Emily Dickinson said, "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." By that criteria, the artwork of Motoi Yamamoto is pure poetry; ever since I first saw photographs of his evocative mazes and sculptures, I've felt as if I were walking around with a nothing to me above the nose. And get this, the images below are made out of salt. That's right, salt.
If there is a somber, haunting quality to these images, it's intentional. Motoi Yamamoto told The Japan Times that he started working with salt after the death of his sister of brain cancer at age 24: "I draw with a wish that, through each line, I am led to a memory of my
sister. That is always at
the bottom of my work. Each cell-like part, to me, is a memory of her
that I call up, like a tiff I had with her over a pudding cake she took
from the fridge. My wish is to put such tiny episodes together." According to this article, "Salt has a special place in the death rituals
of Japan, and is often handed out to people at the end of funerals, so
they can sprinkle it on themselves to keep evil spirits away."
| Photo courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto |
| Photo courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto |
| Photo: Sue-Jean Chun |
Granola is the king of breakfast toppers; sprinkle a little on yogurt, fruit, or milk and you have an instant meal. But the cereal's classic crunch takes a star turn at lunch or dinner when it shows up as a savory topping (think of it as little croutons) on soups, salads, cottage cheese, and dips. Try this version from Chef Robert Wiedmaier, of the restaurants Marcel’s and Mussel Bar in Washington, D.C. He adds his granola to parsnip soup. Once you've make your first batch, though, the real fun begins as you adapt the mix to suit your own taste. The options—Parmesan? Rosemary? Raisins?—are endless.
 |
| Photo: Robert Trachtenberg |
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This new product was just introduced at TED, and it really is brilliant: a combination pack of adhesive bandages and a bone marrow registry kit. People with diseases like leukemia need bone marrow transplants to save their lives, but the lack of donors to the National Marrow Donor Program makes finding a match unlikely, especially for people of non-white ethnicities. Registering to be a match only takes a few seconds and a drop of blood. Admit it: the joy of saving a life may even make you look forward to those paper cuts.
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Every Monday, we're rounding up the things, small and big, that make us stop and think. Today, we're inspired by...
Every Monday, we'll be letting you
know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop
reading. This week, we've been haunted by the powerful, spare memoir:
The Guardians
by Sarah Manguso
This slim and swift-moving book is subtitled as "an elegy" rather than a memoir." And in many ways it is one—written in memory of Harris, a close friend of the author, who ended his life in 2008 after escaping from a psychiatric hospital and throwing himself in front of a train. Interestingly enough, we don't learn that much about Harris, save for his genius for math, music, and soul-splitting jokes. For ten-odd pages, you may think the book is, instead, about the author and her own brush with insanity and mortality. That is, until you realize that what the book is really about is grief—not describing grief, not explaining it, but feeling it, from the anger to embarrassment to the searing ache. "Nobody understands how I feel," we often think (mistakenly) in times of loss. But Manguso not only understands, she can articulate it in the precisest and most unexpected of images—an unrelated car accident, a bowl of Italian candies, a swim in the ocean. What results is a memoir that reveals not the just intimacies of the writer's life, but of your own. Most moving is that The Guardians covers a subject so rarely recognized in our society, the grief from the death of a friend, (another notable exception: Let's Take The Long Way Home). "It doesn't sound like much when I say my friend died. He wasn't my father or my son or my husband," writes Manguso. "Yet there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, says an Old Testament proverb."
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The Guardians
by Sarah Manguso
This slim and swift-moving book is subtitled as "an elegy" rather than a memoir." And in many ways it is one—written in memory of Harris, a close friend of the author, who ended his life in 2008 after escaping from a psychiatric hospital and throwing himself in front of a train. Interestingly enough, we don't learn that much about Harris, save for his genius for math, music, and soul-splitting jokes. For ten-odd pages, you may think the book is, instead, about the author and her own brush with insanity and mortality. That is, until you realize that what the book is really about is grief—not describing grief, not explaining it, but feeling it, from the anger to embarrassment to the searing ache. "Nobody understands how I feel," we often think (mistakenly) in times of loss. But Manguso not only understands, she can articulate it in the precisest and most unexpected of images—an unrelated car accident, a bowl of Italian candies, a swim in the ocean. What results is a memoir that reveals not the just intimacies of the writer's life, but of your own. Most moving is that The Guardians covers a subject so rarely recognized in our society, the grief from the death of a friend, (another notable exception: Let's Take The Long Way Home). "It doesn't sound like much when I say my friend died. He wasn't my father or my son or my husband," writes Manguso. "Yet there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, says an Old Testament proverb."
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 | The
world is a much more beautiful and incredible place than you think, and
each of us has a great deal of power to make it more so. — Oie Osterkamp |  |
| Photo: Thinkstock |
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