my seat. Aside from those assets, though, I can’t say this movie said anything more to me than that decades-old one did. It’s gorgeously filmed, and themes of connection/disconnection are always poignant. I choked up at the end when Alec Baldwin, as the husband, talks to their daughter; it’s probably the only time I’ve seen Baldwin that vulnerable and it got my attention and past my defenses.
\nVertigo (dir: Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). I backed a Kickstarter campaign for new seats at the Carolina Theatre, and one of the rewards was a backers-only showing of this movie with our backsides in the new comfy chairs. (Nice and cushy but they don’t breathe after about 90 minutes.) It had been decades since I’d seen Vertigo, and watching it on the big screen was glorious – it enhanced the richness of the colors, the swell of the music. The movie has a tone and pace unlike any other Hollywood product of the time, even other Hitchcock movies of the time. I kept trying to squeeze it into a noir box and it resolutely wouldn’t go; it was too brightly lit and beautiful looking (those shots of San Francisco!) to be noir. But its storytelling is less about murder than it is mystery, mood, and tone poem. So many motifs (time, memory, reflections, the abuse of women by men) criss-cross the movie like webbing that its creepiness – especially Scottie’s obsessive remaking of Judy – is hard to shake. Yes, it’s dated, but it has a lingering power and gnawing aftereffect that few movies have.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T22:55:07-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/09/what-weve-been-watching-and.html", "tags": ["Review"] }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/08/currently-reading-we-all-hear.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9781786364623/cover.jpg\")
\nCurrently reading: WE ALL HEAR STORIES IN THE DARK by ROBERT SHEARMAN 📚 Knowing that I’d take on a challenge to read only books I own in the first months of 2026, I bought as a Christmas present for myself this set of books off of Amazon. I’m reading one or two stories a day and they’re delicious.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-08T15:52:48-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/08/currently-reading-we-all-hear.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/08/reading-in.html", "title": "Reading in 2026 📚", "content_html": "I’ve always tended to follow the poet and critic Randall Jarrell’s advice – “Read at whim! Read at whim!” I draw in books from local new and used bookstores, little free libraries, Amazon, Libby, Hoopla, and one of the few browser extensions I pay for (doesn’t work in Safari, sadly) Library Extension.
\nBut I was caught by a reading project of Booktuber Michael K. Vaughan who challenged himself to read 500 books he already owns before buying any new ones. He tracks his progress via weekly reading reports and, after 2 years, I think, is now up to the 320s range.
\nNo, I don’t have 500 books, but I do live in an apartment with limited space and one bookshelf.* When we moved, I kept only books that had been signed to me by author-friends, that had sentimental value, or that I knew I could not purchase easily via Amazon.
\n[* I actually do have a second bookshelf devoted to my graphic novel collection, but it’s out in the corridor of our floor.]
\nBut more books have accrued over time, he wrote, passively, and I have been dragging my feet on getting through them. So while Vaughan’s project is not about reading at whim, per se, it did appeal to my whimsy. So I will instead read at whim among only the books I own, keep the ones I really like, and discard the rest.
\nA few ground rules for myself:
\n[* Vaughan reads mostly SF, fantasy, old pulp novels, and comics, though he does read the occasional classic now and then.]
\nHow many books are we talking here? I have no idea; that’s why I’m bounding the project via the calendar rather than with any hard numbers. I won’t get through all my unread books by the end of March, but if I’m chafing to read things outside of my little pile, then I can call however many I did a Win. I can always take up the challenge again later.
\nWhen will I do all this reading? With my morning coffee in my rocking chair. And in the evening before bedtime.
\nAm I a fast reader? When I’m plowing through a book, like the New Bern history book I read recently, I try to read 50 pages a day, more or less. I have the time to do that now, and that number of pages means I can get through most books in a week. Fifty pages a day also keeps details, characters, events, etc. fresh in my short-term memory, and that makes the experience more pleasant for me.
\nIs this my idea of fun? Oh, yes!
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-08T15:41:15-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/08/reading-in.html" }, { "id": "http://brownstudy.micro.blog/2026/01/05/finished-reading-new-bern-history.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780975870099/cover.jpg\")
\nFinished reading: New Bern History 101 by Edward Barnes Ellis 📚 Purchased from Mitchell Hardware during a Christmas stay in New Bern. Of the two popular history books on the town, this was the more substantial in terms of names, dates, and stories on the city’s colonial, Revolutionary, and Civil War history, along with the devastating 1922 fire that swept the city. It also includes extra chapters where the author both dumps his reporter’s notebook and provides key historical documents. I learned a lot but … in retrospect, I probably would have enjoyed the other book more, as it had shorter chapters, more pictures, and looked like more of a fun souvenir while telling more of the town’s quirky stories, like the one about the Taylor Sisters, who aren’t mentioned at all in the Ellis book.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-05T17:56:11-04:00", "url": "https://brownstudy.info/2026/01/05/finished-reading-new-bern-history.html", "tags": ["Review"] } ] }