“White roses, fall! you insult our Gods, Fall, white phantoms, from your sky that burns: – The saint of the abyss is more holy in my eyes!”
— Gérard de Nerval, from Artémis; Les Chimères, 1854.
Kyle Thompson - Graveyard Girls (2013)
I’ve been in Tennessee with my friend Marissa Bolen. Yesterday we planned a huge shoot which involved building a dam, and covering models with flour and milky water. It was a group effort. You can see her shots here, you should follow her!
“That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
Some Favorite Essays, Short Stories, Novels
Essays:
1. Helene Cixous - Laugh of Medusa
2. Anne Carson - Evil and Suffering in Modern Poetry
3. Kathy Acker - Myth of Romantic Suffering
4. Virginia Woolf - On Not Knowing Greek
5. Adrienne Rich - Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying
- Adrienne Rich - Three Other Essays
6. Alice Walker - Looking for Zora
7. Anna Klobucka - Helene Cixous & Clarice Lispector
8. Joan Didion - On Self-Respect
9. Margaret Atwood - Am I a Bad Feminist?
10. Jeffrey Meyers - The Savage Experiment: Arthur Rimbaud
11. Jennifer Nash - Practicing Love
12. Paul J. M. van Tongeren - “A Splendid Failure” Nietzche Suffering
Short Stories:
1. Clarice Lispector - Love
2. Anne Carson - 1 = 1
3. Margaret Atwood - Stone Mattress
4. Amy Bloom - Silver Water
5. Gunnhild Øyehaug - Same Time, Another Planet
6. Anne Carson - Back the Way you Went
7. Tatyana Tolstaya - Unnecessary Things
8.
Kirstin Valdez Quade -
Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224)
9. Clarice Lispector - One Day Less
Novels:
1. Helene Cixous - Stigmata
2. Helene Cixous - Ex-Cities
3. Helene Cixous - Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (my favorite)
4. Jean Genet - A Thief’s Journal (another link)
5. Judith Butler - Bodies that Matter
6. Clarice Lispector -
AGUA VIVA
Happy Holidays, friends. I hope you enjoy. - Love, E
“La campana de Huesca” o “La leyenda del rey monje” (The Bell of Huesca) [1880] - José Casado del Alisal
“Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me When I pluck them; And writhe and twist, And strangle themselves against my fingers, So that I can hardly weave the garland For your hair? Why do they shriek your name And spit at me When I would cluster them? Must I kill them To make them lie still, And send you a wreath of lolling corpses To turn putrid and soft On your forehead While you dance?”
— Amy Lowell, Grotesque