Not y'all having to drag me out the movie theaters…
It's 20:41 PST, June 3rd, and there's a Full Moon in Sagittarius
Dearest F@guettes,
I came, I saw, I had thoughts. More to come on the New Moon.
Sincerely,
E.Y.
Endangered Bookslut Caught Reading in Captivity
Here’s a gift in the guise of a sentence. To an interviewer, from the glamorous Joan Crawford: “If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.” A line befitting of a true celebrity. Crawford’s if-then statement rolls away breathlessly, pauses in mid-air, then quickly delivers the finishing blow. Without the first half (“If you want to see the girl next door”), the second loses power. And yet, without the second (“go next door”), the first half falls apart. Together, however, they are quite stunning. Quippy and conditional, hers is an opulent world that judges your tastelessness from high above. By the time you realize you’ve been insulted, she’s moved on. Truly, a master class in twelve words. After finishing David M. Halperin’s How to Be Gay, I am, yet again, affirmed in my ceaseless devotion to Hollywood’s resounding diva.
Books with Pictures, Books with Words, Books that Caught My Eye:
Note: Years ago, while looking for Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I stumbled upon Anne Carson’s If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho and abandoned Walt entirely. Her translation of the “Hymn to Aphrodite” satiated my picky liturgical appetites; I, a Hellenistically leaning astrologer, take no joy in the Orphic hymns of antiquity. Anyway, months later, I picked up Carson’s novel-in-verse The Autobiography of Red then, weeks later, gobbled up Lectures on the History of Sky-Writing. Her work has such a staying power which is why I wanted to introduce you to “The Glass Essay.” As you read it, listen closely: loss, loneliness, and solitude sing a striking and poetic tune.
The Glass Essay
by Anne Carson
I
I can hear little clicks inside my dream.
Night drips its silver tap
down the back.
At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking
of the man who
left in September.
His name was Law.
My face in the bathroom mirror
has white streaks down it.
I rinse the face and return to bed.
Tomorrow I am going to visit my mother.
SHE
She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.
I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books—
some for my mother, some for me
including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë.
This is my favourite author.
Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.
Whenever I visit my mother
I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,
my lonely life around me like a moor,
my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation
that dies when I come in the kitchen door.
What meat is it, Emily, we need?
Before I say goodbye, I have a parting gift in the guise of an interview.
Goodbye <3