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I really wanted to hate Cleopatra and Frankenstein so bad but it’s so good. I’m on page 128. The switch of person? So so good

#cocomellors #cleopatraandfrankenstein

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“I am utterly fascinated by literature and art that, like I wrote on my blog, straddles the line between extreme seriousness and complete self mockery, the type of literature that puts on emotional deaf but doesn’t let you know what’s beneath the drag, whether or not you’re supposed to laugh, take it as a joke, take it as sincere, feel embarrassed for the author or some combination of all of these things”

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Miss this 🥺

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“I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem so as to release the story that cannot be told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself. The story that cannot be told must not tell itself in a language already contaminated.”

— M. NourbeSe Philip

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my toxic trait is thinking I’m Parisa when I’m actually Libby

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If you’re talking to someone who doesn’t love themselves you’re not meeting them you’re meeting the person they think you want them to be.

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Funk is surrealism on drugs

Surrealism is funk on depression

What is surrealist funk?

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Mad men but women at a non profit

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The ghostly reflections of tree branches mirrored in puddles.

(Or: when thawing snow turns the world into a looking glass.)

It took me extra long to walk to the Black Power Studies seminar today. Perambulating down Oxford Street, I was distracted by every image I saw reflected in the puddles—the sun behind the clouds, the buildings, the power lines, the birds, the gloomy sky. While I was staring at a puddle I was shaken by the sudden THUD of a pedestrian getting hit by a gold minivan. The pedestrian seemed okay, but that unsettling feeling that life can end at any moment stayed with me throughout the day.

Strangely, Virginia Woolf had a lot to say about puddles and mortality. Some quotes:

Some cleavage of the dark there must have been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued […].  The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves “What am I,” “What is this?” […]. 

—To the Lighthouse (1927)

“There is the puddle,” said Rhoda, “and I cannot cross it.  I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head.  Its wind roars in my face.  All palpable forms of life have failed me.  Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.”

— The Waves (1931)

There was the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something . . . the whole world became unreal.

— “A Sketch of the Past” (1939)

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The sudden dissolution of the world, of the self. That’s the horror of the puddle that cannot be crossed, the puddle that augurs madness.

I swear I remember reading about the puddle-grindstone passage in Woolf’s diary, which was absorbed into her novel The Waves. In my vague memory it was connected to news from (Ethel Smyth?) about someone’s suicide. Someone named Carrie, or Caroline, I swear there was an incident that sent Woolf spiraling. An adult incident, a repetition of the dissociative puddle incident from her childhood. But now I cannot find it. Or maybe it was connected to news from Vita, I don’t know. Or maybe the news of the mutual friend’s suicide and the fear of crossing the puddle were falsely fused in my mind by the intensity of my fixations. I had filed the detail away in a dusty drawer of my brain because of the suicided Carrie I knew, the one mirrored everywhere in Woolf’s work. Water suicides. I keep thinking they reveal: there is no ontology. Only God has being, as the Sufi metaphysicians say (and strikingly, the Ocean is the proverbial metaphor for union with God in Sufi poetry, for the only way to stop a drop from drying up is to throw it in the ocean).

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Kerry James Marshall’s ‘Vignette’, acrylic / fiberglass, 2003

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Harlem, Manhattan (1970/1971).

Photo: Jack Garofalo.