“Like Woolf, Garner knows that self and other become tangled in the art of estrangement. ‘In a shop window in Merimbula I saw my face reflected and gave myself a fright,’ Nora thinks immediately after she falls in love with Javo. ‘My hair was wild and stiff with salt, standing on end all over my head. My face was burned almost back to paleness and my eyes stared out of dirty skin. I liked myself: I looked strong and healthy.’ Desire has made her strange to herself by attuning her to the strangeness of another, since there is nothing stranger, nothing more amazing or concerning, than to see yourself reflected through another person’s interested gaze, or for your reflection to melt and resurface as the person moves closer and further away. When Javo leaves her, Nora cuts off all her hair and chases her reflection for pages, failing to recognize who she was in what she sees: ‘I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.’ ~Merve Emre

London Review of Books

Merve Emre · On the Dizzy Edge: Helen Garner

Morning. #sunrise #october

Morning. #sunrise #october

“gatitos de un reino transparente” “kittens from a transparent realm” ~Ida Vitale

Autumn by Ida Vitale translated by Sarah Pollack “Autumn, dog with affectionate, impertinent paws, rustles the leaves of the books. He demands that you pay attentionto those fetching ones that are his, that futilely turn from greento gold to red to purple. As if in distraction, the precise word escapes you forever.”

Bought these poems today along with some other books right before K. Patrick’s wonderful book discussion at City of Asylum #Pittsburgh— and then I came home & took this picture because the leaves on my lawn were a perfect match. #October #Poetry Beautiful Sunday. 🍁📖

“There are Reddit threads dedicated to post-show comedowns. And the tour has surpassed the previous record for highest-grossing by a solo female artist, which was previously held by Madonna in 2009. By its close, Beyoncé will have generated an estimated $4.5 billion for the American economy, about as much as the 2008 Olympics did for Beijing.”

A Silvery, Shimmering Summer of Beyoncé (Published 2023)

The Renaissance tour is a blueprint for how to cultivate pleasure and hold onto it at all costs.

“To worry or to smile, such is the choice when we are assailed by the strange; our decision depends on how familiar we are with our own ghosts.” ~Julia Kristeva

Reading some books written by Julia Kristeva— fascinating material & the author is also intriguing. “As I talked with people about Kristeva’s dossier, I kept thinking about her code name, Sabina. It is not a typical Bulgarian name—according to one expert I spoke to, it is unique in State Security’s nomenclature. Agents would often, though not always, choose their code names. Did officers catch an allusion to the classical myth of the Sabine women, who were invited to attend a festival in Rome, only to be abducted by the Romans and forced to marry them? Kristeva, the mother of intertextuality, has insisted that she never heard that “whimsical pseudonym” before her dossier came to light, and that may be the case. But traces of her intelligence, in every sense of that word, appear all over the files. One of the last items preserved in Kristeva’s dossier is an extensive interview titled “What Is the Function of Intellectuals?,” which she gave to Le Nouvel Observateur, in 1977. “ ~ Dimiter Kenarov

The New Yorker

Was the Philosopher Julia Kristeva a Cold War Collaborator?

The Kristeva affair has become a major case in the ongoing public debate about how to deal with the dark legacy of Bulgaria’s Soviet-era secret p...

Back home with my books & my favorite tree! #October

Me & some dead writers— my favorite way to spend an afternoon ☠️📖