she spent half her life in a pink chenille robe

Above Image sequence from a talk I once presented on the history of chair design, called Sitting Down with Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album. New York: Dell, 1986, pp. 376—

In one corner of the dining room, by the hot-air register, was a big old Morris chair, where Betty, when she still worked at the bakery, would sit and fall asleep, she was so tired. Billy used to say, "Betty's spent half her waking life in a pink chenille robe." The stairwell to the attic was always loaded with things left there by somebody intending to take them up later: books, clothes, tennis rackets, skates, Tinker Toys, little trucks that always seemed to have a wheel missing. Like the road to hell, the stairs were paved with good intentions. 

the family chair in which one customarily dies

Above Armchair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow (1898).

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Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 78—

…in another branch of [his father's] family, nine Douglass men had gone from a single household to [serve in] the [American] Revolution. It was in this Douglass family that they had what was known as the Douglass chair. The custom was for every man in the house, when the moment came for him to die, to rise from his bed and go, or else be carried, to meet his death sitting in this chair. 

online course on the history of design / 2022

Course Introduction Video

Above This is a brief film overview of a four-week course I will be teaching (online), beginning in the first week in October, titled A History of Design: Graphic, Industrial, and Architectural Design in Europe and the US Since 1850. This is Part Two of a series of four. It is one of the fall semester offerings through OLLI at Drake (Oster Lifelong Learning Institute at Drake University). Registration will open during August at <https://alumni.drake.edu/olli>.

he could not correct his relation to the universe

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Hat Trick (© 2021). Digital montage.

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E.L. Doctorow (remembering Theodore Dreiser), interviewed in George Plimpton, ed., Writers at Work: Eighth Series (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 30—

Dreiser wrote this magnificent novel [Sister Carrie]. It was published in 1900; it was then and still is the best first novel ever written by an American. It’s an amazing work...The book was a magnificent achievement but the publisher, Doubleday, didn’t like it, they were afraid of it. So they buried it. And naturally it did nothing; I think it sold four copies. I would go crazy too in that situation. Dreiser rented a furnished room in Brooklyn. He put a chair in the middle of this room and sat in it. The chair didn't seem to be in the right position so he turned it a few degrees, and he sat in it again. Still it was not right. He kept turning the chair around and around, trying to align it to what—trying to correct his own relation to the universe? He never could do it, so he kept going around in circles and circles. He did that for quite a while, and ended up in a sanitarium in Westchester, in White Plains.

Robert Pinsky regarding the process of dying

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Hand Me Down (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Robert Pinsky (regarding the process of dying) in his review of Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story in The New York Times Book Review, 6 January 1991—

The last words, the blessing of the young, the washing of the body, the coins on the eyelids, the deathbed confession, the deathbed reconciliation and the deathbed farewell have been succeeded or crowded by the IV, the respirator, the feeding tubes in the nostrils, the living will, the hospital roommate, the nurses.