Amanda Watson
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amndw2.bsky.social
Amanda Watson
@amndw2.bsky.social
1.1K followers 610 following 1.9K posts
Librarian, literature geek, knitter, opera fan, book history person. Writing a book about commonplace books and poetry readers. Opinions here are my own. She/her/hers. Queer and furious. 🏳️‍🌈
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amndw2.bsky.social
Someone who makes the NYT Connections game is picking up on the zeitgeist...
The New York Times Connections game grid for February 4, 2026. Text reads "Create four groups of four!" The grid of words reads as follows: FRICTION MAGICAL HEATED RIVALRY BOUT CONFLICT LIKE WAR NETSCAPE BINGO BULLSEYE DISCORD LOTTERY ROUND APPROX CRAPS
February 5, 2026 at 12:31 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

18. Joan Miró. Le renversement (Somersault). 1924. Oil and other media on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery.
An abstract oil painting with a yellow/beige background and a number of line-art-style figures on it, including a wagon wheel near the top, a book with the word "JOUR" on it near the bottom, and at left, a stick figure with a handlebar mustache. The stick figure has its arms up and seems to be running. Above and below the stick figure are the words "AH!!" and "HOO!"
January 29, 2026 at 11:10 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

17. Suzanna Ogunjami. Full-Blown Magnolia. 1935. Oil on burlap. Hampton University Museum.
An oil painting of a magnolia blossom in a black vase against a very dark red background. The cream-colored petals open toward the viewer and seem to glow.
January 28, 2026 at 5:32 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

16. James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Sea and Rain. 1865. Oil on canvas. University of Michigan Art Museum.
An oil painting showing a gray cloudy sky over a seashore with tan sand and bluish-gray waves. Everything is very soft and luminous and indistinct. There's a lone figure wading in the water in the foreground, just barely sketched in.
January 28, 2026 at 12:16 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

15. Thomas Cole. The Titan's Goblet. 1833. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
An oil painting of a fantastic landscape. An enormous stone goblet filled almost to the brim with water stands atop a cliff. Its brim is covered with greenery and a few buildings; tiny boats are sailing on the water in the bowl of the goblet. A few narrow waterfalls are falling from the sides. Below the cliff the goblet stands on is a bay with a few buildings and boats visible; behind it are mountains, clouds, and a rising or setting sun.
January 27, 2026 at 1:11 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

14. Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Composition of Quadrangular, Polychrome, Dense Strokes. 1920. Gouache and pencil on paper.
An abstract painting on cream-colored paper of a lot of small, brightly colored squares in various shades of red, yellow, green, blue, and black. The squares aren't all the same size or in a perfect grid, and some of them lean to the right side of the painting, creating a sense of movement.
January 24, 2026 at 4:05 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
My Ravelry favorites page is turning into a parade of anti-ICE hat patterns. There's this one, based on Norwegian resistance hats from WWII: www.reddit.com/r/Antifascis...
A red knitted hat with a ribbed brim, a pointed triangular top, and a braided tassel.
January 24, 2026 at 2:21 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Other cities have the French Toast Index for incoming winter storms. NYC has the Kale Index, and it’s currently pointing to “pre-blizzard panic.”
Empty produce shelves at Trader Joes, with signs for chopped kale, organic kale, and Tuscan kale. All the kale is gone. The refrigerated produce section at Trader Joes. The shelves are almost completely bare except for a few bags of leeks and baby zucchini.
January 23, 2026 at 11:56 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
lol, wtf, Ishmael? 🐋
Text from Moby-Dick: "And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition."
January 21, 2026 at 12:48 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Moby-Dick chapter 81: I'd forgotten this paragraph, but it's definitely one of the moments where Melville is Team Whale and not Team Whaler (or Team Whale Oil Consumer Back On Shore, for that matter). 🐋
Text from Moby-Dick: "But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all."
January 20, 2026 at 2:58 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Piano study update: my new favorite music term is "perdendosi," meaning "dying away" or literally "losing itself," "getting lost in the distance." (I love piano and I also love Italian.)
Close-up detail of piano sheet music showing the direction "perdendosi."
January 19, 2026 at 3:03 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
At the Met for some vocal fireworks!
Exterior of the Metropolitan Opera House with banner for Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani. Interior of the Metropolitan Opera with program for I Puritani in the foreground.
January 18, 2026 at 9:35 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Ishmael looking at attractive men: a series. 🐋
Text from Moby-Dick: "He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia." Text from Moby-Dick: "Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive." Text from Moby-Dick: "Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's father." Text from Moby-Dick: "On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume a shirt and socks— in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen."
January 18, 2026 at 5:05 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

13. Edward Hopper. House at Dusk. 1935. Oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
An oil painting of the top storey and a half of a large house (or possibly an apartment building) with a flat roof and a number of chimneys. Many of the windows are lighted, and a woman is looking out of one of them. Behind the house is a lit streetlight and a flight of stairs going up a grassy hill into a dense row of trees. The sky is pale green and twilit.
January 17, 2026 at 5:07 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

12. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Le lit (The Bed). 1892. Oil on cardboard. Musée d'Orsay.
An oil painting of a bed covered with a red and blue quilt with two women lying in it, facing each other. They both have short hair and only their heads are visible. They're looking at each other through half-closed eyes.
January 16, 2026 at 12:03 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

11. Hilma af Klint. The Swan, No. 1. 1915. Oil on canvas. The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm.
Oil painting of two swans, their poses mirroring each other vertically. The swan at the bottom is black on a white background and the swan at the top is white on a black background. Their beaks and one wingtip each meet at the dividing line in the center of the painting.
January 14, 2026 at 12:52 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

10. René Magritte. La voix du sang. 1948. Oil on canvas.
A Surrealist painting of a tree with several doors opening in its trunk to reveal hollow niches; the bottom one contains a three-storey house with its windows lit up, the one in the middle contains a white sphere, and the one at the top is just swinging open. The tree is surrounded by brown curtains that part to reveal a distant landscape at night with a river winding through it.
January 13, 2026 at 2:29 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

9. Artemisia Gentileschi. Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. 1638-39. Oil on canvas.
Portrait of a woman in three-quarter view, turned partly towards the viewer. She is painting with her right hand and holding a painter's palette in her left hand. Her raised right arm and body make a strong diagonal across the frame. She wears a green dress and a necklace with a pendant. Her eyes are intently on her painting, which we can't see.
January 12, 2026 at 11:53 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Ahab in chapter 37 sounds so much like Satan in Paradise Lost that it led me down a rabbit hole looking for more on Melville's reading of Milton. + 🐋
From Moby-Dick, chapter 37: "Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night-good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)" Text from John Milton's Paradise Lost, book 4: "Now conscience wakes despair That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue. Sometimes towards Eden which now in his view Lay pleasant, his grievd look he fixes sad, Sometimes towards Heav'n and the full-blazing Sun, Which now sat high in his Meridian Towre: Then much revolving, thus in sighs began. O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd, Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;"
January 11, 2026 at 2:43 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

8. Edvard Munch. The Storm. 1893. Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
A painting in impressionistic style of a rocky landscape with houses in the background against a gray and threatening sky. A group of figures stand huddled together with their hands to their heads; another figure, making the same gesture, stands apart from them near the center of the composition, in a white dress. A tree in the background is bending as if in a strong wind.
January 11, 2026 at 1:07 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Me, working on my book: 🐋
Text from Chapter 32 of Moby-Dick: "The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try." (The last of these sentences is highlighted.)
January 9, 2026 at 6:51 PM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

7. Caspar David Friedrich. Two Men Contemplating the Moon. Ca. 1825. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
An oil painting of two men, seen from the side and behind, standing on a hillside between trees. One is holding a walking stick and the other leans on his shoulder. They're looking at a glowing crescent moon in a twilit sky.
January 9, 2026 at 2:21 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
For some reason I’m craving shaved ice. 🐋
From Moby-Dick, chapter 29: “Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up-flaked up, with rose-water snow.”
January 9, 2026 at 12:00 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

6. Giorgio de Chirico. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. 1914. Oil on canvas.
A painting of a street with arcaded buildings in exaggerated perspective against a greenish sky. In the foreground is the silhouette of a girl rolling a hoop; in the background a shadow looms from behind a building.
January 8, 2026 at 2:35 AM
amndw2.bsky.social
Choose 20 paintings that have stayed with you or influenced you — one painting a day (or thereabouts) for 20 days, no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just paintings.

5. Workshop of Robert Campin. Merode Altarpiece. Ca. 1427–32. Oil on oak. Cloisters Museum, New York.
Medieval triptych with center panel depicting the Annunciation. The angel appears to Mary as she reads a book. The panel on the left shows two figures kneeling outside a door; the panel on the right shows Joseph in his carpentry workshop.
January 6, 2026 at 12:58 PM