THE HEAT DOME has rendered me useless. I was recently introduced to the work of Junji Ito, who wrote a comic about person-shaped holes that appear on the side of a mountain into which people are compelled to crawl and disappear. When I saw that, I was, like, what's so bad about that? I want one of those holes. I bet it's cooler in there than out here.

We do have air conditioning, except in my office, which faces west and gets hammered by broiling afternoon sun, so I have set up my computer on Michaela's child-size desk. Neither of us is especially happy about it, but we're adapting. If you can't find a you-sized hole, you make your own.

I felt like I'd fallen into a hole yesterday when Michaela introduced me to a new slang word, "sigma." It is from an inane song titled "Sigma Boy" and, well, just google it if you want to know more. I think, as slang, "sigma" is harmless teetering on sinister. Like "basic." If this doesn't make sense to you, don't blame me, blame the heat.

Three Things That Kept Me Going This Week

1. This photographic essay on Tove Jansson's home and studio. She lived there for years and got to see it evolve from a freezing cold space with broken windows where she hunkered down to make art during WWII to an airy modernist haven designed specifically for her. Too busy drawing to cook, she opted for a bathtub over a kitchen. Hashtag Goals.
2. The Mary Reynolds show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Actually, the show is titled "Frida Kahlo's Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds." But to my mind, here, Kahlo is the bait, and Reynolds is the catch. Reynolds was a bookbinder whose books are more sculpture than book. Reynolds and Kahlo met in 1939 after Kahlo, who had traveled to Paris for an exhibition organized by Andre Breton, became ill and needed a place to recuperate. Kahlo found the supercilious Breton and his crew to be super annoying, and vastly preferred the company of Reynolds and her partner, Marcel Duchamp. “Mary Reynolds, a marvelous American woman who lives with Marcel Duchamp, invited me to stay at her house,” Kahlo wrote in a letter. "She is very kind to me and takes care of me wonderfully.” After Germany invaded France in 1940, Reynolds stayed in Paris to work for the French Resistance. When the Gestapo began to close in on her, she finally escaped and her flight was so fantastically risky that it was documented by the New Yorker over three separate issues.
3. I have no excuse for taking as long as I did to read Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra's biography on Gilded Age heiress and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. (And thank you, friend of Mushroom Head Megan Marshall, for the suggestion!) I worked at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for three years, and I always felt her elusive yet imposing presence in that space. Staff referred to Gardner constantly in the third person: "Did she use that tea set?" "This was her friend's photograph." And so on. The museum's curatorial staff worked in her former apartment, on the top floor of the museum, and I often marveled that we all used the same bathroom that she had once used (there was even a tub)—but I never could get a sense of her personality. Dykstra's account sets aside the gossip and tabloid reports to compose a vivid portrait of the woman who built an extraordinary museum. I now understand "her" and where "she" came from—a sophisticated New Yorker who never fit into Boston's uptight social scene and ultimately made a family of her own with queers and artists and miscellaneous weirdos. One of the most moving stories in the book documents Gardner's dedication to her friend, Dr. Karl Muck. Muck, who had been born in Germany, but spent most of his childhood in Switzerland and was a Swiss citizen, was the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Muck had the misfortune of being German as the United States was entering World War I. Before a concert, he failed to play "The Star-Spangled Banner"—though Muck was never informed that the orchestra was supposed to do that. Shortly after, Muck was arrested without a warrant, due to President Wilson's proclamation invoking the "Enemy Aliens Act." Muck spent the remainder of the war in an internment camp in Georgia. Throughout his detention, Gardner stood by him and his distraught wife, in spite of her friends and family warning her that she, too, would be targeted for being un-American. This is the Gardner I wish I'd known about when I'd worked at the museum. Though I don't think anything could get me to love her museum more than I already do!

As I was putting this list together I was struck by the ways in which each of these women—Jansson, Reynolds, Kahlo, Gardner—were anti-war activists who were also invested in making art that didn't necessarily have explicit anti-fascist messaging. They just continued making the art they wanted to make, aware that their very existence as artsy weirdos was under threat. I know there's a lot of ways to resist fascism, but I often forget that just making the weird work you want to make, and living the weird life you want to live, and enjoying every second of it, is the best way.